Processing the emotions you feel around your family
Hello beautiful one,
A few years ago I was in the kitchen in my mum’s house when she looked in her fridge and pulled out some cheese.
“Who’s been biting the cheese!” She said in a slightly stern voice. And she looked at me.
I hadn’t been biting the cheese, but my whole body burst into what felt like flames of shame. I felt like I needed to run away and be invisible. I said I needed to take a walk, scooped up my kids and ran out of the house to the park.
My body was so uncomfortable. But I was aware of what was happening. I knew I was feeling some emotions, and that what I needed to do was support myself with this feeling so I can work on releasing it.
And every time we work on releasing big emotions like this, it means we start to have less of it in our bodies. We are releasing old emotions that are taking up too much space in our bodies, limiting our ability to have space for new emotions. And when we have too much old emotion in our bodies we are more likely to get overwhelmed by them.
I thought about the tone of my mother’s voice, and her accusation and it felt like the most punishing sound in the world to me. I saw that it took me straight back to being a little girl having disappointing behavior, and that used to feel like the worst thing in the world to me.
Disappointing my mother. And what comes after feeling her disappointment? Shame. And lots of it.
Shame is an emotion that actually has a healthy purpose – guiding our behavior so that we stay in connection with our group, and our caregivers. So we don’t do things against the group. It also plays an important role in enacting boundaries and guiding us to adhere to our personal values.
But when we have too much shame, when we have been shamed a lot as children (usually because our parents were shamed, and they are just passing it down the generational line), it can feel toxic and unmanageable.
It limits us in so many ways, controlling how we express ourselves, how we show up in relationships, how we feel unworthy or unable to stay in deep vulnerable connection with others.
As I shared yesterday, families can be a hotbed of emotional activation. And we often get confused because we think our families are causing our feelings.
And while our families are the place where so many of our unprocessed emotional imprints were first laid – not necessarily all by them – but often through the lack of emotional safety that so many of us have in families, they aren’t ‘causing’ the feelings now.
They are already in our bodies and they are our feelings, and we need to attend to them in order to release them.
Our families – or any other person/experience/situation where strong emotions appear around seemingly small things – activate feelings that are already there.
Even if our families made all the changes we would love them to make – our feelings would still exist, and they would just start showing up somewhere else.
Even if my mother hadn’t said that about the cheese – I would still have shame in my body looking for an opportunity to be released.
Instead – now that I have worked with these strong emotions my mother can say things about cheese and I don’t feel intense shame.
Isn’t that cool?
So we want to make this connection, to take responsibility for our emotional activations, and start to work on processing through our emotions.
This changes everything about how we feel about our family.
A very, very simple way to start working with our feelings is to do this simple process of supporting ourselves with the sensations of the feeling.
Because it’s in the body we feel them, it’s in the body we need to release them.
Acknowledge we are having feelings – I talked about this in Tuesday’s email
Being curious about your feelings – what feelings am I having? I talked about this in yesterday’s email.
Offer some regulation support –
When we aren’t used to processing our feelings, and our brains can be viewing emotions as a problem/threat. So we want to start to feel safe around our feelings. To feel safe to hold them in our body.
So we start to ‘train’ our bodies to feel safe around our feelings. A really easy way to do this is to offer signals of safety to our brains by doing a regulating breath. This turns on the calming part of our nervous system.
A regulating breath is so simple – do a short inhale breath, and then a much longer exhale breath. And repeat.
Notice the sensations our emotions are creating in our body and stay in connection with them until they releaseAnd while you’re doing this breathing you can focus on the sensations that the emotion has created in the body.
Maybe you feel the flames of shame everywhere?
Or a constriction in your throat from some anxiety?
Or some heaviness in your chest from some despair?
Or intense jagged tension from anger or rage?
Emotions live in the body, not in our thoughts, so to process our emotions we want to bring our awareness to how they create sensations in how we are feeling.
And then we pay attention to these sensations.
We allow them to be here. We support ourselves with tools like regulating breath.
Until those sensations pass through and the feeling is released.
So this is a short and quick description of one of the many ways we can work with emotions so we reduce their intensity and overwhelming nature.
I have many, many ways that I work with clients on this:
To create a foundation of safety to work through and release past trauma and big, old intense emotions.
To learn how to understand your emotional reactions and responses so we can work with them, and learn to heal and release them in a healthy and empowering way.
Learning how to bring a sensation of ease, safety and calm into our bodies so we can confidently navigate what arises in our daily life.
After I worked through the shame I felt about the ‘cheese experience’ I was able to come back to my mother, free from the shame.
And because we’ve been able to create such a deep and safe relationship with each other, because we have both spent time working through our feelings, I was able to share with her how I was feeling and get a big loving, understanding hug from her.
This work is so life-changing, knowing how to work with your own emotions, that it automatically changes how your family works with their emotions.
If you’d like to get support from me…
Learn the framework for your own emotional liberation…
Go deeper into processing your emotions…
Get personal support with tricky emotions, reactions & patterns…
I currently have 3 (I think pretty cool) Black Friday Offers for coaching & my courses.
If you’d like to learn more and get more support from me – check them out.
Any questions about what I have shared – hit reply and let me know. I love hearing from you.
It’s always great to hear how these ideas land for you and if you’re able to utilise them to support you.
Much love,
Diana
