Sometimes when you have been working on your mindset, you can find yourself in a time when it doesn’t seem to be working.
You can be trying all the tools and concepts and trying to change things, but it feels hard and you might think you’re doing something wrong.
Well, you aren’t. But you might just be resisting your emotions and using mindset work to try to bypass them. How will you know?
Well if the mindset work and trying the tools isn’t working, and you find yourself saying things like “I don’t want to feel this way…” then you might be avoiding your emotions.
Emotions can’t be escaped. They keeping coming back until you pay attention to them. So if you are feeling stuck, let’s check and see if you are avoiding feeling some feelings.
There are actually 4 things that we frequently do to deal with our emotions.
1)Resist- The thing we most often do is resist emotions. We push against them. We stuff them and hold them down. This is actually the thing that makes emotions so uncomfortable–the resistance of them. The emotions themselves dissipate relatively quickly if we aren’t resisting them. But resisting them intensifies them.
2)Avoid–We avoid emotions when we pretend they aren’t there. We eat, drink, over-scroll the internet and watch porn, among other things. This is less intense than resistance so you kind of trick yourself into believing you’re getting past it in some way, but you’re still not dealing them.
3)React–Reacting to emotions is most easily seen in anger. Throwing things, yelling, etc, are reactions to anger. You are demonstrating your anger moreso than processing it.
4)Allow–Allowing emotion is the quickest way to get past emotion, but it’s the last thing we want to do. Allowing feels a little like a letting go, a surrender. But it feels vulnerable maybe, and so we don’t want to do it. We don’t want to face it. Allowing feels like accepting it, relaxing into it, finding out what the emotion is trying to tell us. You have to be willing to approach the emotion rather than get away. This is what we want to do most of the time with our emotions.
The irony is that when you accept emotions, and are willing to feel them, the quicker they go away. But then if you welcome them, you don’t need them to go away. It’s a paradox. The less you want them and the more you push, the longer they stay and the more they intensify over time.
Listen in to find out how to ACTUALLY process feelings.
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