With all the craziness going on, I’ve been thinking a lot about feelings versus reality. And also about acknowledging our feelings versus becoming them.
With the concerns about school starting back, virus concerns, money concerns, and everything else, we are feeling a lot of emotions. We are feeling stressed and scared and angry and out of control. It’s hard to focus on life when we are overwhelmed with all these concerns.
There are two ways that many people respond to this.
Some people will feel these feelings and it will consume them. They won’t be able to do work or make plans, or move forward because these thoughts and feelings feel too powerful and overwhelming.
Other people push through but ignore the feelings. They pretend like they are not angry so often that these feelings get bottled up and they explode. Or they ignore these feelings for so long that they no longer recognize how they feel about things.
Instead, we need to acknowledge and work through our feelings while not allowing them to stop us from getting things done. Below we will talk about a few situations and how we can work through our feelings on these occasions.
In Acute Situations
In an acute situation, like an argument with a spouse we need to separate ourselves from our feelings. We want to identify our feelings, not become them. We should say things like “I feel angry” or “I feel hurt” or “I feel sad” instead of “I am angry” or “I am hurt” or “I am sad.”
We are a lot more than our feelings and once we identify ourselves as our feeling, it’s a lot harder to work through it or become another feeling. Instead we should view our feelings as separate from our identity. It is something that affects us, but it is not us.
Once we identify what our feeling is we want to get more specific. We might first say we are angry, but we can dig a little deeper. We might in fact be frustrated or hurt or we might feel disrespected or unheard. Saying I feel angry is like going to Baskin Robbins and saying I want ice cream. There are 31 flavors, which one are you feeling.
Once you can identify your feeling, you can express it and make progress from it. You can talk to your spouse, discuss why you felt that way and what can be done to fix the situation. Your spouse will have the opportunity to express their intentions and acknowledge your feelings.
In a situation like a tense work meeting, you might want to reflect on feelings after the meeting is over. At first glance it might seem like everyone was just angry. But in fact, some might have felt unheard or ignored, others might have felt insecure, and others might have felt attacked.
These can all come off as anger, but when you are able to specifically identify the feeling you can better respond to it. As a follow up, you might ask the people who weren’t able to contribute if they had anything to say. You might state that suggestions can be offered anonymously for those who might feel insecure. You can assure everyone that ideas are only being dissected so that it can be fully understood, not to attack the idea.
Once you know your own feelings and everyone else’s its a lot easier to get to an understanding.
When We are Trying To Get Something Done
Often when we are trying to sit down and get something done, we will have feelings that make it hard for us to get started. We might feel like it is too hard, or you are unqualified, or overwhelmed.
In times like these, it’s important to take a minute to truly identify the feeling. As in the situations above, we want to be specific. Maybe we feel angry about the work. When we dig a little deeper, we discover we are actually bored with the work, it doesn’t feel meaningful.
We want to dig down to the true feeling. Once we get to the true feeling or thought, we should make a note of it. Write it down or make a note on your phone. However, as busy moms, we know that our windows to get things done aren’t always big, so that’s where we are going to leave it.
We acknowledge the feeling and why we feel it, and then we tell ourselves we have done hard things before and we can do this. When we have a task or project that needs to get done, we need to dig in.
However, we are going to save our note about this feeling. Later when the are done with our working time, we should reflect on our feeling. What does it tell us about ourselves and our values. If you get mad about working because the work is boring, it may tell us that we value meaningful work and maybe we should look into doing more of that.
If we didn’t want to do the task because we felt unqualified, what makes us unqualified, what other experiences that we have had show that we actually are qualified? If we thought the work was hard, can we make it easier, can we find a different way of doing it?
Thoughts and feelings are just that. They are not facts or truths. They may feel true, but they are just things in our head. It’s important to acknowledge feelings and why we feel them, but it’s also important to remember that we can also change them and we don’t have to become them.
You can be mad. You can be sad. There are no bad feelings. All of them are legitimate and important. But it’s just as important to figure out what in particular made us feel that way, what does that tell us about ourselves, and what can we do to feel better and fix the problem.
We are all feeling a lot of feelings and they may be stopping us from making progress in our work and our lives. Feel those feelings, but also work through them because you are more than your feelings and you can do great things.
Cheers,
Emily
