Feeling Your Feelings In Recovery

Hey there again. It's steve and thanks for joining me for this week's podcast and for following me at www dot Believe in big change dot com. Yeah, we're gonna talk a little bit more about some change this week. That's what life is about. Getting out of our comfort zone. I hope you're off to a good week and moving forward with your desires to take some action and effectuate some change and just be aware that the self critic is there. It's a part of how we were made. It's a part of our ego, it never has anything nice to say and sometimes it wants to get pretty loud and squash our plans to effectuate change. So I encourage you to just be aware of it, acknowledge it, kind of embrace it and be gentle with yourself, celebrate those wins. Baby stepping is still stepping. So, good luck with that. This week. I'm gonna talk about emotional manipulation. Many of us have been subjected to this physically sexually, some form of trauma in our lives. Most of us. By the time we are adults have experienced one form of trauma, at least one form of it. It's very stressful, very difficult. Some of us have turned to substance abuse like myself, most of my trauma and stress was of the emotional nature and I think they're all linked together. Some have endured physical sexual abuse, very sorry about that. That makes the emotional aspect of it a bit more complicated. I think even though I didn't experience that component firsthand. Very traumatizing. I can only imagine prayers for you. Some are dealing with mental health challenges or other life threatening conditions, other disorders as well. So what I want to talk about today is how can we feel our feelings, sit with them, stay with them long enough to name them without letting them get the best of us, meaning we act from them, react from a place of emotion. We lash lash out at people, we get angry mainly because we're hurt. So I want to talk about that today. Um there's a few areas I want to touch on when people invalidate our feelings, minimize our feelings, shame us. And then there's the fourth bucket when people are just flat out toxic and their emotional manipulators hurt people hurt other people. So it's a lot to cover today. And this can be a real uncomfortable place for many of us. Uh this is not an easy one. I'm not gonna kid you. It takes work, but I can tell you from my own experience, it's worth it. I turned to the bottle from my relief to try and figure out and it was only temporary. It provided some at first I thought, but I didn't like feeling my feelings and at the end of my drinking career, I hope I'm not drinking today. You know, I'm much better able to sit with my feelings and stay with them. The alcohol only provided temporarily relief. So it could be substance abuse, it could be another unhealthy coping mechanism. So we're gonna talk about this uncomfortable place and giving ourselves permission to do this. A lot of us struggle with this one. We don't give ourselves permission to feel our feelings sit with them. Just observe what's going on, not passing judgment on ourselves. That's where it's gotta start. I believe then we're less likely to shame ourselves and lash out at other people. My shame levels down and on the downtick, my resentments are down if it starts to go up and I'm being hard on myself all of a sudden these things that I thought I didn't resent people for all of a sudden they start popping up again. Now I know that I've got to turn inward. It's an inside job. So this is tough. I know I lived it for decades. I had a handful of key relationships where people fell into these buckets. We're gonna talk about that. So let's talk about being invalidated. You know, we get invalidated. We feel invalidated when someone tells us that our feelings are not valid, simply put and that they're wrong. There is no right or wrong. Now. We may discover when we sit still with it and we start to process it and talk to others about it. They may not be accurate. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. That's we're on this mission to explore and turn over stones and uncover this stuff and it's it's a job, we're kind of on a fact finding mission. So you've heard some of these forms of invalidation minimization of our feelings. Nobody ever appreciates it. I'll give you some of the ones that I heard for a long time. Oh come on steve. I was just kidding. Why are you so sensitive? You're too sensitive. You know, I was just teasing a little bit. Well guess what? Sometimes I didn't always find those jokes funny or someone says to you well it could always be worse hey, when we're in the moment and something that we feel we've been wronged or you know, it's a bad situation, unpleasant uncomfortable situation or around the toxic person and they really have, you know, kinda screwed us over. That's what we're focused on. That doesn't help. You know, someone says, you know, let go of it, you'll get over it. And one of my favorite cliches is of course, you know, someday you'll thank that person for it. I never thought that that was even possible to put that one on the table and I'll share this with you down the road how I've been able to do it. I'm actually considering where some of these traumatic experience stressful experiences for me, I'm looking at them is is a blessing and I want to share that with you. So you know, let's talk about a couple of other ones. Um you know you've dug yourself quite a hole. I see that doesn't help or of course another one I heard was well you chose to be with that person, You did that to yourself. Not very helpful, I think, you know, and one of the ones that I experienced on and off for a long time, this is where the manipulation comes into play, I think was I'll let you know when you should feel a certain way. I'll let you know when you need to be worried about this. I'll let you know when you need to be upset. And I actually gave up my power for a long time and put it in the hands of somebody else. So my feelings became contingent upon somebody else. You talk about giving up your power. So it's like I needed permission to feel my feelings? Well, my permission became my permission slip became alcohol. That's what I turned to, mainly in places of being alone and isolated. I used alcohol to make myself feel better. I used alcohol to experience feelings of sadness just to feel it, to feel loneliness. I had those emotions and feelings have become so blocked that I didn't know how to access them. And I used alcohol as kind of the gateway to open it up, seemed to work for a while until of course it didn't work any longer. And then of course, some people shame us. You know, I heard one not too long ago. Why do you always do this to me or why do you always act this way? I actually heard a person respond to the other person and said I didn't do this to you. I did it to myself. So one person shame the other person and the other person shame themselves. And then as I talked about the emotionally the emotional manipulators, the really toxic people. So we have to do some prep work here and lay some groundwork so that you know, I don't tend to beat myself up because occasionally I'll attract somebody that really isn't being that authentic and I find out that they're really toxic and I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about that. How you can lay the groundwork and start to pave the way because I used to go my gosh, how did I attract these people? What am I doing? I conditioned myself therefore I conditioned other people to treat me a certain way is what I've realized at the end of the day, when you net it out, you tolerate certain behavior, You condition others to continue to treat you that way at the end of the day. But that's not such a bad thing because we can take ownership. We can take our power back. Don't give up your power. So let's talk about a few things that I want to share with you that I believe are pretty basic. Uh some of them are more theory as I just touched on and some of them are very specific things. So the first one I've touched on, give yourself permission to feel said stay with it name and then share your feelings with people that won't invalidate you of course. And that will take a little time and a little navigation to find those people could be at your church, a support group meeting. Um, you know, people that you just get to know over time that you can trust, especially if you can't you're not in a position where you can seek professional help and if you are doing that kudos, that's a good thing. Used to be a stigma with that. Um, I think that's starting to be broken down. I use professional help. I see a therapist. I also work with a life coach and that's worth every penny. But that's my choice. I need that kind of support, that kind of structure. So give yourself permission to feel your feelings explore it. Don't judge it. They're your feelings, they're yours. They've come up for a reason. It's information you're receiving for a reason. The second one I just touched on find that validation and support when you do when you get a chance to talk to people a little bit. Be sensitive of their time. Remember giving up your time to somebody else is one of the most generous gifts. Acts of generosity. We can we can give five minutes, 10 minutes. Sometimes an hour. Try not to download on them. Be sensitive to their time. They'll appreciate that and they'll be willing to sign up for it again. You're kind of putting a nice mutual boundary in place because me, I tend to hang in there and listen maybe a little bit longer than I should because I wanna help. I wanna listen to understand people, I can't change them. The only cat I can work on is me. The third one. Some struggle with this. I'm gonna go ahead and put it out there again. Prayer and meditation. Some people pray to the god of their understanding, a higher power. That's what I choose to do if you struggle with that. That's okay. There's no shame in that. Think about something. You know, you can pray for things like love and positive energy and hope praying for good energy. Um you don't have to necessarily pray to something if that's, you know, you struggle with that one, pray for something, pray for others and if you want to pray for yourself and you want to be a little selfish where helping you will give back and help others. That's okay too. So just a couple of things there, give it a shot, meditation is simply just focusing on your breath And observing this and if you can just do it for a few minutes a day, that's how I started out. I kept thinking when a person advised me I had a sober coach for a while and he advised me just to do it for four minutes a day and I was thinking, well, why why can't I do it for 25 or 30 minutes because I've done that before. But I had to work my way up to it. His response was, well, how consistent are you with that? Well, given the fact that I was coming out of alcoholism, um, or in the depths of it, I'd say it wasn't very consistent. So, again, give that some thought. It's ok to be a little selfish when you want to help others carry the message forward. Give it back a little bit. The fourth thing is you can journal, write down whatever comes to mind right as you're feeling, right as you're speaking, right as you speak, just for a few minutes. It really is therapeutic because sometimes that's what we have. We have the pages to listen to us. We have a voice, right? Type journal, whatever it is, that works for you. So, again, I touched on a lot today. Remember you don't have to give up your power. You don't need permission to feel your feelings to sit with them. Stay with them and name them. And you don't have to let your feelings, your happiness, your sadness be contingent upon somebody else. We'll talk again soon, sending you positive energy, positive thoughts and love today. And, uh, I will be talking to you real soon. I love you and you do matter. And your efforts are enough today. You're gonna rock it out today, be well.