Hello, beautiful humans and welcome to the mental Wellness.
Wake up, show a weekly podcast where growth minded creative
people, come to learn, best practices from both spirituality
and psychology that create lasting well-being.
I am your host mental Wellness, expert improvised acting teacher
therapist and Coach, Don McMillan.
Let's get to it. It.
What are you unwilling to feel? What are you unwilling to feel?
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So what are you unwilling to feel?
There's this wonderful exercise that I enjoy doing with people
and clients of the plans aren't people, but I do it in my social
life as well. It's called stop-start continue.
It's good for birthdays solstices, New Year's and the
questions are What has been going on in your life?
What behaviors have? You been in in what behaviors?
Have you been doing that? You would like to stop.
What new behaviors would you like to start?
And what's something or some things that have been going well
that you would like to continue so stop-start continue.
And as I Was preparing for this episode it occurred to me that
stop-start continue. Also explains how it is that we
have behaviors that we don't like Yes, I'm going to argue
that every maladaptive behavior that you engage in is actually
an emotional management strategy.
There's a feeling we want to stop, there's a feeling we want
to start or there's a feeling that we want to continue.
So why is this important? I am in the business of helping
people change. Sort of.
One of the truths about therapy
is that often people want to have therapy in order to
understand themselves better, not necessarily to change
anything. I'm going to say that again
because it Bears repeating sometimes people go to therapy
because they want to understand themselves better not
necessarily because they want to change anything.
The fine print on that is That they're hoping that an
understanding themselves better, they will be able to get more of
the things they want and less of the things that they don't.
But genuinely there are a lot of people who show up who just want
to figure themselves out that that motivation, often comes
from a form of suffering, right? Really happy people don't
necessarily want to sit with someone else and discuss all the
things they're doing right to make themselves happy.
So that impulse often comes from from pain.
From let me understand myself better so that I can have less
pain and do more things that I like.
But it's definitely a motivation sometimes people go to therapy
to complain. A lot of people think therapy is
about venting about just getting things off your chest and there
are therapists who work that way, who open up the therapeutic
relationship. Type in order for people to do
vent, to complain to say whatever is going on with them.
And that moment I personally don't work that way necessarily.
I find that that can be a useful tool but it is not the end-all
for me. I would prefer to work with
people on choosing what they would prefer, or choosing what
they would like, better than what it is.
They're getting, that is why I started by saying I'm in the
business of change. That is my preference.
That's not always what I do. One of the other aspects of
being on my side of the chair, the couch, or the table is
meeting people where they are when someone comes in, with
goals for therapy, my job is not to convince.
It's them that their goals are wrong or that.
I know better than they do. They're the expert on themselves
and so someone can send and they just want to understand
themselves better. And I will do my best to guide
them if an understanding themselves better a possibility
of doing something differently opens up for them.
Yay, yay, yay. So a lot of what people are
suffering from with or come to therapy about is they're doing
something or experiencing something.
Saying, they don't like and they want it to sob or they want to
change the results are getting in life.
And what I really would like to bring forward, is the idea that
maladaptive behaviors behaviors, that are not producing good
results or that continue in spite of bad results or however,
you want to think about it. The stuff you do that, you don't
like and you wish you didn't do. Our emotional management
strategies. The start with procrastination,
excuse me, people often think they procrastinate because
they're lazy or unmotivated, or they just don't have enough
willpower or some other self-judgment procrastination is
an emotional management strategy in your mind, Whatever task, you
are not doing seems less enjoyable than any number of
other tasks. And so to manage that a motion
that anticipated unpleasant emotion, you will choose to do
something else. Wait a minute.
You say and I'm procrastinating. I'm not doing anything.
You can't not do anything. You're always behaving.
We're always behaving. So let's say.
That I think I need to clean out my garage and I'm not doing it.
Part of me thinks that cleaning out.
The garage is going to be a lot of work.
It's going to be hot. It's going to be Dusty.
There's going to be bugs. I don't want those feelings.
And so instead I decided to give myself a manicure.
So I'm not doing nothing. I'm doing something else instead
but it's an emotional management strategy.
I am trying to avoid a feeling. I think I don't want to feel
stop-start continue, I'm wanting to stop myself from having a
feeling I don't like or I want to continue a feeling that I am
enjoying, for example, relaxing sitting on the couch Watching a
Netflix TV show, smoking a bowl of the marriage.
Awana playing a video game. What I am doing in my mind is
more pleasant than what I think I are quote should be doing so
my emotional strategy is in order to continue feeling of
feeling. I like I'm going to engage in
whatever behavior and in order to stop myself from feeling of
feeling and don't want to feel I'm going to keep putting off
that other behavior. Let's take drinking too much or
consuming anything too much. What causes that?
Well it's emotional management strategy, emotional management,
strategy one, I'm tense and unhappy and I don't want to feel
that way anymore. I want that to stop.
So I'm going to start consuming something in order to activate
another feeling Continue. I was bored.
I want that to stop. So I start eating Oreos, eating
Oreos is enjoyable so I continue to eat for bags.
They can the bags for bags of Oreos and order to allow that
pleasure to consent to continue. So kind of make sense or feeling
something. We don't want to feel, we wanted
to stop. So we engage in some sort of
behavior to make the one feeling stop.
We want to feel something different, so we start a
different behavior and once we achieve a pleasurable Behavior,
we tend to want to cling to it and cause it to continue.
Make sense. Does that make sense?
So how that's all very well and good?
The question then becomes, what do you want to do about it?
So one of the things that we can do is be willing to feel our
feelings. So for example, I'm beginning to
feel boredom. I'm beginning to feel boredom.
Part of me besides, I don't like boredom what can I do?
That will be interesting or pleasurable or they could learn
to tolerate that feeling and just accept that in the moment
boredom is present. I did an episode a while back
about changing our language rather than saying I am bored,
which is changing our perception of ourselves.
Our identity, into the state of boredom, which isn't true,
always more than anything. Thing that we're feeling in, any
moment, it is more. Accurate is accurate to say, I
feel boredom, I'm noticing boredom is present.
Boredom is present. And when you give yourself that
little bit of distance, you might be able to make different
choices. So, boredom is present.
I could decide that. That's so intolerable that I
want to immediately do something to change it or I can accept
that boredom is present. And choose to do, what is most
important and that moment are what is necessary according to
my values. I'm let's imagine that I am
feeling stressed for my day of work.
I could start drinking a bottle of wine in order to start
feeling more, relaxed, or less stressed or less of anything,
right? I could stop.
Tune them out with a bottle of wine or I could have notice that
stress is present. Tension is present.
Allow it to be. So and choose my behavior based
on my values, if I'm just come home from work, maybe one of my
values is to spend quality time with my kids, or my partner, or
my pet, or my ferns or to make a healthy dinner.
If I'm giving in to, oh, I can't stand this feeling, I'm going
to, I must do something to get rid of this feeling.
Then maybe I'm too busy drinking wine to pay attention to my
family or my fern. Or to do The Chopping and
sauteing that I had planned. Okay, so let's go with continue.
I enjoy hooking up with strangers on the internet and so
I start to feel bored. I decided that I don't like
feeling or I just feel normal and I'd rather feel excited.
And so I continued to hook up with strangers on the internet,
even though I'm beginning to miss so much sleep, that I'm not
getting to work on time, for example.
So stop-start continue describes what it is?
That is behind some of our behaviors that are not serving
us. We want to stop a feeling we
don't like we want to start a feeling, we like better.
And once we have a pleasurable sensation, we want to continue
it. The answer is.
To allow our feelings to exist. That's it.
Allow our feelings to exist and then to choose our actions based
on our values instead of our mood, that's really the whole
enchilada. Okay?
Maybe not the whole enchilada if you're not American.
Well, that's a phrase that doesn't make sense because and
to let us are Mexican food. But that really is a lot of what
we're doing. A lot of our suffering.
A lot of our problems are a lot of our behaviors are really
about, trying to manage emotions that we are unwilling to feel.
For a lot of men, depression, shows up as anger, frustration
and short-tempered, - because, for a lot of men sadness is
never been in an emotion that they've been allowed to feel.
So rather than tolerate and accept that sadness is present,
they'll choose anger as a more acceptable feeling.
So in order to stop feeling sad, they will start feeling angry.
For a lot of addicts. It started off as starting
wanting to feel good and then after certain point, when starts
to use to stop feeling bad for over indulgences.
It's about continuing stay up too late playing video games is
because you're having pleasure and you want to continue.
So one of the ways that we learn to tolerate our emotions it is
it goes back to that meditation is simply too.
You notice that they are present, name them?
And not demand that they change in any way.
There's notice that as they're just notice it, I'm noticing
that depression is present. Okay.
It's that simple may not be easy, but it is that simple.
And so what I would really delightfully love for you to
embrace this notion that if you're noticing other some
Behavior like, why do I keep doing this or why don't I do it
if you, for example, if you want to work out more often and
you're not not starting. It's because starting that thing
feels like some kind of unpleasant Motion because it
will interrupt something else that you're doing.
Like, relaxing on the couch, or sitting around doing something,
that's not as effortful, for example.
So yeah, emotional management strategy.
So perhaps I would like for you to forgive yourself for not
having changed behaviors that you don't like.
I'd like to invite you to consider allowing those emotions
to Simply exist without necessarily having to obey them
or change them. And I would also like to invite
you to remember that no matter what Right here.
Right now. You are full.
You were perfect. You are complete.
You are amazing. You were wonderful.
Whatever you are stopping starting or continuing, you're
worthy and deserving of having a life.
So Transcendent and miraculous that, you can't even imagine it.
Thanks for being here. Until next time,