Happy Monday and welcome to your mental Health Mini.
This week's guest is Jay Fields and we are talking all things
emotional intelligence. The reality is, is early in our
life, we get these blueprints for what it means to be a good
person and what it means to relate and what we do with
emotions and that sort of thing. And so whatever you saw modeled
in your home growing up is what most people tend to do, even if
what they want to do is something different, will
default to it. So in my family, emotions were
something to be figured out, like we'll figure out why you
feel that way and we'll fix it. self-sufficiency was a strong
value in my family. So it'd be like, you can do
this, you can get through this. As opposed to like, Ouch, that
must really hurt. Like, I totally get how you
would feel that way. As an adult, my default is to go
to figuring it out or telling myself like, it's not that big a
deal. You can do this, you're strong.
And it's not that those two things are bad.
They're absolutely great, but the first part that's missing
for most people is resonance. A grown up saying your feelings
make sense to me. You're not crazy.
I've felt those two before, and I'm here.
Or you're strong. Look at all the ways you've
gotten through things in the past.
This is resilience in building that.
But without that first resonant place, eventually the person
gets the message. My feelings must be weird and
off because I'm having this experience that feels super big
to me. And the people who love me and
care for me don't seem to think it's that big a deal because
they're not meeting me and seeing me in it.
I must be weird. And these emotions must be out
of proportion. And so we get even more
untrusting of our inner experience.
And that's where kind of those patterns of people pleasing or
being coming in mesh with other people happen because you no
longer trust that your inner experience is appropriate and
you're looking to like, connect with someone else's outer
experience to be OK. What can we do about this?
The first step is to start to have some connection to your
body. When I'm talking about becoming
more aware in your body, I recommend that people find a
felt resource. A felt resource is anything in
your body in the present moment that you can experience is
either pleasant or neutral. So for example, feeling my feet
on the floor is pretty neutral for me.
If you can find in the present moment something that's either
neutral or pleasant and you're having an unpleasant emotion,
you now have two things happening.
You have two layers of experience.
You have the heat and the tightness of anger.
You have the neutrality of my feet on the floor.
And what that does is it makes it so that that heat and anger
don't overtake you or flood you so much that you go numb because
you have this other layer. The way I like to talk about is
this is true. This is also true.
It's true that I'm angry and feeling overwhelmed.
It's also true that I can feel my butt in my chair.
So my whole experience is an awful.
And then from there, naming it, if you can name it, literally
brings together the part of your brain that can understand your
experience with the part of your brain that's having the emotion
and that's integrated for your brain and then helps your
nervous system to regulate. And if you know what the feeling
is, then it's about offering self empathy.
Of course I feel sad. Of course I feel anxious.
Of course I feel elated. And that's your way of saying I
make sense to me because our brains don't like dissonance.
Our brains don't like when your body feels like you're really
freaked out and you're telling yourself it's cool.
But if your body feels freaked out and your brain goes, it
makes sense to me that you're freaked out.
You put it in context and of course your anxiety makes sense.
Doesn't mean you like it, doesn't mean you want it, but it
means it's not dissonant. What I tell the people that I
work with when we first start doing these exercises is that
what it's doing is it's basically you creating a felt
sense of being related to yourself, creating a
relationship to yourself, that you become trustworthy to
yourself. You become trustworthy that you
will validate yourself and your feelings.
From there, you build self-confidence, you build self
worth, you build again that sense of trust, and from there
that's the foundation of changing every behavior.
If I have trust in myself that I'm going to show up for myself,
if I have a big hard feeling, I'm more willing to disappoint
someone else versus try to please them at my own expense.
Embodied self-awareness can feel like a big, hard, scary thing to
do when you're feeling that lack of connection to yourself.
But doing it helps everything in your brain to go, oh, this is
OK, you just have to start dipping your toe in the water.
Trust that your brain will come along with you right now.
The stories you tell yourself about it are like, whoa, this is
going to be hard. But all the Physiology is there
to support you in it, especially if you're kind to yourself
through the process.