What To Do When Feelings Get Big.
In my last blog “Principle Number Seven” I explained the need to take a step back from big feelings, remain a neutral observer, and get curious about our emotions. By asking ourselves questions about our feelings while being non-judgmental of them, we can decide how we want to proceed. Another way of saying this would be that we can choose to “Act” instead of “react”. One of the techniques I talked about was to check the narrative or story, that we are telling ourselves about our feelings.
Thoughts are automatic, they just happen. We cannot control a thought before it occurs. People say, “Change your thoughts, change your life”. This is true! Changing our thoughts can change our lives. But until we recognize our thought patterns, we cannot change our thoughts. Thoughts are like habits; they have become engrained because we have repeated them so many times. And just like a habit, they can be changed with conscious effort and practice. So, this sounds like a paradox, “we cannot control our thoughts until we become aware of our thoughts and change them”. Let’s dig deeper!
To better understand this process, we must understand where our thoughts come from. Thoughts originate from our internal belief systems. According to study.com, a belief system is “a set of codes or principles that helps people inform themselves of the world around them. It helps them interpret the world, and act in a way that aligns with their beliefs.” We have categories of belief systems, such as social, behavioral, religious, political etc. Belief systems sound simple, but they are very complex. They are made from our childhood experiences, our parents, teachers, peers, friends, adult experiences, trauma, religious and spiritual experiences, culture, and media. Beliefs can be as simple as “squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom” or as complex as multi-layered political beliefs.
When there is an event or occurrence in our day (we will call this a trigger), such as a disagreement with a significant other, our brain searches our belief systems, selects the appropriate belief, creates a thought (a story) about the trigger, and the thought (story) creates a feeling. The feeling will then cause a reaction (behavior). This all happens very quickly. Sometimes, it may even seem the behavior happens automatically. Before we know it, we may have said something horrible that we can’t take back. Or, maybe even physically acted out, like picking something up and throwing it.
The truth is, we can train ourselves to pause after a trigger, and ask ourselves the questions:
1. What am I feeling? A feeling is ONE word. Such as happy, sad, mad, glad, worried, hurt etc.
2. Why am I feeling this feeling? In other words, what is the “thought” driving the feeling? A thought is a series of words. Such as “I am feeling angry because my significant other just told me they think we aren’t a good match.”
3. What is the belief driving that thought? Scan your belief system to determine what the belief is, and where that belief came from. For example: “I believe that we are a good fit because we spend so much time together and we like the same activities. My mom and dad always spent so much time together and they were very close.”
4. Check your story for evidence that it is true. Look for facts, be curious. “Is it true that we are a good fit because we spend so much time together? Do people who aren’t a good fit sometimes spend lots of time together? Is the time we spend together enjoyable? Or is it stressful? What activities do we do together? Are these activities a large enough percentage of our relationship that they should serve as glue to hold us together? Is it possible that what I perceived as closeness wasn’t?
5. By examining your beliefs and thoughts you will often be able to either change your perspective or gain the capacity to recognize that someone else may have a different perspective than yours. This can allow you to choose a behavior that will be healthy for you, the relationship, or the situation. It will hopefully end damaging outbursts that can occur when we react without thought challenging.
This might seem like an awful lot of work to go through to sort through our feelings. At first, it can seem a bit overwhelming and awkward to do. However, it’s very important to do this work when our feelings are big and unmanageable, so we don’t do damage to our life or anyone else’s. Click HERE for the worksheet to help you learn this process. When our feelings are really big our fight or flight response has been activated. Our brain is going to send signals to our body to do either of the above. By slowing down, and asking questions of ourselves, we re-engage the pre-frontal cortex (our reasoning center) and the fight or flight response calms down. This will allow us to act accordingly instead of reacting destructively.
In time and with practice the process of thought challenging can happen quite quickly and much more efficiently than when we are first learning how to do it. Learning to manage big feelings will help us to manage our lives in a way that supports sobriety. We no longer use alcohol or other drugs to numb or shut down our emotions, so we need to learn skills to help us regulate our emotions.