ME AND MY FEELINGS
The Myth of “Bad Emotions”
Over the years, we’ve found two key barriers to people living their fullest life— mistaken beliefs (and the stinking thinking that emanates from those beliefs) and a limited relationship with their emotions.
If you want to be nourished and lead a more meaningful, purposeful life, overcoming your victimhood and getting in touch with your feelings are the critical first steps. By overcoming your victimhood, your energy becomes available to make positive changes, and your frontal lobe can be applied to creatively solve problems. By improving your relationship with your feelings, you can recognize and respond to your yearnings, be on your own side, and learn to accurately see yourself in the here-and-now, with positive regard, consistently and unconditionally. In other words, improving your relationship with your emotions improves your ability to attach to yourself and your world —providing a secure foundation to explore the world and to become your best self and live your best life.
In the following weeks, you explore, experiment with, and learn skills to identify and express your emotions. Your increased skill in emotional intelligence will establish the foundation for greater self-knowledge, fulfillment, personal power, intimacy, nourishment, and ultimately a deeper relationship to your higher purpose.
THE POWER AND PURPOSE OF OUR EMOTIONS
Our emotions are one of our greatest and most overlooked sources of nourishment and power. Our emotions are intended to act as the arbiters of our pleasure-pain mechanism. When we can access our feelings and express them responsibly, our emotions move us away from unnecessary pain and towards more pleasure.
Your fear warns you of danger so that you can respond appropriately — moving away from danger and toward safety. Hurt helps you recognize and move away from the source of pain and toward comfort. Anger helps you turn away from hurt and towards pleasure, informing you when something is not right, when you are going against your values, or not meeting your yearnings. Your sadness is a response to a loss of a pleasure that helps you mourn and release, to receive comfort and to heal.
Our emotions also act as the bridge between our body and our mind, which helps to integrate us. Often misunderstood as barriers to rational thinking, research is proving that emotions are essential to rationality. We literally can’t think well or make decisions without our emotions. They direct our attention, enhance our memory, tell us what to value, organize our behavior, and drive our social abilities and moral development. They are also a source of human energy, information, trust, creativity, and influence.
In-Out and Up-Down Model of EQ
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional awareness is knowing what we are feeling. Having the skills to read, utilize, manage, and express our emotions is emotional facility. Together, emotional awareness and emotional facility constitute our emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is critical not only to our personal development, but to our professional success as well. In fact, an article on emotional intelligence in the Harvard Business Review has been one of their most frequently requested articles for over a decade! Hopefully, you are starting to understand the value of this month’s lessons.
Let’s look at what happens without your emotions. Without emotions, we don’t learn. We may cognitively understand new concepts, but true learning must be connected to emotions. Without access to your feelings, you can’t identify your yearning or what will meet your yearning, which prevents you from judging what is nourishing and what is not. Moreover, if you don’t understand the significance of your emotions, you’re likely to numb yourself with soft addictions, because you don’t realize how emotionally unnourishing soft addictions are. But you needn’t stay in this unsatisfying space! As you recognize the positive function of your emotions, you can restore them to their rightful place.
IN JUDITH’S LIFE...
As the third child in a family where my father carried the anger and my mother bore the hurt for our family, I learned to serve a lot.
I suppressed my emotions and learned to serve others. I became a counselor and educator directing nationally recognized model programs for the service of others. I was outstanding in the emotional areas of empathy but found little reason for expression for myself.
It was not until I faced some painful truths in my life and made my One Decision that I began to feel more openly andexpand my active emotional vocabulary.
While I am proud of my ability to understand and empathize with others, I still need to watch out for my tendency to serve others instead of meeting pressing emotional needs of my own.
—Dr. Judith Wright
This week, you explore your relationship with—and attitude toward— your emotions. Expect to become an emotions advocate—sharing what you are learning about the power of emotions and the benefits of developing emotional intelligence. In the weeks to follow, you learn to identify your feelings and express them more fully.
What emotions arise from your assignments? Which ones have you historically muted? What do your insights on emotions tell you about the limiting beliefs through which you see the world? If you chose more empowering thoughts/beliefs/actions in relationship to your emotions, what would those be?
Explore your relationship with your emotions. Lay the groundwork for realizing the value of your feelings. Discover the positive function of your emotions!
My Feelings:
Good, Bad, or Ugly?
Main Assignment
ME AND MY FEELINGS
How do you treat your feelings? Do you act as if they’re an embarrassment or an enemy you need to fight? Do you ignore them and do everything you can to numb them and try to make them disappear? Do you characterize them as either “good” (love, joy, bliss) or “bad” (anger, fear, pain)? If this is how you view them, welcome to humanity.
We were all raised with messages about which emotions were okay and which ones were not okay. But it’s not just the “bad” emotions that we were trained to suppress—we have been socially conditioned to not allow too much emotional expression of any type of feeling. Too much joy can be looked down upon or seen as ungrounded, out of control, or childish. Expressions of anger can be labeled as bullying, intimidating, or worse. Expressions of aliveness often seem threatening to others. We believe that an appropriate degree of emotional expression has a limit.
Limiting any feeling limits all feelings. To the extent that we suppress our pain, we suppress our joy. While there are some families and cultures that have a healthier relationship to feelings than others, Western society tends to view emotions as problematic.
Your assignment this week is to explore your relationship with your feelings. Complete the Feelings Survey, be aware of your thoughts and judgments about (and your relationship with) your emotions, and teach others about the value of emotions. Completing your survey helps you assess your relationship with your emotions and explore the messages that have influenced your beliefs and attitudes toward your feelings. Use the assessment to prompt your thinking and exploration.
Fill in your Love Sponge worksheet, indicating what feelings were okay and not okay in your family upbringing, as well as the parts of you that were okay and not okay. What feelings have you been afraid to feel? Which feelings are not okay to feel? What feelings are you not in touch with? What parts of you are connected to the “not okay” feelings? What feelings are “exiled?” What parts of you try to protect you from your feelings? What parts serve as Managers or Firefighters, trying to protect you from feeling those feelings?
Each day, scan your thoughts and reactions about emotions throughout the day, both in yourself and in others. See where you judge yourself or others for having or expressing feelings. Watch where you immediately numb a feeling because it’s “bad” or uncomfortable. Observe how you treat yourself when you have feelings, including when you are are uncomfortable. Notice when others are expressing feelings—and notice your reactions and judgments about others’ expression of feelings. Record your thoughts, reactions, and judgments in the worksheets provided.
What do you feel about feelings—your own and others?
Also, have a daily conversation about the power of emotions, the positive uses of emotions, and your own experience of your emotions. Remember what’s good about emotions — and teach it! Share with friends, coworkers, family, with someone sitting next to you on the bus or on your zoom meeting, whomever you are with. This week, become an advocate for emotions. While you share from your own experience about what you are discovering about yourself, you are not only teaching others but also grounding the lesson for yourself.
Explore your relationship with your feelings. Prepare to regain the wisdom and power of all your emotions as we work to free the exiles!
Very-Able Assignments
ORIGINS OF MYTHCONCEPTIONS ABOUT FEELINGS
From the Feelings Survey Part 2, can you see how you developed your mistaken beliefs about emotions? How do those beliefs manifest in your life? See if you can catch your mistaken beliefs and distorted thoughts about emotions as they come up during the day. Use the prompts from the Feelings Survey to journal on the impact of your history on your emotional life.
ENVISIONING A LIFE OF MORE EMOTION
Go back to Part 1 of the Feelings Survey and circle the top five questions that you would like to respond to with a resounding “Yes” at a level 5. Use these questions as an invitation to develop your relationship with your feelings more deeply. Begin to imagine what your life would be like if you answered “Yes” to these questions.
READ—AND SARE—THE “INTIMATE INTELLIGENCE: THE ABCS OF EMOTIONAL LITERACY” CHAPTER IN THE HEART OF THE FIGHT
Read the chapter, “Intimate Intelligence: The ABCs of Emotional Literacy” in Drs. Bob and Judith Wright’s book, The Heart of the Fight. Drink this chapter in to develop greater fluency in the language of emotions, the language of the heart, and continue to increase your intimate intelligence with practice and expression.
READ “THE HEART OF TRANSFORMATION” CHAPTER IN TRANSFORMED!
Read this chapter on emotions and emotional intelligence in Transformed: The Science of Spectacular Living to remind yourself of the power of emotions and their critical role in your ongoing transformation—not to mention your memory, creativity, reasoning, immune system, intimacy...Take notes on the chapter for bullet points you want to share as an emotional advocate this week. Give copies of the book to friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers—and discuss the power of emotions and the powerful journey of transformation.
MAP YOUR EMOTIONAL FACILITY: THE IN, OUT, UP, DOWN
Chart your emotional facility. Where are your strengths? Which types of emotional facility do you use the most? Which types do you use the least? Which can you develop to increase your emotional intelligence? In means being in touch with what’s going on inside of you and what you are feeling. Out is the free flow of responsible expression. Up refers to increasing your affect and its intensity in expression. Down is modulating your intensity, containing your emotions, and self soothing. For a deeper dive, look at Chapter 11 in Heart of the Fight (especially pages 197-198) and use the worksheet attached to map your emotional facility.
ATTITUDES AND JUDGMENTS ABOUT FEELINGS
What do you feel about feelings—your own and others’? Throughout your day, observe others expressing (or not expressing) their feelings. What are your reactions— your thoughts, feelings, and judgments— when you see someone crying, laughing, scowling, freely expressing, or stone-faced? How do you feel when someone is, or is not, expressing their feelings?
Become an advocate for emotions. While you share from your own experience about what you are discovering about yourself, you are not only teaching others but also grounding the lesson for yourself.
NOURISH YOUR LOVE SPONGE
This week, fill in your Love Sponge and notice which parts of yourself and which emotions you have labeled as not okay. What are your thoughts and feelings in the dry parts as opposed to those that are more okay for you to express? Growing up, were you affirmed for being happy but feeling angry or hurt wasn’t okay? What parts of yourself do you expect that people will like, appreciate, or approve of? What parts of you have been hidden in the shadows? Which parts of yourself do you share proudly, and which do you judge harshly? Simply noticing your Love Sponge is a way of seeing and nourishing yourself.
DEVELOP MORE NOURISHING CONTACT
Contact is a key aspect of nourishment. Greet five people every day as a way to build your skill in making nourishing contact and building connections. Then, up the ante in your engagement. Think about a tennis match—one player lobs the ball across the net, the other player lobs it back for as many exchanges as they can before the ball is missed. Practice your “volleys” this week––rather than just greeting people with a hello, greet them and exchange at least two volleys with a minimum of three people every day. Keep track of the number of people you greet and the number of volleys you exchange.
Nourishment & Self-Care
Complete the Feelings Survey to assess your relationship with your emotions and to explore the messages you’ve received which have influenced your beliefs about and attitudes toward your feelings. Use the assessment to prompt your thinking and exploration. Look for examples of your thoughts and reactions about emotions throughout the week, both in yourself and in others.
FEELINGS SURVEY PART 1
Complete the following Feeling Assessment. Rate yourself on the question from 0 to 5, and write the number of your rating in the blank provided:
0 = never
1 = rarely and under no pressure
3 = occasionally under moderate pressure and
5 = impeccably under high pressure.
You may find this scale uncomfortable at first and if you do, simply rate each question from one to five for how often and how well you think you do what it asks.
Feelings Survey
__ I know when I am having a feeling.
__ I identify how emotions feel in my body.
__ I identify my feelings and express them fully.
__ I am at ease with my emotions.
__ I welcome my feelings as an important part of my experience.
__ I feel comfortable with a full range of feelings.
__ I express all feelings in a way that completes the emotion; that leads me to more truth and understanding.
__ I look for cues in the information my feelings offer.I learn about myself and understand myself from being with my feelings.
__ I use my emotions to help find ways to handle situations effectively.
__ I use my emotions as a source of joy rather than to fend off pain.
__ I have a full range of emotional expression (or do you over express one type of feeling over another? anger instead of hurt? or perhaps pain instead of anger?)
__ Expressing anger brings me more clarity, understanding and resolve.
__ Expressing my pain results in feelings of peace and relief.
__ I have frequent moments of unmitigated joy and frequent feelings of overall well-being.
__ I express my love fully.
__ I receive expressions of love and take them in fully.
Use your responses to the first part of the survey to help you see where you can grow in relationship to your emotions. Most people don’t answer a 3 or 5 to every question. Even for the questions where you have answered affirmatively, you may still want to deepen your relationship with your feelings in that area. There is no end to learning about yourself and your feelings; it is an ever-deepening journey.
FEELINGS SURVEY PART 2
This part of the survey addresses your training and conditioning about your emotions. Take a few quiet moments and journal your responses to the following questions:
1.) What messages did you receive about emotions from your family and community; what were you taught?
2.) How were you treated when you were upset, sad, angry, or afraid?
3.) Were you encouraged to express yourself, had your feelings validated, and then sent out to handle the situation with coaching, support or encouragement (Take a few moments to go beyond “yes” or “no” and explore what did and didn’t happen.)
4.) Were you encouraged to express yourself, to complete the emotion and learn from the situation? (Take a few moments to go beyond “yes” or “no” and explore what did and didn’t happen.)
5.) Were you comforted and encouraged to deal with the emotion? Or were you told to stuff it or that “Big boys or girls don’t cry”? Or “Children are to be seen and not heard”? (Take a few moments to go beyond “yes” or “no” and explore what did and didn’t happen.)
6.) What was the norm in your family or community in regards to emotional expression?
From the Feelings Survey Part 2, can you see how you developed your mistaken beliefs about emotions? How do those beliefs manifest in your life? Journal on the impact of your history on your emotional life.
What negative and mistaken beliefs do you have about your emotions? Write down your negative beliefs in the form of thoughts, such as:
My feelings are bad.
I shouldn’t feel.
I must hide my feelings.
Being emotional is wrong.
I can’t handle my feelings .
Only wimps have feelings.
People who emote openly are weak or weird.
Buck up. Suck it up.
If I started letting my feelings come up, I wouldn’t be able to function.
Chart Your Emotional Facility
Which types of emotional facility are predominant for you? Which do you use more than others? Under what circumstances? Which ones do you want to develop?
Attitudes and Judgments about Feelings
Love Sponge
Reflect for a moment on which emotions were allowed in your family and which were suppressed. What were you taught about which feelings were OK or not OK? Was sadness OK but anger wasn’t? What parts of you were acceptable or OK, and which parts weren’t? Fill in the “OK” and “NOT OK” parts of your Love Sponge below. Remember, the primary emotions are fear, hurt anger, sadness, and joy.
