#79 Resisting Your Emotions

Read the full episode transcript

 Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Oh, hi! Welcome back to Your Favorite You!

I am your host, Melissa Parsons. If this is your first time listening to the podcast - welcome! I love the people who jump in at episode 79 and just hit play. I also love the people who start at episode 1 and listen until they get current - both groups are welcome here. So, if it is your first time listening, you are in the right place. If you are a loyal listener of the show, thank you so much for listening every week. Now, here comes my shameless plug to ask you to take a moment to write a review of the podcast on Apple podcasts! I would also invite you to share this podcast with anyone you think might benefit from listening. I will love you forever and ever if you do one or both of those things!

OK - onto the topic for today. Many people who are new to the self-development world have not bought into the idea yet that feeling our feelings is the key to the universe! I think that this feeling of your feelings is so important that the concept was the 4th one I introduced you all to on this podcast - so you can go back to episode 5, if you haven’t listened to it, or if you need a refresher. I was titled “Feel All Your Fucking Feelings”...

Most times, when I start working with a brilliant woman, she has a very limited vocabulary for her feelings - she either feels good or bad… Some of my clients are a bit more advanced, and they can delineate between happy, sad, mad, and scared. After you are done being my client, you likely have about 150 different emotions that you are willing and able to feel… 

And that’s probably an underestimate. If you look at any of the feelings wheels or the feelings lists, most of them have 150 to 200 different feelings on there.

I have a theory for why we are so limited in the words available to us to describe how we are feeling… To clarify, there are way over 150 different words to describe the full range of emotions, but most people come to me only using about 4-6 of these words to describe their emotions… so that is what I am referring to when I say which words are available to you to use for how you feel.

My theory is that first, most of us or many of us have been socialized out of feeling - as I have said before, many of us had parents or caregivers who either did not have time to allow us to feel our feelings and work our way through the gamut of emotion that a typical human feels in a day… and many of us also had parents who were emotionally shut down themselves, fearing that our emotions would bring out their emotions, and they were also never taught that it is safe to feel our feelings. So, of course, our parents and our caregivers tried to protect us and them by shushing us, telling us whatever was happening was no big deal, telling us to let our emotions pass without ever dealing with them.

The second part of this theory is that we have been taught for years that the goal of life is to be happy all the time. Hell, it said on my calendar earlier this week that it was World Happiness Day… You can imagine the eyeroll that my calendar got from me on that one! Honestly, I am all for World Happiness Day if we also have World Bemusement Day and World Melancholy Day and World Perturbed Day and World Mortified Day! I would totally rock out some of these days if they existed on the calendar!

So, of course, since we have been socialized to not feel and, if we are going to feel anything, the goal is to be happy, it is no wonder that we are all so stunted in our allowance of emotions!

The other thing I find, which is the actual topic for today, is that all of the feelings we really don’t enjoy feeling all feel kinda the same in our body. The reason for this is not that they actually do feel the same, or that they bring up the same feelings in our body - I know what melancholy and bemusement and perturbed ness feels like in my body now, but before I did this work, they all kinda felt the same… that is because I was resisting feeling them… So instead of actually feeling melancholy or bemused or perturbed, which all feel different, I was actually feeling resistance, which feels the same!

We talk a lot in coaching about allowing your emotions instead of resisting them. The problem with resisting them instead of allowing the emotions is that your ability to resist your emotions is limited. You can only resist them for so long before they come bubbling up and over and blow up in your face. This is why when you ask your teenager for the 3rd time to do something without allowing yourself to be annoyed that they did not do it the first time that you blow up in anger and start yelling. This is why when you are not allowing yourself to feel overwhelm when you have a million things on your plate that you either shut down completely or you sit and watch Netflix or read your romance novel or play solitaire… you would rather resist the emotion and pretend it is not happening than to actually feel the overwhelm for a moment and then ask, ok now what??? 

Many of my clients come to me somewhat numb. They are using alcohol to resist feeling their feelings. This may sound familiar. You get home from a long day at work and you are frustrated with just about everything. Instead of being with the frustration in a healthy way, you reach for the bottle of wine or the martini and effectively drink until you are comfortably numb. For most of us, this takes us away from our favorite version of ourselves… it creates a disconnect with the people we love and live with… and it doesn’t solve a damn thing. All the frustrations are still present once you are sober again.

Resisting emotions can create a disconnect between our inner experiences and our outward behavior. When we constantly push aside or ignore our feelings, we may find ourselves feeling emotionally numb or detached from our actual experience. This can lead to a sense of disconnection from our authenticity and make it challenging to navigate life's ups and downs with self-awareness.

Also, the actual act of resisting emotions often requires a significant amount of mental and emotional energy. It can be exhausting to constantly suppress or deny what we are feeling, leading to increased feelings of stress, tension, and, for some of us, burnout. This continuous effort to hold back our emotions can also impact our ability to concentrate, make decisions, and our ability to engage fully in meaningful activities.

Additionally, resisting emotions can hinder our ability to cultivate meaningful relationships. When we are unable to express our emotions openly and honestly, it can create barriers to effective communication and understanding with others. This can lead to misunderstandings, conflicts, and a lack of emotional intimacy in our relationships. We are essentially pretending when we are resisting our emotions. It leads to people not getting the ‘real’ us - and, most importantly, it keeps US from getting to know the real us! So, it creates a disconnect between you and your favorite version of you.

Overall, while it may seem easier in the short term to resist emotions, the long-term consequences can be detrimental to our mental, emotional, and physical well-being. It also obviously harms our relationships with those who are most close to us. Allowing and processing our emotions in a healthy way allows us to live more authentically, it allows us to build stronger connections with ourselves and with others, and it helps us cultivate greater ability to face all of life's challenges and to celebrate all of life’s beauty.

If this sounds familiar to you, and you’re like, “Hell, I think Melissa might be right. I think I might be resisting feeling my feelings,” I would love to be the person who helps you figure this out, that helps you be able to get to know yourself on a deeper level, that helps you to improve your relationships with other people, and that helps you to face all of the challenges that life has for you. And more importantly, to me, to celebrate all the beauty that is already in your life. 

Alright folks, that’s it for this week. I’ll see you here next week. Take care.

Hey, everybody, don't go quite yet. I want to let you know all the ways that you can work with me.

If you've been listening to this podcast and maybe especially you have listened to episodes where I interview my clients, and you are thinking like the older woman in the diner in the classic Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal film, When Harry Met Sally... In the film, Sally is proving a point to Harry by faking an orgasm while in public at a diner. Sally finishes, so to speak, and then takes a bite of her food. The older woman in the next booth says, "I'll have what she's having." If you've been thinking, "I'll have what she's having," this is your sign from the universe to schedule a consult with me.

I have a few spots available for one-on-one coaching with me. This is a space where I am laser focused on you and your brain for six months at a time. I will also be doing consults with women who want to join my next group coaching cohort, which will likely start in the spring of 2024. The way to contact me is to go to my website, melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the Work with Me page and click “book now” to schedule your consult. I will look forward to hearing from you. Let's make 2024 your favorite year ever as you become Your Favorite You.