EMBRACING OVERWHELM...WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE A HOT MESS
Welcome to The Small Jar, a podcast where we explore how to intentionally design the life that you want in the space between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number five.
Hello, friends. I have to be honest, this was not a great week for me. I felt totally overwhelmed at times.
It was a combination of frustration, anxiety, anger, worry, regret. I've always been the kind of person who takes on a lot. And so I've experienced and dealt with some level of stress for most of my life.
I think of myself as someone who likes to do things well, and so I can become frustrated when things don't work out, or angry when I think someone is making things harder than they need to be. Becoming a mother introduced a whole new and intense spectrum of feelings for me. Obviously love, but love in a way that I had never experienced before.
True, unconditional, I would throw myself in front of a car to save you kind of love. Intense, raw, and vulnerable. Someone described it to me once as tearing your heart out of your body and exposing it to the world.
So the flip side of the love is this constant fear and worry that something could go wrong. As a mother, I have always felt like I'm a runner at the block, waiting for the signal that something might be wrong, and that I might have to run to the rescue. I can imagine this heightened awareness, this hyper vigilance was useful to women who had to protect their offspring from wild animals.
We're no longer subject to these types of stresses, but our bodies still produce adrenaline and cortisol at the first sign that something might be wrong with our children. A few times this week, I felt like I was done, just mentally and emotionally exhausted. Throw up your hands and say I give up level of feeling.
They say one way you know you're experiencing emotional overwhelm is if the intensity of your feelings outmatches your ability to manage them. Yep, I was there this week. Anger, frustration, love, worry, fear, regret, guilt, love.
I've been on a roller coaster of emotion. Most days we experience a range of positive and negative emotions, and it is what it is. We ride the waves of our feelings throughout the day, and we notice the ebb and flow of this tide, but we can handle it.
And there are other times when it feels like a tsunami, like that scene in the perfect storm when the ship is making its way up the hundred foot wave. You just know the ship is going to sink. You feel a pit in your stomach, almost a feeling like you're stuck in a hopeless situation that can only get worse.
Emotional overwhelm. If you've experienced this, you know it's not a comfortable place to be. For much of my life, when I've experienced this tsunami of powerfully negative emotion, I would handle it in one of two ways.
I would either react to it or try to avoid it. Here's what that looked like for me. When I would react to overwhelm, I might find myself lashing out in anger at people, saying things I would regret.
I could also find myself crying uncontrollably, becoming consumed with the emotions of sadness and worry, frustration. I would literally not be able to function in a productive way. I would feel shut down and stuck.
When I would try to avoid the overwhelming emotion, it most often looked like trying to feel better. Wine has always been my go-to pick-me-up. At the end of a stressful day, a glass or two of wine seemed to solve the problem, at least temporarily.
Sometimes I would eat to feel better, maybe binge shopping. Some people get lost in social media or watching Netflix. These types of activities act like a buffer between you and the painful emotions, almost like a numbing effect.
The problem for me, and for many of us, is that reacting to or avoiding pain only compounds the pain. For example, when we react to our anger, we might lash out at others. Then afterwards, we feel shame and regret.
When we try to avoid pain with buffers like alcohol, food, or some other activity to excess, we begin to train our brains to rely on these external sources of temporary comfort. Before we know it, it becomes a problem when we don't have the buffer. We find ourselves relying on food or alcohol to feel better, and then we wonder if there's something wrong with us that we needed.
Reacting to and avoiding our pain in these ways creates additional layers of shame, regret, guilt, powerlessness, on top of the pain that already exists. I think one of the hard parts about feeling emotionally overwhelmed is that it feels like it's happening to you. Like there are all of these forces out of your control that are making you feel deep sadness or intense anger.
And you kind of know why, at least what some of the bigger reasons are. But there's a place inside of you that wonders why you can't handle it. For example, I remember being totally overwhelmed when my children were babies.
There would be days with no naps and seemingly endless whining. By the end of the day, I would be exhausted, stressed, overwhelmed, hiding in the corner. At some point, I would end up crying or really angry about something, and I would immediately feel this sense of shame and guilt.
Like how is it that I didn't handle that better? When my head had cleared, I would see it was just a normal, tedious day with my young children. But I judged myself so harshly. Like why couldn't I handle it? And this is just a small example.
We can reach emotional overwhelm with any number of big or small circumstances. Fights with spouses, family members, children or friends, challenges at work, thoughts about the past, worry about the future. At times, these thoughts and feelings seem to compound upon each other and make us feel utterly bowled over with a flood of negative emotion.
For much of my life, I have judged myself for the times when I am overwhelmed. Whether I had blown up in anger or had too much to drink, I would find myself stuck in shame and judgment of myself. It seemed like a fact that I was broken somehow.
Not capable of managing my emotions. Weak. Potentially on the road to becoming an alcoholic.
You look at others and think you're alone and having these deep, painful emotions and uncontrollable reactions to them. When we are overcome with emotion, we are convinced that the circumstances of our lives are creating our pain. We think we are just conveying the facts when we say, my children don't respect me.
My husband doesn't help me enough around the house. If she doesn't do what I say, something awful will happen. My boss doesn't appreciate me.
I'm not someone who makes friends easily. I've always struggled with my weight. Underlying all of these statements is an implicit belief that external facts are creating our pain.
It's someone else's fault. Somebody did something to me or somebody didn't do the thing I needed them to do. Or alternatively, there's something wrong with me or something wrong with the circumstances.
Blaming others. Blaming ourselves. Blaming life.
Here's the fascinating thing about blame. As long as we believe the pain is being caused by circumstances out of our control, we have absolutely no power to feel better. If we believe our pain is someone else's fault, we give all of our power up to the hope that the other person will change so we can feel better.
If we believe our pain is caused by some inherent flaw in ourselves, we become convinced that we will never be able to escape our pain because that's who I am. The person who can't make friends or lose weight. When we believe our pain is being caused by the circumstances of life, death, illness, disaster, we are completely at a loss because these circumstances are certainly out of our control.
And in some cases, like the case of death, inevitable. As I say all of this, I in no way mean to imply we shouldn't feel pain in connection with these circumstances. When someone we care about dies, we will feel grief.
There is no way around it. There are times when we will feel anger, frustration, worry, anxiety, and fear. This is life.
The problem is that we as a society have learned that there is a problem when we feel this way. Look at everyone's social media account. Happy moments, hashtag blessed, showcasing the perfect, enviable moments of our lives.
How many of us would feel comfortable posting about our moments of extreme stress? Well, this week that was me. Did I react to my anger? Yes, yes I did. Did I try to avoid my feelings by having a glass of wine or two? Yes, yes I did.
I am not perfect, nor do I think I ever will be. But I am learning that this is absolutely okay. I am learning to drop the expectation of myself that I will be perfect.
So instead of spending the week wallowing in shame and regret on top of the anger, frustration, and worry, I was able to embrace the emotional overwhelm that was true for me. No self-judgment. I didn't entertain the thought that I couldn't handle it or that there was something wrong with me because I was feeling the way I was.
I held space for myself and allowed myself to feel. Isn't it crazy that it's so hard to just allow ourselves to feel awful? When we see other people feeling sad or upset, we want to comfort them immediately. It's uncomfortable for us to see someone else in pain.
And when we are in emotional pain, it's so easy to think that something is wrong. Wrong with us, wrong with the situation. We just want to feel better.
So one of the predominant emotions I felt this week was anger and I allowed myself to be angry. Think of it this way. Imagine a time when your child was sad.
Maybe you knew why and maybe you didn't. But perhaps the child was young enough that you were able to lean in and not worry something awful was wrong. You just noticed your child was sad and it was okay.
Maybe you gave her a hug and just sat with her for a while, not even talking, just letting her know that you were there for her and that you love her. Imagine the peace and comfort of having someone just be there for you, not judging, not trying to fix anything, just loving you for exactly who you are in that moment, sadness and all. What if you could offer that same level of unconditional love and support to yourself when you were sad or angry or worried? What would that look like? Can you even imagine it? Just you and your pain, sitting together, acknowledging that it's there, experiencing what it feels like in your body, heavy, deep, coming in waves, a pit in your stomach, a throbbing in your brain, an inability to take deep breaths.
Close your eyes and think about what it feels like in your body when you're experiencing intense negative emotions. You feel what it feels like in your body, but it's okay. This is what the pain feels like right now and nothing has gone wrong.
This pain is simply a sensation in my body, a response to the way I'm thinking about the circumstances of my life, and this is what's true for me right now. It's okay. As I found myself steeped in anger, frustration, guilt, and helplessness this week, I loved myself through it.
Me and my pain, not trying to fix anything, not judging myself, not in a hurry to make it go away, I kept saying to myself, this is what anger feels like right now. As I was able to hold space for my pain, it was as if I could create a little bit of space between myself and my anger, like the moment when the adrenaline of your anger subsides or your hysterical tears start to wane, just a little bit of space. And as I observed my anger, I was able to ask myself what was really wrong.
Why am I angry? With a clearer mind, I was able to separate the facts of the situation from my thoughts about it. Here was another person saying things and doing things, and here is me making it mean all sorts of things that are causing me pain. I was able to take a deep breath and recognize that my pain is never the other person's fault.
It's never them causing my pain. In fact, if you were sitting in the room with me this week, and you had observed the situation with your own eyes, you wouldn't have been angry. You would have seen and heard the other person say words, and you would have seen me say words in an angry tone in response, and you would have thought to yourself, what is going on here? Why is she upset? I'm not even joking.
Without the story, without the background, without all of my thoughts about why what the other person said was a problem, there was no problem, no pain. Byron Katie often says, no one can hurt me. That's my job.
We feel pain because of our thoughts, our stories about what the circumstances of our lives mean for us, and no matter how hard we try, we can never control our minds 100% of the time. So when we're willing to allow our pain, our negative emotions, and simply hold space for how we are feeling, we can begin to observe why we are feeling the way we are. The majority of the thoughts in our brain are unintentional.
They come to us without us even realizing it. They come to us without us ever questioning them. But these thoughts are simply sentences in our brain, and somehow we give them all such weight.
We believe they are all true. My mind may offer me the belief that someone has done something to me, that it's their fault, that whatever is happening is going to have dire consequences in the future, or when I think something that's happened in the past shouldn't have happened. When I think these thoughts and I invest energy in them, when I believe them without question, that is what causes my pain.
But recognizing that the thoughts in our mind cause our pain does not mean that we should simply change our minds to feel better. It doesn't work that way. But can you imagine the freedom of opening your mind to the possibility that if you are the one who created the sentence in your mind, that it's someone else's fault, that the future will be painful, that the past should have been different.
If I'm the one who created the sentence in my brain, then I am the one who has created my pain. Again, not to change your mind, but to understand that we create our own emotional experience with our minds. When we recognize this, we can hold space for ourselves in a place of power.
Our pain is no longer simply happening to us, but something that is true for us in the moment. This week I was causing my own pain with thoughts about the future and the past. How I wanted to change what someone else was doing to try to avoid future pain.
But I was causing my own pain with these thoughts. The other person was just doing what they were doing, and I was making it mean so many things that were causing my pain. And you know what? I couldn't change my mind about it, not right away.
But I came to terms with all of the thoughts my brain was offering about the situation, that the other person was wrong, that the other person had to change, that the other person had let me down. Those thoughts were true for me, but instead of justifying my anger or judging myself for feeling angry, I was able to acknowledge that I believed those thoughts to be true in the moment. This acknowledgement opened the door just a little bit to the possibility that these thoughts might not be true.
I was able to be honest with myself about what I was thinking. If I could consider the possibility that it was not the other person's fault, and my anger was simply a reaction to the thoughts in my mind, then I could begin to observe each one of these thoughts, not in judgment, simply observing what I was really thinking and why. When I held this space, I recognized some pretty powerful truths for myself.
I wanted the other person to do something differently because I was convinced that if they didn't, that they would feel immense regret in the future. Here's the unbelievable truth. In my effort to avoid future pain, I was creating more pain for myself and the other person right now.
I believed that the other person didn't have their priorities straight. But when I really questioned that belief, I truly realized which one of us was wrong. The other person was prioritizing love and happiness, and I was prioritizing short-term pain so that future happiness would be possible.
Which one of us has a healthier outlook on life? I realized it might not be me. I discovered all of this beautiful self-knowledge simply by allowing myself to feel. Instead of judging, I recognized a profound beauty in all of the ways that I love the other person and I want them to be successful and happy, but also a profound love and appreciation for how the other person is immensely capable of finding their own path to success and happiness, and that I might not be right.
I might not have all the answers. I gave myself time to feel angry and sort out what was true for me, and I was then able to show up for the other person in total honesty and love. I could apologize, but not from a place of guilt and shame, but from a place of self-knowledge and love for both of us.
Instead of creating more pain, this week's emotional overwhelm helped me create even stronger bonds with someone I love very much. I am not perfect, but as I have learned how to understand the cause of my emotions, I have been able to access such power in my life to manage negative emotions, and even more to harness the spectrum of positive and negative emotions to create positive changes in my life. I think of this process, this self-coaching, as a bit like organizing a closet.
Your mind is the closet and it contains all of these thoughts. Some of the thoughts have been with you for a really long time, like the miniskirt you wore in the 80s, or those pair of pants that went out of style a long time ago. You're not even sure why you keep them, but it's hard to let those pieces, these old thoughts, go.
Sometimes they represent our wish to go back to relive the joys of the past, and sometimes they represent regret, something you'd like to go back and change. Like those pants that used to fit, holding onto them an ongoing reminder that you don't have that body anymore. There are things in the closet, thoughts in your mind, you use every day.
You don't even ask yourself if you like them, you just access them because they're there, convenient. Sometimes you try on new thoughts, like the new dress you buy because it represents who you want to be, who you think you should be. Sometimes the dress gives you inspiration, and other times it makes you feel like you're not enough, not there yet.
So your mind is this closet of jumbled thoughts, some that you have held on for your entire life and others that you don't even realize are there, stuffed in the back of the closet like something forgotten, but still taking up space. And then you have these thoughts that are dreams for something better in the future. Coaching, for me, is like bringing Marie Kondo into your mind, clearing everything out and looking at each individual thought to decide again and again whether you want to recommit to having that thought in your life.
The first step is to pull everything out of the closet of your mind, throw it on the ground, and you pick up each thought one by one and question it, understand why it's there in the first place, what it means for you. There is so much beauty and awareness that we can discover for ourselves by simply watching our mind, not in judgment but in total love. This is what is true for me right now, in this moment.
It's not right or wrong. The piece of clothing in your closet isn't right or wrong. It's simply a matter of whether or not you choose it on purpose.
There are many thoughts in my brain that I would love to give away. They're thoughts I don't want, but I'm not ready to throw them away yet. I need space to acknowledge that the thought is there.
Maybe I'll get rid of it one day, and maybe I won't. But at least I'm able to recognize that I am the one who created the thought, and I am the one causing the emotion connected to that thought. Before we become the watchers of our minds, we feel the pain and don't have any power to ease it because we don't understand what's causing it.
We blame our pain on others or the past or what might happen. We attribute our pain to circumstances completely out of our control, and we feel powerless. We need to change others, fix the past, or control the future to feel better.
And because we can rarely change others, never change the past, nor can we control the future, we are constantly fighting this impossible battle in our minds. The only way to feel better is to react to our pain or avoid it. We fight a losing battle and create more pain in the process.
Cleaning out our minds gives us an opportunity to intentionally separate the facts of our lives from what we are making those facts mean. We create the space to understand that it's never the facts that cause the problem. It's only what we make those facts mean.
Here's a closing thought. If I never love, I will never grieve. If I don't hope, if I don't dare to pursue my dreams, I'll never feel disappointment, rejection, or frustration.
The goal of life is not to stop experiencing negative emotion, but can you begin to give yourself the grace of understanding that negative emotion is part of life and there is nothing wrong with you that you experience it. When you allow yourself to experience these negative emotions without judgment, you can create space to understand what's really true for you without judgment, without guilt or shame. When we allow ourselves to feel, then we open ourselves up to the truth and the beauty of our lives.
Would you rather live a life that's 50-50, where you experience love and grief, hope and disappointment, or live a life without hope, without love? I choose love. Until next time, friends. Thanks for listening to the Small Jar Podcast.
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