CREATING EMOTIONAL INTENTION
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 120.
Hello, my friends. I want to start with a story about something that happened to me yesterday. You know, in this work towards being the best version of ourselves and living into intention around how we want to feel, we can all judge ourselves for sinking back into the reactions or behaviors that we want to avoid.
So I want to start with a reminder that no matter where you are in your journey, finding compassion for where you are right now is the key to opening up so many doors around where you want to go. So here's what happened. I was driving home yesterday afternoon, and to be honest, I'd had a really crappy day.
I was so worked up and frustrated and annoyed that I called my husband and I ended up just venting at him, just letting loose a huge list of complaints and judgments about my day and all of the things that went wrong. Plus, my husband, he just listened to me, and he didn't try to fix it. He didn't try to talk me out of it.
He just listened. And then after I let off most of the steam, I stopped. And I said, well, how was your day? And he shared some of the struggles he was facing.
And that space gave me a little time for awareness. I was kind of surprised, actually, because it had felt like a long time since I'd felt this level of anger and resentment. And to be honest, it felt a little like, how did I get back here? But I realized that in talking to my husband, I saw how much was going on in my head.
And it was like I just needed to release the pressure valve a bit and let all of these thoughts out. What's always true is that your brain is going to offer you thoughts and judgments. Whether you like it or not, they're in there.
They're taking up space, and they're impacting your emotional well-being. Through my practice of self-coaching, I've really honed a level of compassion for all of these thoughts and judgments in my head. Because what I've decided is, these thoughts aren't who I am, but they can dictate how I show up in my life.
So as I've grown with this work, I don't spend time asking myself how I can be someone who doesn't sometimes get to the end of the day at her wits' end, essentially having an emotional tantrum, which is what I had with my husband. In other words, I don't waste time judging my actions. Instead, the question I ask myself is, how can I understand and develop intention around my mindset so that I have the power to step into who I want to be, to create more of what I want in my life? Because although I know these emotional tantrums aren't who I am, I also know that they don't really move me forward.
One interesting realization I had about my outburst of my husband, and it definitely helped that the tantrum I had didn't have anything to do with him, but the interesting thing about it was that the tantrum was very familiar to me. In fact, the theme of it was something that's been kind of my emotional go-to for my entire life, or at least as long as I have awareness about it. Here's the gist of it.
I've historically had a tendency to get really angry when people question me or when things don't go my way. It's this bitter, resentful energy coming from a perception that other people shouldn't be the way that they are. Maybe I'm thinking they're making me feel put out or attacked, or just making my life more difficult.
I don't know if you can relate. I think back to so much of the emotional agita I've had in my life, and I remember being angry about boyfriends not doing what I wanted them to do, or friends acting in a way that I didn't respect, or bosses not supporting me, not making me feel valued. If I were to put a bow around it, it's that I've spent a lot of my life waiting for other people to meet my expectations of them so that I could feel better.
Sometimes my expectations were reasonable, and it's perfectly understandable that I would be upset about how the other person was showing up. And by the way, we always have a right to be upset about anything. Our feelings are always valid.
We get to decide if other people are pissing us off. But there are definitely other times, and I'll use the example of my past bosses, that my perception that they weren't supporting me or validating me, or the thoughts I had about how they were questioning me, these thoughts were most definitely not absolutely true. In fact, my co-workers probably wouldn't have agreed with me some of the time.
Actually really funny story. I think I've mentioned before that I met my husband at work, and he was at a higher level at the investment bank where we were working. So before I got to know him, and during the time I was trying to get my footing at this bank, which was quite a bit more intense than my first job, I remember going by his office and trying to get help with something, and he was always busy.
In my mind, he was blowing me off. In fact, I was so angry about it that I panned him in a 360 review of him in a room with some of my peers. Fast forward about eight years, and my father-in-law had a great laugh telling the people at our rehearsal dinner this story.
In other words, while it might be true that some of my bosses sometimes didn't support me, it was definitely not as true as my mind would have me believe. But my thoughts, whether true or false, created a really intense and negative emotional experience for me over the years. Once I found coaching, and now that I understand what was happening in my mind that was creating that experience for me, and certainly now that I've had the opportunity to work with so many women, I see how common this experience is for so many of us.
Whether it's with our families or our friends, co-workers or bosses, we are all to some extent going through life unconsciously hoping that other people will show up the way we want them to show up so we can feel okay. Think about all of the different ways we do this. When our kids come home, we hope they'll be happy, or at least pleasant, because then, it can seem, we'll get to feel at peace.
But when they're in a bad mood, it can feel like they're taking away that peace, making us feel annoyed or anxious. We expect people on the road to drive responsibly, but when another car cuts us off in traffic, we blame the driver for making us angry. None of these reactions are wrong.
In fact, you could probably say they're all very appropriate reactions. But here's the problem. Particularly when you're experiencing negative or pain full emotions, if you think those emotions are someone else's fault, when you think that other people made me feel a certain way, then you've lost all control over your emotional peace and well-being.
I've done this my entire life, my friends. Before I understood the impact of my mind on my emotional well-being, I was dependent on other people showing up the way I wanted them to show up so that I could feel okay. None of us want to go through life angry, resentful or hurt, right? We wouldn't choose those emotions.
But it feels like in order for us to stop feeling this way, we just need other people to show up a little bit better. We can even feel a bit entitled to a certain level of treatment that we're not getting. When you complain to your friends about your husband or your kids or whatever in your life, we're all going to commiserate with each other because we know how it feels when somebody shows up in a way that's wrong or what we might call disrespectful or unappreciative.
Your friends are all going to agree with you about the behavior and how that other person should absolutely change. And I'm not here to talk you out of that. But just notice, when the responsibility for your feelings is entirely on the shoulders of some other person, your emotional well-being is entirely in their hands.
My friends, it's no wonder we feel so crappy all the time. So here's the first takeaway. If you're feeling like your emotions are sometimes out of your control, you may be putting the responsibility for your emotional well-being in the hands of someone else or some circumstance that's out of your control.
The second takeaway here is that we react to our negative feelings that are the other person's fault, by the way, by trying to get that other person to change their behavior. Again, this can make sense, right? They are causing my pain. Therefore, they need to change so I can feel better.
You could even think of it as our way of trying to take back a little control over our feelings. You might try to get that other person to change or tell them that they're wrong or that something they did hurt you or made you feel unappreciated. You could think, if they just knew how their behavior was making me feel, they would, of course, change it, right? We could also try to prove them wrong.
If they're not appreciating us, then we're going to work extra hard for that validation so that they see how hard we're working for them. For me, the way I would do this is, for example, if it was a friend or a boyfriend, I would let them have it. I'd tell them all the ways they were wrong or letting me down.
In extreme cases, I even cut myself off from these friends because they weren't the kind of people who I wanted to associate with. I wanted people in my life who lived up to my expectations, who wouldn't make me feel in pain. When it came to my bosses, I would work harder to try to prove myself and get the validation or approval I was looking for.
I might even try to justify or defend myself if I got the feeling that they thought what I was doing wasn't good enough. I was determined to show them, to get them to change their mind about me, or at least what I thought they were thinking about me. Fast forward to life with my kids and I can see some of the same behaviors.
There's probably no one on earth who can make us feel more out of control of our emotions than our kids, am I right? This work feels so real and important to us, this work of motherhood. Our kids' success and happiness and safety mean so much to us. And it makes sense that their opinions of us also matter.
We want them to like us and of course love us. So we have a lot of really high expectations about what it means for our kids to show up in a way that allows us to feel okay. If you haven't looked at this for yourself, this is mind-blowing.
Look, our expectations cover everything from the way our kids respond to us when they get home and how often or quickly they text us back, to what they feel when they get home after a hard test, how many friends they have. We're constantly observing our kids, watching how they show up and interact in their lives, continuously watching them. Whether you realize it or not, we're gauging whether or not their behavior matches our expectations of what we want for them.
And depending on whether reality matches or falls short of our expectations, we can experience joy and love and pride, or alternatively, anger, anxiety, and hurt. Talk about an emotional roller coaster. It feels like a foregone conclusion that we're going to key off of our kids' emotions and behaviors.
How many times have you heard that phrase, you're only as happy as your unhappiest child? And maybe we wouldn't have it any other way. I mean, when my kids are sad, there's a part of me that's going to feel sad. I don't want to argue with myself about that and I certainly don't want to feel happy about that.
It makes perfect sense. But at the same time, our emotional well-being can feel tethered to our kids' experience. This is definitely an opportunity for growth if you haven't spent time here.
Because while it makes perfect sense that we would feel sad when our kids are sad, without having an understanding about what's really going on in your mind that's creating your emotional experience, you can find yourself feeling an uncontrollable range of emotions in response to your kids' behavior. It becomes even worse if your teen is going through something or struggling. Look, if the only way you can find emotional stability is by fixing everything that's going on in your kid's life, you are going to be constantly in the position of trying to plug every hole in the dam to make life perfect so you can feel okay.
And you've probably also already discovered there is so much about your teen's life that you quite literally cannot fix. You can't make friends be nice to them all the time. You can't give them the answers during the test.
You can't control the boyfriend or the girlfriend. You also actually can't control your teen's moods and behaviors. So as a result, no matter how hard you try, you can feel completely out of control of what's going on with your kids and therefore out of control of your emotional experience.
But there is another path. When your teen is struggling, finding peace probably doesn't feel like the right goal. But let's start with finding strength.
Accessing the fortitude to be able to make the decisions you need to make and to show up for your child at the highest level. It's nearly impossible to do that when you're out of emotional control. Or maybe a better way to say that is when you're out of emotional intention.
Because if I'm sad, I don't need to control myself into feeling happy. That's not going to feel honest. I don't need to force myself to feel happy about my kid's struggles.
But I can be in intention with my sadness. Understanding where that sadness is coming from and finding the strength to be able to decide if there's anything I can do about it or if it's simply a feeling I'm going to have to allow. In contrast, when we're not in intention with how we're feeling, and one of the biggest ways we do this is when we blame other people or the circumstances of our life for how we feel.
What happens when we're not taking responsibility for our feelings is that we try to control or change the situation or the person so that we can feel better. But often that can look like something we don't really want. Like the fights we get in with our kids because we're nagging.
We ask them to do something, they don't listen, the conversation escalates. Then we judge ourselves or our kids for how the conversation went badly. We react to our feelings and then we create self-judgment and guilt and anxiety when not only have we failed to change the situation so we can feel better, but now we've reacted and so we feel worse.
It's a vicious cycle. The added risk here is that you can develop a view of yourself and who you are based on how you feel and how you're experiencing your life. You start to look at through this lens of, this is who I am when I deal with this situation.
What that looked like for me growing up was that in my mind, I thought I was the kind of person who was hard on people. That I was picky about friends and needy with boyfriends. Honestly, when I really look back, so much of my past behavior stemmed from insecurity.
There was a big part of me that really didn't feel confident and was looking to other people to give that to me. When I fell in love for the first time, I was blown away, honestly, because I was shocked that somebody would actually finally like me back. It was like a drug because for the first time in fleeting moments, I could give myself permission to believe that I was worthy of that love.
And then, of course, when things didn't go right in the relationship, all of a sudden that feeling would be taken away from me and I would desperately try to change my boyfriend's behavior to get that feeling back. When I think about my professional career, the way I approached bosses was definitely out of insecurity and looking for acknowledgement that I was good enough. But I also didn't realize how much my defensiveness and resentment towards my bosses had to do with this need for validation.
Even if there was a part of me that understood I was insecure, I still blamed my bosses for not supporting me. I desperately wanted to project a powerful and confident image, but ended up overcompensating, wanting to prove my bosses wrong. I started to actually view myself as a bit overbearing, someone who needed control.
I developed this mindset that I was this intense personality, someone who got angry and reacted to situations in really powerful and sometimes uncontrollable ways. I didn't like that about myself, but I also didn't know how to let go of it. I thought I had to put up this hard exterior so that people couldn't see how scared I was on the inside.
I am sure a therapist could have a field day about where all this came from and what it means about me, but to be honest, I think that information would have only made me feel worse. Because it's like then somehow this would confirm this is who I am. Someone with deep insecurity and anger management issues.
But if that's truly who I am, then it's like I'm destined to live this life of uncontrollable emotion and reaction. I can even see starting to judge how I was as a young mom, needing to control the schedule, how that might have impacted my kids. You can go down a rabbit hole of self-blame and shame, honestly, because you think you're a certain way, and then God forbid that this had consequences for my children.
We could create a lot of pathology around my experience, my friend. But interestingly, when I started realizing that I needed support, it was when I heard a life coach talking about drinking as the solution for escaping the emotion of your life. And it was like a little door cracked open for me, and I started to see how I was beginning to think of myself as someone who needed alcohol.
In fact, alcoholic was another diagnosis I considered. I worried that this might be another thing that was wrong with me. But as I learned more about how it's a pretty common way we try to cope, to buffer against our emotions, I saw how my drinking was actually solving a problem for me.
It was helping me escape all of this anger and resentment about my day-to-day life, all of the ways I was being mistreated and had too much to do. It wasn't just people that made me frustrated, it was when the circumstances of my life weren't what I wanted them to be. So it was always someone or something else's fault.
But another lesson I've learned the hard way through the years of trying is that you can't control or change other people, and that in most cases I don't actually have immediate control over the circumstances of my life either. So there I was, throughout much of my adult life, stuck because I couldn't change other people or my life to feel better. It now makes so much sense to me why in the past the thought of giving up drinking seemed impossible to me.
It was the one thing I had control over that could give me some relief from this cycle of resentment. Our emotional experience directly impacts how we show up in our lives. For me, the anger and resentment caused me to fight harder, to work harder, to try to change other people.
And because this felt hard and typically didn't work, I found myself stuck in resentment and stuck in a habit of drinking at night to find some relief. All of this because I was blaming my pain on other people or just life not going my way. What emotional experience is at the core of what you're going through right now.
I want to invite you to just imagine that feeling and all of the ways that you respond to that feeling, whether you react to your emotions by spinning or wallowing in them or blowing up about them, or if you try to push them away or resist them to buffer against them. All of these are reactions that keep you stuck in this negative spiral and most definitely don't create any forward momentum in your life. So I've covered a few things, so let me recap.
First, you have many thoughts about your life and these thoughts create your emotional experience and also drive how you show up in your life. But what many of us do is that we blame other people or the circumstances of our lives for our emotional experience. But when you do this, you're giving all of your power away.
You put the responsibility of your emotional experience in someone else's hand. And because we think our feelings are someone else's fault or something outside of us that's wrong, we feel compelled to try to change other people or the circumstances of our lives. But then we realize we can't actually do that.
So we're left in this powerless place where our pain is someone else's fault, but we have no power to get out of it. My friend, is it any wonder that we lose our minds with frustration and anger sometimes? No seriously, let's tap into a little compassion here. When you're in pain and you're powerless to stop that pain because you can't get this other person to listen, you can't get them to show up a little better.
No matter what you try, they don't seem to care. My friend, when this is where your mind goes, your anger makes perfect sense. I look back on the lens through which I've looked at the world for most of my life and I have so much love for that younger version of me who just wanted to be loved and feel like she mattered.
Yesterday afternoon on the phone with my husband, the same old boss I panned in that 360 review by the way, but as I was complaining to him about my day, I saw the glimmer of that younger version of me. That resentment and the anger. Like I slipped right back into that old habit of blaming other people for my emotional pain.
After I got off the phone, I actually laughed and I realized I just needed to get all of those thoughts out of my mind. I needed to have that little tantrum about how I thought it was everybody else's fault. And look, we get to blame other people.
We're not always wrong. People do some crappy things. We get to be mad.
All of our emotions are valid. But anytime I put responsibility for my emotional well-being fully on the shoulders of another person, I know from years and years of experience that I'm not moving forward. I'm not getting what I want.
I'm just stuck. Through the work I do in my coaching program and through my own self-coaching, I've learned through a lot of self-inquiry to find so much compassion for the parts of me that are insecure and that just want to matter. You know what? I actually love these parts of myself.
I don't need to change any of it. I can love that little girl inside of me that just wants a little validation. And I can also choose to be the woman who creates that confidence for herself.
Because at the end of the day, I can also step into the belief that I am always trying my best. And I'm also willing to have my back even when I get it wrong. My friend, if you find yourself on an emotional rollercoaster because people in your life or circumstances of your life are creating pain for you, this is your invitation to take your power back.
You can't force other people to change. You can't immediately change the circumstances of your life. But you can create the confidence and trust in yourself to choose the emotional experience that will move you forward.
It is such a powerful place to be. I've spent my whole life feeling powerless while trying to control the world, my friend. And what I learned is that I actually have all the power I need already inside of me.
This is the journey you'll experience when you join me in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0.
Until next time, friends.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, MOM 2.0, at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
