Welcome to IVF This, Episode 107- How you’re supposed to feel 

Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends. I hope you’re all doing so, so well today. I’ve noticed myself lately feeling a little off. A little bit of a funk. For no particular reason. Maybe it’s like the post-holiday endorphin/ dopamine dip. Maybe it’s something else entirely. 

But I have been reminding myself, A LOT lately, of exactly what I am going to talk about today. 

So, let’s just jump in!

I want you to start by doing a quick body scan. What are you feeling (emotionally) and where are you feeling it? For instance you might say anxiety and I feel it in my chest. Now, when you do a body scan, what you’re doing is checking in with your body. I always encourage my clients to close their eyes when they do this, and you might be listening to this on your commute and that might not be a safe choice right now. So, when you re-listen to this episode, I want you to try to keep your eyes closed while you scan your body. I don’t want you to ask your brain. I want you to ask your body. Your brain is not invited to this particular party. 

What are you feeling and where are you feeling it?

Now, how do you think you’re supposed to feel right now? Do you think it’s different than how you currently feel? Are you supposed to feel some other way than how you currently feel? 

I’m gonna take an educated guess and say that it is different for some of you. Because this is what we do to ourselves. We create this tension inside ourselves because our brain is telling us how we’re supposed to feel; but our bodies are telling us something very different. That’s why if feels so awful. That’s why you feel so tense, or on edge, agitated, or anxious. There’s an internal war that is being waged. 

And hear me when I say this: How you feel right now is how you’re supposed to feel, anything else is resistance. Anything else is that tension. Anything else is lying to yourself.  Anything else is invalidating yourself. It is in this tension, this denial, this arguing with reality- that we often react to our emotions. We might feel restless and unsettled and turn to food, or alcohol, shopping, or social medial- or something else, in an effort to “feel better.”

What I want you all. To know is that acknowledging how you feel and allowing yourself to feel it doesn’t mean you’re resigning yourself to only feeling that way. It doesn’t mean it’s how you’ll always feel. It doesn’t mean you’re giving up. It doesn’t mean you’re broken. It doesn’t mean you’re damaged. It is not a sign of bad things to come. It isn’t to say that this is your new normal and that you’d better get used to it. It is not to say that you are stuck. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. 

This has come up so many times lately in my coaching, that’s why it’s on my mind. Acknowledging how you feel and allowing yourself to feel it just means you’re no longer resisting what is. 

It’s freedom. 

Acknowledging how you feel and allowing yourself to feel just means you’re no longer wasting time and energy trying to argue with reality. You can decide to feel differently in the future because you can decide how you want to think in the future and remember that thoughts cause feelings. So, we’re in charge of those. There are only three things in the world that you truly have power over and that’s: how you think, how you feel, and the things you do. 

But whatever’s going on in our body is already there and telling ourselves it isn’t supposed to be there, that we aren’t supposed to feel this way makes it worse, makes it harder instead of easier. And the truth is that how you feel doesn’t mean anything about you. If you feel jealous it does not mean you are a jealous person. If you feel angry it does not mean you are an angry person. If you feel happy, it does not mean you are a happy person. If you feel sad, it does not mean you are a sad person. You are a person who is feeling something, that is all. 

And feeling something is a normal part of being a person. All people feel. All humans feel. So please hear this, how you feel is not a problem. What you make how you feel mean is the problem. I see so many of my clients creating negative emotion on top of negative emotion, instead of just allowing ourselves to have a clean experience of pain. We dirty it all up with our judgment about what it means that we’re feeling that way, with thoughts about why it shouldn’t be happening and how we shouldn’t be feeling how we’re feeling. And if you want to know more about dirty pain and clean pain, I have a podcast episode called Clean pain vs dirty pain that explains that idea. But the Cliff’s Notes version of it is that so many of my clients create negative emotion on top of negative emotion, instead of just allowing themselves to have a clean experience of pain. We dirty it all up with our judgment about what it means that we’re feeling that way, with thoughts about why it shouldn’t be happening and how we shouldn’t be feeling how we’re feeling. 

We dirty it all up by believing the lie that we shouldn’t be feeling how we’re actually feeling. 

Don’t do this to yourself. If you’ve been doing it, decide you’re not going to do it anymore. Telling yourself that you shouldn’t feel the way you feel would be like me telling myself that my eyes shouldn’t be blue. They are blue. They should be blue, how do I know? Because they’re blue. It does not help me to argue with reality and tell myself that my eyes should be some other color than what they are. 

Now, feelings unlike my eye color, change, they’re transitory, they don’t last forever. They’re simply a product of past thoughts. And once we fully allowed ourselves to feel what we’re feeling because we’ve stopped judging ourselves for how we feel, because we’ve stopped telling ourselves we’re supposed to feel some other way. Only then can we create a different emotional experience. This is what I mean when I talk about how we don’t have to get rid of our feelings- because we can’t- but that we can change how we experience them.  Only then can we process what we’re actually feeling. Only then can we let it flow through us in a clean way. And the same is true for other people. 

If someone was to tell you that you shouldn’t feel how you are feeling, what does that create for you? Does it make you feel any differently? No? I wouldn’t think so. In fact, for me that usually creates a feeling like indignation, on top of what I was already feeling. Whatever you are feeling is not a problem. Whatever someone else is feeling is, also, not a problem. Even if that person is your parent, best friend, partner, your boss, or whoever. 

I know so many people who desperately try to control, monitor, or change the way they or someone else feels. This is a byproduct of deciding that what you, or someone else is feeling, is a problem. This is such an energy waste- trying to change something that cannot be changed; it can only be allowed. 

So, this episode is on the shorter side today but I want you to come back to it. I want it to be one that you just bookmark because I think we need this reminder over, and over, and over. I know I do. Sometimes I’m recording these podcasts as much for myself as I am for you because I need these reminders too. 

Next time you notice that little voice and it says, “You’re not supposed to feel this way. You shouldn’t be feeling like this, you should be past this, you should be doing better than this, this makes you weak, something’s wrong with you, you must be broken.” 

You know that voice, we all have it. Gently remind that voice that nothing has gone wrong simply because I am feeling whatever I’m feeling, that how you feel is totally okay, that how you feel doesn’t mean anything about you other than you’re a human on the planet who has thoughts. 

How you feel is how you’re supposed to be feeling and we know that because it’s how you feel and then once you’ve allowed the feeling to pass through you, then and only then will you be able to create something new for yourself TO change the way that you experience all the emotions that we tend to try to run from: grief, anxiety, fear, jealousy, the list can go on and on. We don’t have to get rid of them. They’re supposed to be there. We just want to change our experience of them. So they don’t feel like they are the ones in the driver seat. We want to change our experience of them, so that we can actually address them, process them, to remind ourselves that these feelings will not kill us. That we are all these beautiful, messy, complex people- everyone of us. Brene Brown has a quote, “No one rides for free.” We all get the human experience. The good the bad, the ups then downs. But we’re going ot do it with intentionality. That’s such a beautiful gift that you can give yourself. And that is what I want for each and every one of you. 

 Ok, that is what I have for you, today. Have a great week. And we’ll talk again soon.