Today, let's delve into a topic that's central to our caregiving experience: emotions.
Emotions wield incredible power in our lives, especially when we're on the caregiving journey. I'll share a personal anecdote about a particularly challenging moment in my caregiving story, highlighting the intense emotions that surfaced during a difficult doctor's appointment.
Throughout our lives, emotions play a vital role in shaping our actions and responses. But what exactly are emotions? I'll delve into the fascinating mind-body connection behind emotions, explaining how they're not just abstract feelings but tangible vibrations within us, triggered by our thoughts.
I'll explore how we typically respond to emotions and why these responses often fall short. From reacting impulsively to trying to avoid or resist emotions altogether, we've all experienced these ineffective coping mechanisms. But fear not—I'll introduce you to a transformative approach to handling emotions.
By embracing emotions rather than resisting or avoiding them, we can navigate the highs and lows of caregiving with greater clarity and compassion.
As a Resiliency Coach for people who are caregiving for their partner, I'm here to support YOU, the caregiver. Learn more about my work at www.coachmarika.com.
Today, let's delve into a topic that's central to our caregiving experience: emotions.
Emotions wield incredible power in our lives, especially when we're on the caregiving journey. I'll share a personal anecdote about a particularly challenging moment in my caregiving story, highlighting the intense emotions that surfaced during a difficult doctor's appointment.
Throughout our lives, emotions play a vital role in shaping our actions and responses. But what exactly are emotions? I'll delve into the fascinating mind-body connection behind emotions, explaining how they're not just abstract feelings but tangible vibrations within us, triggered by our thoughts.
I'll explore how we typically respond to emotions and why these responses often fall short. From reacting impulsively to trying to avoid or resist emotions altogether, we've all experienced these ineffective coping mechanisms. But fear not—I'll introduce you to a transformative approach to handling emotions.
By embracing emotions rather than resisting or avoiding them, we can navigate the highs and lows of caregiving with greater clarity and compassion.
As a Resiliency Coach for people who are caregiving for their partner, I'm here to support YOU, the caregiver. Learn more about my work at www.coachmarika.com.
Announcer:
Welcome to In this Together, a podcast for partners turned caregivers, where you'll discover invaluable insights and actionable advice to navigate the ups and downs of caregiving with resilience and strength. Here's your guide, Marika Humphreys.
Marika Humphreys:
Hey, caregivers, I just want to say that I have really enjoyed the process of recording these podcast episodes for you and I really hope that you are finding them interesting and helpful as much as I am enjoying the process of writing them for you. Today we are going to talk about emotions and how to better cope with the challenging emotions that we experience in caregiving. Emotions, first of all, are just very powerful, and I want to share a story with you that happened kind of early on in my journey as a caregiver. We had an appointment with my husband's oncologist after we found out his cancer had spread to his chest, and I remember just the anxiety and the dread that I was feeling the days leading up to that appointment. And we had brought our young child along because I feel like it was summertime, somewhere in the summertime, so our child was with us and basically the appointment did not go super well. Our oncologist simply told us that he didn't really know what to do because the situation was sort of unique and outside of his realm of experience and that we should really just book another appointment with a specialist about an hour away. And I remember just feeling like so numb after leaving that appointment because we were no further along and having any sort of plan. I can't imagine how my husband was feeling, but I know we both left there feeling numb, and so we had a young child with us and so we just sort of wandered around the downtown area of the town we were living in at the time, which was a small town, and I remember feeling very much in a daze and we ran into the aunt of one of my child's school friends, someone, a woman, that I did not know at all. I just explained to the woman oh, we just come from the doctor's office, and then I literally just burst into uncontrollable sobs and this complete stranger that I'd never seen before. She just gave me a hug, which was wonderful.
Marika Humphreys:
I remember feeling really embarrassed also, and that was just an example of the roller coaster of emotions that I feel like so many of us are on as caregivers. I was just completely overcome with sadness at a very inconvenient and somewhat embarrassing time. I didn't know at the time really how to understand and deal with my emotions in a more effective way. But that is what I want to talk about today, because I think probably all of us have some sort of story where we've broken down or been overcome with emotions in at a time when we really would rather that we weren't.
Marika Humphreys:
Emotions, again, are powerful and they do have the ability to overwhelm us at times. So I'm going to tell you why that is in a bit. But first of all, I want to actually talk about what emotions are. Now. I think most of us feel like we know what emotions are because we've had them before. Every single person has experienced an emotion.
Marika Humphreys:
But the way I am going to describe it now is a little bit different than just the experience of an emotion. It's what an emotion is at its core, and what that is is a simply a vibration in your body. Sometimes that vibration can feel like a tightness in your chest or pressure in your head. Sometimes it's tension in your shoulders or like a heaviness in your stomach. Those are all examples of the ways that emotion can feel in our body, the experience of that vibration. If you had to describe it to somebody, those are the types of words you would say.
Marika Humphreys:
And that vibration, it actually comes from our thoughts. So Emotions don't just happen to us, like it sometimes feels they do. What actually happens is we have a thought and that creates an emotion. So, essentially, we think a thought in our head and we feel the emotion, the effect of that thought in our body. And that process happens so quick, it's instantaneously, that sometimes and a lot of times we aren't even aware of what we're thinking, we're just aware of the emotion and the experience of it. So that is the mind body connection though that think a thought, feel an emotion, and a lot of times we have habitual emotions that we are. Our body is so used to that thought feeling pattern that it happens just so instantaneously. It can be, for many people, anxiety or worry or anger is just an instantaneous spark and you're feeling those emotions.
Marika Humphreys:
Now I want to contrast that emotion, right as I described it a vibration in your body. I want to contrast that with, say, like a physical sensation, like hunger, for instance. Hunger is a sensation you feel in your body, right, sometimes it's like an emptiness in your stomach, but that sensation then travels up to your head and you register oh, I'm hungry. Whereas an emotion, the path is the opposite way. It really always just starts in our head and then we experience it in our body. Now there are some exceptions to this.
Marika Humphreys:
For the sake of today's episode, we're just going to go with that generalization that emotions are always caused by our thoughts in some way. At the core, an emotion is just a vibration that you experience in your body. That is it. It is not something that can hurt you or kill you. It is just a vibration, right? I think that's a great way to think about it, and the reason why it's important to understand this is because we want to demystify emotions a little bit. Some of us are actually afraid to feel them, but emotions are really important to understand, and the biggest reason for that is they fuel our actions. Everything we do is motivated by how we want to feel or how we want to avoid feeling. Think about that for just a minute.
Marika Humphreys:
That's kind of crazy. Everything we do in life pretty much is motivated by how we want to feel or not feel. We want to feel pride, we want to feel success. We want to feel calm, peace, happiness, love, right. All of those desires motivate us to take action. Or we want to avoid pain and fear, we want to not feel sadness, so we try to avoid those emotions. So our actions come from our motivated or fueled by our feelings.
Marika Humphreys:
Most of us would place our emotions in two categories there's positive emotions and negative emotions. Sometimes we call those good emotions and bad emotions, but I prefer positive or negative because there really shouldn't be a value around an emotion. I know there's emotions that are pleasant to feel, like happiness and joy and calm and focus and achievement. Those are all positive emotions. And then the negative emotions are the ones that are not pleasant to experience, as I mentioned fear, anxiety, overwhelm, stress, generally not pleasant to feel, and both of those emotions motivate our actions in the world. Right. Negative emotions can start wars, they fuel arguments, they cause people to harm others, whereas positive emotions can bring people together. They can motivate us to achieve a goal or cause us to fall in love or help us care for our partner. So emotions are important because they fuel our actions and the other thing that is really we can't escape emotions because they're part of the human condition. The positive emotions and the negative emotions are all part of the experience of being a human. We cannot avoid them, no matter how much we try.
Marika Humphreys:
I often talk about caregiving as an emotional rollercoaster, in part because that is definitely how I felt a lot of the time. I felt like there were periods where I would feel hopeful and positive and then the next minute it would be dashed and I would feel powerless and disappointed and sad and it felt like this kind of jerking up and down, like a rollercoaster that I didn't want to be on and just my emotions were just pulled in one direction or the other, and sometimes I just didn't even know what was coming right, didn't know what the doctor would say, what the latest scan would show or how my husband would be feeling. All of those things pulled my emotions around, and so I think part of that experience is why a lot of us as caregivers have a very mixed relationship with our emotions. On the one hand, we sort of fear being overwhelmed or overpowered by our emotions, right. So we try to hold them back and not experience some of the more painful emotions. But at the same time we want to feel calm and and acceptance, or we want to feel a sense of security about the future. So we want certain emotions and we don't want others, and if only we could curate. You know our experience in life, but unfortunately we can't. But it doesn't mean we don't try, right.
Marika Humphreys:
So what I want to talk about is the ways that we typically try to handle our emotions, that most of which are ineffective. I would say you can pretty much put these in three categories, and most of us, I think, do one or the other more often, but I think all of us do all of them at some point. The first category of how we respond to our emotions is most familiar to all of us, and that is we react to them. So what I mean by that is we let our emotion control our behavior. For example, if you're feeling angry, you yell at someone. Another example is if you're feeling sad, you shut down and withdraw, not talk to anybody. So those are examples of kind of reacting out of our emotion. Another way we tend to respond when we're feeling negative emotions is we try to avoid them altogether. We try to avoid feeling them. This is very common and I would say that most of us do in some form, and it can look like trying to distract ourselves from the actual feeling by eating, drinking, watching TV, scrolling social media, shopping excessively Any sort of distraction you have as a way to avoid feeling something.
Marika Humphreys:
Now, for me, I would say food is one of my go-to ways to try and escape an emotion. If I'm bored, I want to go eat something. If I'm sad, I want to go eat something. If I'm anxious, I want to go eat chocolate. So food is like the solution in my mind to those feelings, and what it does is it does actually sort of dull the sensation In the moment. It's very effective and I sort of forget about what I'm feeling.
Marika Humphreys:
Those ways that we avoid emotions can feel very effective, but they don't really solve anything in the long run and what happens is the emotion just will kind of wait for you and show up again. So we don't actually achieve anything when we avoid our emotions. But it doesn't mean we don't try, and that's what I think a lot of us do, and in our society today we have lots of ways to distract ourselves. Even staying busy can be, for some people, a way to avoid emotion. And then the last response that I want to talk about today is resisting emotions. So that's a little bit different than avoiding. Resisting is more like trying to suppress it or fight against your feeling, be push it down or tell yourself, nope, I'm just not going to go there. I think also, resisting can be judging our emotion like as wrong or bad, or I shouldn't be feeling this, so I'm just going to try to ignore it or gloss over it. Right?
Marika Humphreys:
Those are all ways that we resist a feeling, and I will say that sometimes that can be an effective strategy, especially if the emotion is something like excessive worry or an irrational fear. Telling yourself you're not going to indulge in that can be useful. But a lot of times resisting emotion especially emotions like fear or sadness or grief or loss they need to be felt and when we try to resist them, we ended up just exhausting ourselves in the process. Because the emotion I think of it like banging on the door it just wants to be let in, and so the more you try to hold it back, it will exhaust you. All of those ways of responding to emotions don't really work to help that emotion go on its way, and what tends to happen is then those emotions will build up and that is when we become overwhelmed with them. For instance, in my example of what happened to me on the sidewalk of our town was I was overcome with sadness because it had built up and built up and I didn't know what to do with that all that emotion. So I ended up sobbing on a stranger's shoulder. So if you've experienced something like that, just know that's what's happening is that your emotion is just built up so it overpowers, like it kind of like runs over. But a lot of times the other way that you can experience kind of a build up of emotions is you will feel it in your body in some form. For some people they get upset stomach or consistent headaches or unexplained aches and pains. That also happened to me had this chronic upper back pain that I couldn't really attribute to anything that I was doing and it was just a lot of suppressed emotion that was just building up and I was experiencing his physical pain. So that is not at all uncommon.
Marika Humphreys:
So we've talked about the different ways that we typically react when we feel negative emotions and that they're generally not effective. So what do you do instead? I want to share that with you. I'm going to share one way to better cope with an emotion, but there are lots of ways, and I will talk about other methods later in different podcast episodes, but today I just want to give you a simple one.
Marika Humphreys:
The best way to cope with an emotion is to open up to it. There's a great little saying that I heard once, and it said the quickest way out of an emotion is straight through it, and I love that because it's 100% true. You have to be willing to open up and let an emotion in in order to let it flow through and go again on its way. So if you think of an emotion like energy, energy needs a place to go. When you open up to it, that energy goes through you and it will go out. Or another way I like to think about emotions is like waves a wave that crashes over you and then recedes. Emotions aren't permanent states. They ebb and flow. So that means that you cannot go around an emotion and you cannot go over it. You have to go through it, or rather, let it go through you. So that is what I mean by allowing an emotion.
Marika Humphreys:
Sometimes in coaching we also call this processing an emotion and the way to do that is by first noticing the emotion. So you have to notice when you're in the throes of an emotion and then name it. That can be really helpful, like this is fear, this is sadness. And then acknowledge the emotion to yourself I'm feeling fear or I notice I'm feeling a lot of anxiety right now. And then the last step is allow that emotion, give yourself permission to feel it, and I know that seems weird, but that's simply Means saying to yourself can be in your head right, it's okay to feel this right now, or I'm gonna let this emotion flow through me. So notice, name, acknowledge and allow. That is the process Notice, name, acknowledge, allow N-N-A-A. It's easy to remember. You want to notice the emotion when you're having it, give it a name, acknowledge it to yourself I'm feeling a lot of anxiety and then allow it and it's okay, this anxiety is okay to feel. Those are all ways that examples of how you can allow the emotion and this is a conversation you can have in your head. It takes about two minutes and it may feel weird, but the process of pausing in your day to open up to and process that emotion, I am telling you, will make a huge difference. I really, really want to encourage you to try this. It's kind of magical how much of a difference this can make.
Marika Humphreys:
Now I will say that there is a common challenge people often experience when they think about even doing this, and it is being afraid of the emotion. A lot of times a client will tell me I am afraid that if I open up to this sadness, I will be swallowed whole, or if I let this fear in, I'm just gonna be completely overtaken. They feel like their emotion is like a pit that they will fall into and never be able to come out. And the reason we feel that way is because that emotion has been building up, that it starts to feel overwhelming and it feels like it's so big and so huge that if you open up to it and just allow it in, even just a little bit, you will just be flattened by it. But that's only because you've been resisting it so long. So what actually happens is the opposite. When you open up to it, you give the pressure a relief valve, you allow the pressure to release and it no longer feels so overwhelming. I was thinking of an analogy and this may not be the best analogy. It's a little bit counterintuitive that in order to open up to something is how to not be afraid of it or how to give yourself some relief from it.
Marika Humphreys:
So I recently started running and I have started literally from zero. I'm a big walker but I'm not a huge runner. And I started with small goals about six months ago, kind of run, walking a mile, and I'm up to now four miles. And I will say, as I've been going through this process and trying to like achieve my goals of like today we're going to run two miles. I would get to this point where I felt like, oh my gosh, if I stop now, I will never be able to start again because I'm so tired. But what I have found is if I stop and say, walk for a minute or two, I actually give my body just enough rest to keep going and actually feel better.
Marika Humphreys:
So emotions are kind of like that when you open up to them, what you do is allow it to come through you and you give your body the relief of not trying to hold that emotion back and that actually takes away some of the fatigue that you're probably feeling trying to hold it back and it gives you sometimes enough energy to keep going right. So you really want to process through your emotions as much as possible as they come up. Okay, you're releasing that pressure, you're giving relief to the pressure that's building up. Those are the steps to process an emotion and I will just say this is a very large topic and we've just covered it very broadly because I want to give you a nice overview and really help you understand emotions at probably a level that you maybe have never heard before or thought about much.
Marika Humphreys:
I'd like to encourage you this week to focus on noticing the common emotions that come up for you. What are they? Write them down. What are the top one to three emotions that you feel most frequently? And maybe there's certain triggers that are consistent. Often we have triggers that create those thoughts that then generate those emotions. So just start noticing that.
Marika Humphreys:
Notice the emotions that you're feeling and name them.
Marika Humphreys:
That is first step to building up your emotional awareness and expanding your emotional capacity. And then, if you want to also try the acknowledge and allow part of that process, notice, name, acknowledge it and allow it give that a try and you will be surprised at how much a difference it can make. You have to be willing to allow that emotion to go through you, and as much time as it takes, you cannot be in a hurry to get out of an emotion. You won't be able to experience the relief if you're in a hurry to get rid of it. So anytime we're in a hurry to like I don't want to feel this, I don't want to feel this, that emotion is going to stick around. So you have to be really able to relax into it. All right, caregivers, I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions about this, please email me and ask questions about any topics I've covered so far, or any questions just about caregiving in general, and I will be covering frequently asked questions and future episodes. All right, I'll see you next week.
Announcer:
Thanks for listening to this episode of In this Together. If you would like to learn more about Marika's work, go to www. coachmarika. com.