In This Together: Building Resilience When Caregiving for Your Partner

14. Why You Should Allow Your Feelings as a Caregiver

• Marika

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As a caregiver or care partner, you deal with a lot of tough emotions like sadness, resentment, and guilt. In this episode, I explore the positive impact of embracing and processing these difficult feelings. Our natural tendency is to want to avoid or numb ourselves to these types of feelings when they arise. I'm mean, let's face it, who want to feel guilt? But, suppressing emotions can lead to hidden costs (which I talk about in Episode 11), but there are also many great benefits to allowing yourself to feel and process them.

I’ll explain what it means to be "in" your emotion and how that differs from the conscious and deliberate skill of allowing your emotions.

I’ll also teach you my method for processing emotions, which involves noticing, naming, acknowledging, and allowing them. By allowing your emotions, you don’t act them out; instead, you observe yourself experiencing them.

There are four major benefits to learning and practicing this skill. I’ll discuss each one and how it helps you become more resilient not just in caregiving, but also in life!

Go to the Episode Webpage

References:
11. The Hidden Costs of Suppressing Emotions When Caregiving

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.

Marika Humphreys:

Hello to all my caregivers and care partners out there. It has been an exciting week for me. I've had some big moves in my business and I'm just really excited about that. It is really crazy because when I was in the midst of caregiving for my husband, I would never imagine that this is where I would be in five years. Like so often, we think we know what life has in store for us, but it can surprise us, and it often does and none of us know what the future holds, and I reflect on that often, because I would have never predicted this for myself. So life is always changing and I feel like the best that we can do is just be conscious and open to change and make the most of our situation or our circumstances at any given moment. Our situation or our circumstances at any given moment, and what I teach you here in this podcast is designed to help you with that. Help you with staying conscious and making the most of where you are.

Marika Humphreys:

So, anyway, today we're going to lighten the mood a little bit and talk about the upside of being willing to feel your feelings, especially the bad ones or the negative ones, because, as a caregiver, a lot of the emotions that come up are negative and often very difficult to deal with. So it makes sense that we would want to avoid those feelings or try to stuff them down or try to numb ourselves to them. In episode 11, you can listen to that after this if you haven't listened to that one yet I talk about the hidden costs of suppressing your emotions, like all the consequences, the things that come up as a result of not being willing to feel your feelings. So I want to take the flip side today and talk about all the upsides to being willing to feel those difficult emotions. And just a fair warning I'm going to use lots of analogies today because I think this topic is a little hard to conceptualize, so analogies are very helpful with that. This last week I have been talking about this with a couple of my clients who are each processing the loss of a loved one, and I get it.

Marika Humphreys:

Sadness can feel really hard. It is not fun to feel the heaviness of sadness. I absolutely understand that and if you could avoid it I would say go for it. But negative emotions don't just disappear when we ignore them or numb ourselves to them. It may seem like they go away, but it's only temporary and especially when they're really strong emotions like the feelings of grief, when we don't process them and the thoughts that are supporting them or creating them, the feelings often intensify, and that is why people become overcome with emotion at certain times. It's because those thoughts and feelings have been piling up and not being addressed.

Marika Humphreys:

So think of it like a mail. If you ever have been a person who sort of dreads dealing with your mail, like the letters and the bills come in and instead of opening them as they come in, you just sort of let them pile up until you have this big pile of unopened mail. I am a little bit guilty of this. I'm working on it, though. If you do this consistently for a long time, you're going to end up having this big, overflowing, unorganized mess and you won't know what's important or what's unimportant. Emotions are a bit like that. If you just simply open them and deal with them as they come, you will stay clear and organized, things won't pile up and you won't get overwhelmed with them. So our emotions have to be felt and allowed, or they will pile up.

Marika Humphreys:

Now I want to talk about specifically what I mean by allowing them. I call this processing emotion, and it's a little different than just being in an emotion. So for most of us, when we experience an emotion, we are fully in it, right? We completely identify with that emotion and we can't separate ourselves from it at all. So if you're feeling angry, you are completely immersed in that anger. You may want to slam doors or yell at people. When we're just fully in the emotion, we often act out of it. So for a lot of people, an emotion like anxiety. They feel compelled to just be busy or be doing something, but it's often kind of unfocused and nervous energy. So that's just an example of being in an emotion. When I say open up to and process your emotion, what I mean is something different up to and process your emotion, what I mean is something different.

Marika Humphreys:

I teach a process called NNAA for how to feel an emotion. Notice what you're feeling, name the emotion, acknowledge it to yourself and then allow the sensation of the emotion by observing how it feels in your body. Does your chest feel tight? Do you feel a vibration in your stomach or tightness in your throat? This is just one way that I teach my clients to allow the experience of the emotion in their body. Okay, so I'm gonna give you another analogy If you've ever done something that you maybe haven't done, something physical that you haven't done in a long time perhaps, like garden or go to the gym or I don't know stack wood and you get sore from that because you haven't moved those muscles in a while.

Marika Humphreys:

So when that happens, your muscles feel uncomfortable. Right, the soreness is uncomfortable, but you understand that it's just a physical sensation and you understand why you feel that way because your muscles are sore, and so for most people, muscle soreness is not a big deal. Right, you're willing to kind of sit through it, the discomfort of it, until it passes. Well, experiencing an emotion can be really similar to that when you know why you're feeling it and you don't have any judgments about it. You just notice it and you allow it.

Marika Humphreys:

Now I also want to talk about the opposite extreme that we sometimes go to. Instead of avoiding or suppressing emotion, we go to the other extreme and indulge or wallow in our emotions, and this usually looks like letting the emotion totally take over without any reflection, so like sitting in a pile of mud sort of. And when we're indulging in emotion, we often look for more reasons to justify our feeling, so we kind of put ourselves in a victim stance, and indulging in an emotion usually leads to more negative thoughts and more negative feelings. When you open up and process an emotion, that's a clean process. It doesn't lead to more negative emotions, right? You become an observer of yourself as you experience an emotion. So it's different from wallowing and it's different from avoiding or suppressing. It's allowing or suppressing, it's allowing, and it's.

Marika Humphreys:

This process of allowing an emotion is something that I had never learned or been exposed to, even until I found coaching. But if you've done any meditation or mindfulness, that also teaches you to observe your thoughts and feelings in your body, and that's a very similar process. So now I want to share with you the benefits of processing your emotions, because it is probably new for most of you and it's a bit weird to do at first, but there are a lot of payoffs to learning this skill. So the biggest benefit is that when you feel your feelings in the way that I describe, by naming the emotion and paying attention to how it feels in your body you become a bit of an observer of yourself. You actually separate yourself a little bit from the experience of the emotion, and what that does is it actually lessens the intensity of the emotion because you're no longer in it, you're now observing it. So you sort of move from this is me to this is something I'm experiencing, and that shift helps put the whole experience in context.

Marika Humphreys:

So again, another analogy that will, I think, explain this, what I'm talking about, a little better. So imagine you're in the movie theater and you're watching this amazing movie that is totally well done and there's this. You're very into it, immersed in it, and there's a super emotional scene and it's just intense and sort of all encompassing, and you feel the character's feelings, right, you feel their joy or their sadness or their fear as if it's your own, like we've all seen a movie that is that good. Now imagine stepping back and becoming the projector operator and from the projection room you see the film reel and understand that the intense emotional scene is just light and sound projected onto a screen. This is a total shift in perspective, right From being in the scene to observing the mechanics behind it, and that is similar to moving from experiencing an emotion to observing the sensation it creates in your body. Right, you recognize the emotion, but you're no longer lost in it. Instead, you understand it as part of this larger picture.

Marika Humphreys:

So I know that is a little different to think about, and this process does take practice to think about. But and and it this process does take practice, but learning how to allow your emotions and observe yourself, having them does make the experience less intense, and it's a huge benefit and, honestly, one that is available to anybody. Anybody can learn this. Okay, it's just something that we're just not really taught Anybody. Anybody can learn this. Okay, it's just something that we're just not really taught.

Marika Humphreys:

Another benefit I want to talk about really comes once you've practiced processing your emotions instead of reacting to them or numbing them. When you've done this several times, your experience of your own emotions will change. They will feel less intense and you will just have more understanding of yourself and what triggers you, right. So essentially, what you're doing is you're building your emotional intelligence, and the more we understand something, the less frightening it is. So learning to absorb not learning to observe yourself in an emotion and acknowledge it, will ultimately remove some of the mystery and fear around emotions. So you will start to understand how different emotions feel in your body. Different emotions feel in your body. So, for me, anxiety is a very distinct vibration in my stomach and sadness often feels like a heaviness in my chest. And because I understand these emotions in the way that they feel in my body, they just aren't scary to me anymore.

Marika Humphreys:

I used to hate feeling anxiety Before. When I was anxious I couldn't focus at all and I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't get any work done and sometimes it would just literally derail my entire day. But now I know exactly how anxiety feels in my body and I can observe the feeling. In fact I'm kind of attuned to it. The minute I feel it I just notice it and I don't freak out about it anymore at all. I just acknowledge that I'm feeling anxiety and it's okay, and sometimes I know the thoughts that are causing it. Other times I don't. But I also just know in general that emotions come from my thinking. So there's something I'm thinking that is causing me to feel anxious and I can just simply allow and be aware of that vibration in my stomach and still go about my day and I just do my work and you know, and eventually the anxiety will dissipate. So just like muscle soreness, when you understand it, you just stop judging it or fearing it, right, and you just let it pass when it passes. But unfortunately, we've learned to be fearful of our emotions or other emotions we've learned to have shame about, and all of these emotions that we judge just boil down to energy in our body, and when you can learn to think of it that, simply, it just makes everything.

Marika Humphreys:

Let's talk about another benefit of recognizing and processing your emotions, and that is that the more you do it, the less those emotions pile up and overwhelm you. So, just like a sink full of dirty dishes, right, if you simply put a dish into the dishwasher right away after it's dirty, then the dishes don't pile up in the sink. Emotions are similar. Right, when we recognize and process them as they happen, they don't pile up. Now, what makes this difficult is that often it's instinctual to want to get away from our negative emotions. So you have to recognize this tendency and interrupt it. And I do this for myself with just like a simple reminder. When I'm feeling something that I don't want to feel, I tell myself breathe it in, marika, and I just, it just reminds me to relax and allow the emotion and allow the emotion.

Marika Humphreys:

Now, sometimes also, we can't allow the emotion because it's kind of an inappropriate time, like at work, or again, maybe some of you with your partners you don't want to show certain emotions. I think all of that is okay, but it is important to have a way to process through that emotion later, and that is where journaling can really help. So what that does, though, is when we handle those emotions essentially as they come up. That is how we take control of our emotions, because when they pile up and overwhelm us, then we're no longer in control, and the last benefit I want to talk about here is that the more you learn about your emotions, what triggers them, which ones you have frequently, how your body feels when you have them all of those things the more you develop a deeper understanding of yourself, and understanding is always the first step in growth. So I think the more that you understand yourself, you can also be more compassionate with yourself, and it also allows you to focus on finding effective strategies for the tendencies that you notice you have that you may not like.

Marika Humphreys:

So one of my clients this week has identified that she is particularly triggered by any health issue that comes up for her around her health, and what she tends to do is she will react and sort of go into a little bit of a fear, panic, rabbit hole, of oh my gosh, what if it's this? And then she'll Google things and find out all the possible diseases that she could have. And she recognizes that this is just really unhelpful and sometimes it takes her a couple of days to get out of it. But because she has this awareness around this particular trigger for her and how she tends to respond, we were able to brainstorm some strategies that she could use to interrupt that pattern when she's triggered, and in fact we even talked about how she can essentially sort of mitigate the pattern altogether by sort of developing a different connection with her body. So we were only able to do that, though, because of her awareness, and she's done this work for a while now, so she really understands. She's learning to just understand herself at a much more deeper level.

Marika Humphreys:

Okay, so to summarize the four major benefits, they are that when you learn to notice, name, acknowledge and allow your feelings instead of stuffing them down or numbing them, numbing yourself to them or wallowing in them, when you learn to do that, it will actually lessen the intensity of the emotion. Emotions in general become just less scary and frightening and we have less judgments about ourselves in them and they don't build up and overwhelm us, and then, finally, we also get to know ourselves at a much deeper level. So those again are the four major benefits of learning to process your emotions. This skill is something that took me a while, and I do think, though, that I was really disconnected from my emotions and from my body, actually, but I have grown in this area tremendously, and it's just been really helpful, because I think life is always going to throw us challenges, whether it's caregiving now for you or something else.

Marika Humphreys:

I've mentioned several times I'm raising a teenager. Life is full of challenges, and we will have emotions as a result of those challenges, and that is just part of it, right? So the more that you can learn to build your emotional capacity, understand your emotions and know how to feel the negative feelings without them derailing you, the easier it is to handle those ups and downs. All right, so that's my pitch on all the benefits of feeling an emotion, a negative emotion. If you want help with this, you can go to my website, coachmarikacom, and set up a consultation, and then we'll we'll get on the zoom and talk about coaching. Um, all right, caregivers, I will see you next week.