How To Get Smart About Your Emotions by Doing This One Thing

Feel the feels, or you'll keep paying the price.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

If this post sounds familiar, it’s because it’s reprinted from last year. Don’t worry, I updated it:) Stay til the end so you can get the links for podcast with Psychotherapist and Clinical Director, Dr. Leslie Faerstein.

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For most of my life, I was completely disconnected from my emotions. I was so disassociated that I couldn’t name more than a few. Happy, sad, mad? What else was there?

As a child, I was trained to ignore feelings and move on. No one helped me to process my emotions, which often overwhelmed me. Without a way of validating the especially big feelings, the best I could do was pretend they didn't exist. It made sense for me to do that because my emotions didn’t matter to anyone.

Emotions without an outlet will either blow up or damage you on the inside.

The dissociation from my emotional data center led to some poor life choices and contributed to pains in my body that compounded over time. Stuck in survival mode, my nervous system was recording everything. If I wouldn’t deal with my feelings, it did.

Tension patterns related to shame, grief, depression, and anxiety cemented a poor posture, causing years of neck and back pain. Being rear-ended three times aggravated the nature-nurture sculpture that was me.

A more gnawing problem (pun 100% intended) is that I grind my teeth at night. Although I’ve worn a mouth guard for five years, I've ground down and cracked molars by the relentless tightening of my jaw and neck muscles for four decades.

How does one stop grinding while sleeping? No doctor has given the answer yet.

I’m not alone when it comes to emotional disconnection. Women have been trained to suppress their feelings for centuries. This curse may have stemmed from one wild, fun-loving, risk-taking woman who got some bad press.

Everyone knows the Bible story of Adam and Eve.

Eve, the curious rule-breaker, was swayed by a talking serpent into picking an apple from the Tree of Knowledge in the garden. How bad could it be, she asked herself. Serpents have tiny brains, but this one can talk! He was much more intriguing than that straight-and-narrow Adam.

Following her intuition, she broke a rule of the all-powerful and all-knowing God. Biblical God was vengeful, cursed Eve for her mistake with painful childbirth, and gave all of us the stain of original sin.

The odds were never in Eve’s favor in the garden that day. Being formed from a man’s rib was a half-assed start. Plus all those questions and emotions weren’t going to work. The powerful prefer streamlined obedience. Oh, and never trust your intuition.

Why do we still give any credence to this made-up story?

Imagine if someone (Adam-grow a spine!) had Eve’s back: “Kudos to our newest garden team member who made a surprising discovery while exterminating vermin, leading to a tasty new apple variety!”

We’re still paying the price for this ancient myth as Christian nationalists continue damaging women today. Women still lag in pay compared to their male counterparts. The Equal Rights Amendment was drafted and introduced in Congress in 1923. A century later, it still has not enshrined its guarantees of gender equality in the Constitution. It was only fifty years ago that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed, and women in the U.S. were granted the right to open bank accounts.

The female stereotype is of women being hysterical is why they don't drive well and can’t hold important jobs like president.

No one has ever had our backs. Women don’t do a good job supporting each other because many, like me, are stuck in survival mode.

Man or woman, we are completely out of touch with an internal system that makes us human. Men have emotions, too, but they've also been raised to be even more disconnected from their feelings than women.

Emotions are a part of who we are and give us important information. Suppressing them makes us sick in both mind and body. We must feel our emotions, sit with them, and alchemize them to be healthy.

Take a step in creating the emotions you want by trying this.

I heard an exercise on a podcast once, and it went like this. Instead of making a “To Do” list, make a “To Be” list.

Write down how you want to be for the day, week, or period you're working on. Let this list reflect how you want to feel.

Then, write your normal to-do list by reflecting back how you want to feel.

My "To Be" List:

• Peaceful

• Rested

• Content

My "To Do" List:

• Draft an article (this means I don’t pressure myself to finish it when I’m tired.)

• Support myself and other women in a conference call at 2 p.m.

• Buy nourishing food for the week

• Walk the dog and take time to enjoy nature

• Wash my clothes so my favorites are clean in my drawers

I could have written "run errands" on my to-do list, but “run” makes me think of a frenetic pace, so changing the words keeps my peace theme.

Words matter.

My friend Carol wants to bring more joy into her life. I imagine her to-be list having the word "joyful" on it. Her to-do list will get adjusted if something on there contradicts her plan to be joyful.

Life will countermand the to-be list at times. I want to remain peaceful, but shopping might make me anxious and less content, so that's where I give myself grace. I acknowledge my emotion, process it, and see how I can alchemize it.

Emotions, by their very nature, come and go.

Building awareness of our state of emotion is the key to emotional regulation and connectedness to yourself. The first step for change is always awareness. How are you feeling today

You’re going to love my interview with Dr. Leslie Faerstein.

During the pandemic, I met Dr. Leslie Faerstein through a LinkedIn (LI) group that committed to writing a public post every day for thirty days. We called ourselves LI Sprinters, and some included an emoji of a person running next to their profile names, an easy identifier, so we knew that we were in the same cohort.

Next to Leslie’s name wasn’t a sprinter, but the words “Not Dead Yet.”

The words made me laugh, but I also wanted to know who this vibrant, assured, and interesting person was. I loved that she wrote posts about ageism and women’s issues. I was surprised to learn that she was in the group to gain exposure so employers could find her.

I never met anyone like her.

At an age when workers wanted out of their life-long careers, Dr. Leslie, who was in her late 60s, wanted more. She never wanted to retire and wouldn’t rest until she was settled in a new job. She had a vision of who she was and didn’t stop until {spoiler alert} she found employment again.

You will enjoy listening to Dr. Leslie, a native New Yorker, tell her story about how intentional and aligned she has always been. Of course, we also speak on women’s issues because that’s a big part of who she is.

You can listen on Apple, too. Just click 🍎