00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 194, "When You Feel Sad or Bad or Mad." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:23 

Well hey, welcome to the podcast today. This is Tanya. Surprise, not like you didn't know that. Alright, hey, really quickly, I think I mentioned last week, but just in case I didn't, this month marks three years of me podcasting. So fun, such an amazing growing time for me to consistently be thinking about content and ideas and how it fits and how it works. It's just been such an amazing three years and I'm so grateful that you have joined me on this journey. It has been brilliant for me and I hope that it is brilliant for you. I hope that you're finding some really great stuff that is helping you nudge your life more in the direction that you want to go and helping you create the kinds of relationships that you really, really desire in your life, relationships with yourself and with other people in your life and also with God. There's a lot of work to do and I don't think we're ever going to run out of work to do. So I'm glad that you are here joining me and I hope that every week you walk away with at least one little nugget that strengthens your ability to step more into being the kind of person that you want to be because you know what, life always feels better when we're the kind of person that we want to be and that's what we're after here. So that being said, three years. To help me celebrate, if you have not left me a review, you can go onto either iTunes or Spotify and you can leave me a review there and I would love that. I would appreciate it so much. That is a great way for you to help other people find this content and to to share and it is a great way for other people to find me to support my podcast as well. 

02:07 

So, all right, we are moving on today. Episode number 194, right? "When You feel Sad or Bad or Mad." Alright, here we go. I think sometimes when I talk to people about this work that I do, they think that, well, all you're trying to do is just always try to feel happy. You always wanna feel good. And I wanna clarify a few things, mostly that that's not the purpose of the work that we do. Is it possible? Probably would be possible, but is that what we want? Probably not, because feeling sad is a very human thing to do. Or feeling angry or frustrated or hurt. These would all be emotions that sometimes are called negative emotions, but I prefer to call them more "difficult emotions," and we are often very resistant to them, and that's because our primitive brain just wants to protect us. If it feels threatened, it wants to run away fast. So it avoids the difficult emotions, and it will do that by buffering. 

03:13 

Now we've talked about buffering before, but for those of you who might be a little bit newer to the podcast and are not familiar with that term, buffering is doing outward things to try to avoid inward things. Most often we associate it with difficult inward things, but sometimes even really good inward things we try and buffer because the feelings can be so strong. And buffering can be anything from scrolling social media, watching YouTube videos, or binge watching TV, reading anything, eating, exercising, looking at pornography. Really anything in life can be used as a buffer. We just have to look at the reason that we're doing the activity. And if we're using it to avoid feeling difficult emotions or even sometimes really great, amazing, and possibly overwhelming emotions, it's buffering. 

04:09 

I shared an experience last week with you that I had with the person that I'm dating right now, and I want to just clarify a few things there and show you the buffering that I was doing. So when I started to have some difficult emotions going on, I didn't realize it at the time, but I had my phone close by and I picked up my phone, I got on Facebook, and I started scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And probably after about 10 minutes, I was like, "whoa, I don't want to be scrolling." Like, this is not what I want to be doing. But I still wasn't connecting with the idea that I was feeling some difficult emotions yet. I knew that I was...okay, it's kind of weird. You know how our brain is sometimes? I knew I was feeling some difficult emotions, but I was not clueing in that I was trying to avoid them. So that wasn't clicking in my brain yet. But reading is such a better option than scrolling Facebook, right? So I went and got a book that I had been reading and I'm reading this book and after about 15 minutes I was having, obviously, having a hard time concentrating. All of a sudden it hit me and I went, "oh, oh, I'm buffering." Like even though it was a great book and it's a helpful book and even though Facebook is not a horrible place to  be, I was buffering. I was trying to avoid feeling those difficult emotions that I was having, okay? 

05:36 

And so when I did that, then I decided to separate myself out from where everybody was and I went to the bedroom and I laid down on the bed, okay? And we're going to talk to you a little bit more about that. But this is what we need to do. When we notice that we're buffering, when we notice that we're actually feeling difficult emotions, we need to feel them, we need to stop the buffering and just sit for a bit. And we need to allow the emotion to well up in us. Okay, so what I did is I went and I laid on the bed and I allowed myself to think about the situation. I allowed myself to feel the emotion and it caused me to cry because it was a big emotion for me, and it was painful. Okay, but I allowed myself to feel it now. Some people are really great at visualizing and imagining and so if that's you, if you're good at that, you may want to think about "okay, what does this feel like? Where is it in my body? Is it in my head, my neck, my chest, my gut? Where am I feeling it? What does it look like? Is it big? Is it small? Is it round? Is it sharp? Is it heavy? Is it light? Is it prickly? Is it is there a color associated with it?" Some people are really really great at that and some people aren't. I'm not really that great at it. I really have a hard time with that, but I can sit and I can think and I can think about the situation going on and that will allow the emotion to feel very strong in me. So do whatever works for you. 

07:09 

But here's the thing about emotion, especially these difficult emotions. They're like a toddler who wants your attention Okay, think about the little kid who comes up, pulls on your pant leg, and is my "mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy mommy Mommy mommy: right until you get down on your knees and you're like, "yes, sweetheart, what do you need?" and as soon as we pay attention to that child and they'll tell us something silly like "I saw a bug outside," and we'll go, "Oh my gosh, that's amazing," and then they've run off right? They just want to be seen, they just want to be heard ,and that is exactly what our emotions are doing. They're like this toddler who just wants to be seen and wants to be heard, and when we stop and give ourselves space to feel this difficult emotion and time to feel it, we will find that they will start to subside. Right? The emotion may be really strong for me on that experience that I was just sharing with you. It was about maybe four minutes that the emotion was really strong and then it started to subside. And if you've ever done this you'll notice it doesn't last forever. Maybe maybe 10 minutes max. It might be really really strong but then it's going to subside. 

08:30 

And here's the thing. It's just an emotion. It's just a feeling and darn it hurts. I get it. It's hard and it hurts but it will subside. And once it subsides a little bit, I know that for me, then my brain can start to think more clearly about it. I'm not spinning in this space of thinking of "well what about this?" and "what about this person? This person is so horrible," and me wanting to move into a victim mentality, right? It's easy for me to do that. So take the time to feel the emotion give it the attention that it wants. Really see it, really hear it, and then it will subside and then we can spend some time thinking about what got us there. 

09:13 

Now let's clean this up a little bit. Let's figure out what's happening. Let's make some decisions about what we are okay with and what we are not okay with. Okay? And really start to clean it up in our brains. This is the thing...difficult emotions are not wrong. They're not bad. They are just part of our human experience. They're part of the opposition in all things that Nephi talks about in The Book of Mormon. They're part of the 50-50 balance of life. If you think about the universe, everything is balanced out, good and bad, right and wrong, light and dark, easy and hard. Everything is balanced. It's like a universal law that there has to be a balance, and emotions are the same way. And in our lives, when we're a healthy human, we are going to be feeling good, easy emotions and difficult emotions. 

10:10 

Now, I know when I first started doing this work, I was like, "no, I think I'm about 80-20, 80% positive or more easy emotions and 20% negative. But the more I've started to do this work, the more I've started to pay attention to myself and listen to myself and the more I have moved closer to a 50-50. And you may be thinking "well, that's not good. We don't want that." Actually, I am intentionally trying to move into that space because I'm realizing that when I don't allow myself to feel the more difficult emotions at a deeper level, I'm not feeling the positive emotions at a deeper level as well. So if we were to put it on a scale if I can feel difficult emotions at a three, the balance out of that is that I can only feel the more positive or the easier emotions out of three as well. When I can feel the difficult emotions at a seven, I can feel the more easy emotions at a seven as well. The depth of my emotion is greater. So if I want to feel stronger love, if I want to feel greater compassion, if I want to feel greater joy, I also need to be able to stretch into those more difficult emotions. And so this has actually been  my a lot of work that I've been doing for myself the last three years or so since I've been really focused on the coaching work. 

11:35 

Okay, and this kind of brings me to the second point that I really want to chat with you about today. Feeling sad or bad or mad, guess what? It's okay. In fact, there are times that these are the exact emotions that we want to feel. Alright, and we may be going, "no I don't ever want to feel bad. I don't ever want to feel sad." Well, let's look at this. If someone you love dies, feeling sad is exactly how we want to feel. When we read the realities of child sex trafficking, "angry" is entirely appropriate. And when we realize that we've said something that was hurtful to someone else, we want to feel bad or we want to feel guilty. That moves us to make change. And this is all part of our human experience. Our goal is not to be robots who don't experience a wide array of emotion. If we felt happy all the time, that would mean that we're happy when social injustices happen, when people we love pass away, or when people we love get hurt. We may think that the goal is to feel happy all the time, but it's really not. 

12:45 

I think sometimes society, and even the culture within our religious organizations, sometimes gives us the idea that we're supposed to be happy, and that if we're not happy, we're doing something wrong. But I want to offer that that's not true at all, actually. Our goal is to be a human, and the human experience is that God has given us all of these emotions. All of these emotions help us to draw closer to Him, help us to grow in the ways that we need to grow. Our goal is to be humans who process our emotions in healthy ways, and who show up the way we want to. But avoiding difficult emotions is something that our primitive brain is really good at. It's going to do everything that it can to avoid difficult emotions. So it takes a lot of awareness on our part to feel the discomfort of tough emotions. We want to really get good at being aware of difficult emotions, and then feeling or processing those emotions. 

13:53 

Sometimes when difficult emotions start to come up, do what we call "thought swapping." So with the tools that I teach about how our thoughts control our emotions, we may be really tempted to discover the thoughts that are making us sad and just start swapping those thoughts out for thoughts that will make us feel happy. But this is not really the space that we want to go either. Let me share with you another personal experience. So I have one child who does not really want to have a lot of contact with me, and it's really difficult for me, and it's hard. And I found myself about a year ago, I would just say, "well, guess what? He's an adult. He gets to make whatever choice he wants to." Okay, I totally believe that. And that's a thought that I believe is true. But I was doing it, I was saying that with an effort to turn off the pain so that it didn't make me feel sad. And then probably about nine months ago or so, I was like, "whoa, wait a minute. What kind of a mom do I want to be? How do I really wanna show up for him? Do I wanna be a parent who doesn't feel deeply for my child?" Because I was moving into this flippant neutral kind of territory: "Well, he's an adult. He gets to make whatever choice he wants to," and turning off my emotion and moving on. 

15:22 

And then I just realized that, you know what? Even though the deep feelings in this situation for me can hurt, that's exactly how I want to feel. I don't wanna be unfeeling about my child. I do want it to hurt. And I do want to feel the sadness because that's the kind of mom I wanna be. I wanna be a mom who feels deeply for her children. And so, I choose to move into a space that feels the sadness, but that also opens an emotional door so that when he is ready to look through the door into this space that I've created, he can tell it's a safe, emotional space for him. If he comes to that door, that emotional door, and he sees that I'm over here going, "yeah, I just really don't care. You do your own thing. Doesn't matter to me," if he sees me moving in that space, he's not going to feel like it's safe to come in. So I want to create this really safe, emotional space that he knows that he's cared for and that he knows that I love him desperately. And that means that it does cause me to feel some sadness. And I'm okay with that. I'm actually more than okay. I'm really happy that, there we go. There's a juxtaposition, right? I'm really happy that I've been able to create this space where I do feel the sadness for this. Now, I've created this space, have a door there for him, he may come in at some point. But guess what? He may not. But I can't control that, right? I can't control what he does. What I do get to control is whether I create this space or not, and I feel really good about the space that I've created. I feel good about feeling sad, because I am showing up the way that I want to. I'm emotionally engaged, and I'm invested in the relationship. That's what I can control. 

17:30 

Listen, feeling bad is going to feel bad. I want to show you one other thing that kind of circle back around to this buffer idea.  What we will sometimes do, however, is we will feel bad about feeling bad. So we will resist the pain. We will ignore the pain, or we will avoid the pain. And then what we're doing is multiplying the pain. Now let me explain how this works. What we end up doing is doubling down on the bad feeling by beating ourselves up for feeling bad, or by buffering in a way that we then feel bad about later. So then not only do we feel bad for the experience, whatever it is, but then we're adding to that by doing something else that causes us to feel bad. So maybe we feel, like in my example, maybe I feel sad about my son. And so I go eat a carton of ice cream to buffer the difficult emotion, right? To ignore it or to do something. And then I feel horrible for eating that much ice cream. Or we may spend two hours scrolling on Facebook and then feel guilty for wasting time on top of the sadness that we were trying to avoid. Or we may just ignore it by doing something else productive, right? Maybe we'll go clean or maybe we'll go take care of bills or stuff that we need to take care of. But then we don't process the difficult emotion and it just keeps coming up again and again and again. "Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy," right? It's just going to keep coming up until we process it. So even if we're doing something really productive, like exercising or meal planning or something with our work, we have to take time to process the difficult emotion or it will just keep coming up, right? 

19:32 

This is when our pain starts to turn into suffering. When we start to layer the difficult emotions, right? I feel bad and then I feel guilty and then I feel frustrated that I feel guilty, right? And then I start feeling shame because of all that, right? We start layering them and that's when it becomes suffering. So this is just something for you to watch for in your dealings with your difficult emotions. Notice when you're feeling them and allow yourself to feel them rather than turning to another activity to buffer and embrace the fact that you're a human, and you're not always supposed to feel happy and feel good. The 50-50 in life says there's a balance in the universe and we're going to feel both. God gave us emotions, all of them, the difficult ones and the easy ones. And there is something to learn from every emotion. There's something to learn when you feel sad or bad or mad. And this is part of the joy of growing up, my friends. I love it, don't you? So amazing. 

20:46 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would like to chat with me about your situation and how coaching can help you, you can book a free consult at tanyahale.com and we can get to work and we can help you figure things out and move into a space that feels better for you. Feels better even if you're feeling bad or sad or mad. It feels better because you will be processing. Okay, I love you my friends. Thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for sharing this with people who you know will benefit from this content. Have an awesome, awesome week and I will talk to you next week. Bye. 

21:28 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.