How do we talk about hard things? For some of us, our emotions seem overwhelming and we find ourselves dumping them out onto those around us. For some, our emotions seem unacceptable and we find ourselves bottling them up.

Neither of these strategies really helps us process our emotions and make progress with them.

I think we all find ourselves either emotional dumping to bottling at different times to different people, and I want to support you with how to address both of these situations

 

In this episode:

What emotional dumping looks like

How it causes a disconnect and drain in relationships

Why we emotion dump

What venting looks like

How it can create connection and support in relationships

Why it is hard to vent

How to grow in self-awareness if you are someone who emotion dumps

What to do if you are someone who emotion dumps

What to do if you are someone who bottles up their emotions 

The difference between clean pain and dirty pain

Giving yourself permission to vent

How to vent to someone you trust, in a way that creates safety and connection

 

Related links mentioned:

The #moms30for30

The episode from Hidden Brain, Where Happiness Hides

 

Full transcript (unedited)

0:12

For those of you who are new, you're welcome. I'm Shawna. I'm a mom of three. I live in small town BC, Canada. I am a life coach to moms who want to live with more purpose, peace, presence and passion. And I think passions really important part because I think that we should be enjoying our lives a lot more than we let ourselves sometimes.

0:31

So I am just squeezing this recording in my kids are going to be home in about 27 minutes, I'm going to record this. And today I want to talk about something called Emotional dumping.

0:42

And let's Twilight music back to a time when my kids were much smaller babies and toddlers. And this was about seven years ago, I had all my babies and three and a half years. Now they're 10, nine and seven.

0:56

So let's flashback, and I'm home with them. And you know, no matter how many kids you have, if you're at home with a kid, one or two or three, it can feel wild. And when there's more than one and they take turns napping, and then they have tantrums, and their snacks lying around the kitchen. Like it's just, it's just crazy times.

1:15

And there's good times too right? like dance parties and dress up and cute little giggles. But when you are in it, day after day, it wears you down. And I know there were a lot of days where Connor would walk through the door at the end of the day. And I would unload narration of everything that went wrong that day. And I've reflected a lot on this. And it's something that I still do sometimes.

1:40

And when I'm doing it when I've done it, I think that I really want someone to acknowledge how hard it is and how hard I was trying. And I know that I didn't validate myself a lot, especially in early motherhood, and I was looking to him to do it. I still sometimes do this, like I said, it's a process.

1:57

But I think this is a pretty common pattern that we moms can fall into. Because our world is really shrunken down to the toddlers in our home. Some close friends or two and the stream of moms quote unquote, doing it right on Instagram. So when that person who's out in the world walks into the door, we do it I call emotional dumping.

2:19

Even if you're like me, emotional dumping is not a term you want to give it because you want to know that you can come to the people you love with the hard things that you're going through and talk to them about it. And that's not quite what I'm talking about.

2:33

I'm going to spend this episode really differentiating the two, I'm talking about those times where it goes past, venting into that land of complaining and nagging and blaming.

2:46

This is a topic that I've covered in the month of gratitude challenge that I've done in the past.