5 Steps to Feeling Your Feelings | How to Process Emotions

Stop using food as a buffer for your negative emotions

We talk a lot in this podcast about recognizing the thoughts that precipitate our emotions.  Remember, all emotions are the result of a thought.  But we also really need to spend some time talking about the power of those emotions over our actions.     

We do a lot of things to avoid negative emotion: we eat, drink alcohol, watch tv, scroll social media etc, all in an effort to BUFFER those feelings we don't want to feel.  Not only do we avoid feeling those negative emotions, but we then go further and avoid situations, relationships, opportunities, etc. that might trigger us to feel that emotion we're avoiding.  Our life gets smaller and smaller, avoiding the negative means we also get less of the positive.  

We do that, because honestly feeling those negative emotions like sadness, shame, pain, guilt, loss, etc. SUCKS! Feeling those feelings is not a fun or enjoyable process so of course we avoid it! But we also avoid it because we just don't know how to deal with those feelings.  No one ever taught us how to process emotion so that we can move past it, and it's a CRUCIAL skill if we want to live a bigger life.  

In the worlds of therapy, medicine, and coaching there are several modalities for releasing "stuck" emotion, and many of them are very effective, but they also require the help of a professional.  In this episode I'm going to give you a simple 5 step system that will help you coach yourself through negative emotion and help you feel your feelings so you can move past them.  

The 5 steps are:

1. NOTICE - when you're buffering

2. NAME the negative emotion

3. FEEL the emotion - in your body

4. PROCESS the emotion - go deeper

5. RELEASE the emotion

Can you imagine what if would be like if you no longer NEEDED to buffer with food? How freeing would it be to have the skill to process those negative emotions, to not be afraid of feeling them anymore? Think of the choices that you might make differently, the opportunities you might seize a hold of if you are not afraid anymore to feel those negative emotions?  Your life could open up exponentially. It' s not the easy way, but no one ever said you'd get an amazing life by doing the easy thing.  

XOXO

Tara

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Show Notes: 

https://www.tarafaulmann.com/podcast/entry/50

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