No Bad Feelings
Well, hello there. I'm so happy you showed up today. I hope this episode finds you in a great mood. Having nothing but positive feelings.
Yeah. Right. Here's the deal. Today's episode's really gonna help you out. Because there's no such thing as bad feelings.
There's no such thing as negative emotion. Our culture has an emotional immaturity to it that is absolutely poisonous. Not allowing all of our emotion is impacting worldwide mental health and absolutely has to stop. But how? This episode is for people who want to feel good rather than bad.
And sometimes, We pretend that things are okay when they're actually not. We pretend that we feel positive when we don't. This episode is going to help you put a different spin on your emotional life so that you don't have to be at war. With what we currently define as negative emotion or bad feelings. Here's a deal.
There are no bad feelings. Okay? Before I get into this with you, I want to remind you that you have to acknowledge emotion. It's vital. Which means we can't keep bypassing at all.
We have to show up. We have to learn to be present in order to do our personal growth work. That's why I created a mini workbook, a visual guide for you to start to learn these skills, of presence, of emotional awareness and mind discipline. And honestly, learn a little self compassion because these are the vital important skills for emotional maturity. I've made it really easy for you to download this mini workbook for free on my website at takeouttherapy dot com.
There's a big button at the top of my website that says download a peaceful mindset Doesn't that sound lovely? Or I've provided you a direct link below. Again, it's takeout therapy dot com. So let's get into this. What's the deal?
People think of emotions as either good or bad, positive or negative. This is the wrong way to go about it. Because if we go about life this way, oh my goodness, we're gonna be so disappointed because We don't always feel good, friend. We don't always feel positive. And to be honest, we can't always fake it.
Humans are emotional creatures. Emotion is not an option. Not the good ones, and not the quote unquote bad ones. The thing is, is we experience life through emotion. But it feels uncomfortable in our body sometimes.
Right? Some emotions feel comfortable in our body they feel light, they feel airy, they feel like they have wonderful energy. Some emotions, not so much. They feel tight. They feel like our heart is racing.
They feel like we can't catch our breath. They feel unmanageable. Does this mean that they're not appropriate? No. It doesn't mean that at all.
Here's the deal. The body is your emotional center. And you need to learn to distinguish between sensations in the body and emotions. So developing a little bit more of a somatic approach can be really, really helpful here. And I'll get into that.
You know, the thing is, is when we have a negative emotion like confusion or frustration or a lot of people have a big issue with anger. We think that something's wrong. We think that we're doing something wrong. Like, we think we need to feel differently. I always say, this is poor meaning making meaning that we give meaning to our emotions we think that we if we have certain feelings that it means something about us, we're doing a bad job at life, or we suck, or we need to get ourselves straightened out.
The thing is, is we're really hard on ourselves, and we're kinda hard on others too. When we're experiencing about like half of the human experience. And this has a profoundly negative impact. On our mental health. When we disallow bad feelings, it really damages our relationships.
And our relationship with ourself because we have to pretend and that's totally an authentic. It's absolutely fake. And it's a performance. Do you wanna keep going through life performing? I know at some point I decided not to do that anymore.
And today, I wanna help you do that as well. To how how to, like, allow for negative emotion to actually be part of the experience and not to look at it as a black hole that you might fall into. I'll say before I give you, like, my instructions on how to do this, I will say, in Takeout Therapy Club this month, we are talking about emotional mastery, and this discussion is part of that. It's really important that we take a look at our emotional lives in-depth in order to take care of our mental health. So if you are somebody who's really interested in, like, doing a deep dive right here into emotional mastery, come join.
Takeout Therapy Club. You can find it on my website or there's a link in the show notes. But here's how to sort of change your relationship with this idea of good or bad emotions. The first thing you wanna do is gain an emotional vocabulary. This is something that we work on in therapy actually.
Many people come into therapy and they want to talk a lot about their lives and their experience as a human being, but they don't really always have all the words for it. And so part of what I do is I help people come up with the words for how they're feeling. Right? I think we know how to say, like, I'm happy or I'm sad or I'm pissed or I'm, you know, like, happy, sad, mad, easy, peasy. I'm frustrated, I'm confused, I'm disappointed, I'm lonely.
Those are a little bit more complex. We know how anger feels in the body. We know how happiness feels in the body. We need to gain this emotional vocabulary by distinguishing one emotion from another. So understand that emotion is an authentic expression of humanness.
Okay? So if you want to gain an emotional vocabulary, all the words get included, even the ones you don't like. And then, like, stop meaning making, which means when you have a what you sometimes perceive as a negative or a bad feeling, don't let it mean something. Right? Like, don't take a feeling and bring it into a dialogue and make it your life.
If you're really struggling and in college, for example, it doesn't mean you need to quit. It means it's really flipping hard and you're having and you're like having that experience, it's for reels. Right? If you're really socially anxious, for example, That doesn't mean you don't go to the party. It means it's difficult for you, and you can make room for that.
So when we start to make meaning about ourselves based in our emotion, we wanna, like, notice that and clip it. As quickly as we possibly can. Many people, for example, have big doubts in their relationships in there incredibly loving and happy, right, relationships. Sometimes we're like, I don't know about this. Does that mean you want out?
No. It means relationships are kinda hard. Right? Can we make room for that? When you gain an emotional vocabulary, and you understand your emotions as an authentic expression of your life.
You can talk about that rationally. You can use I statements. Right? This is how I'm feeling right now. You can chase the root of the emotion and talk about that.
Remember last episode on Walking Hong eggs shelves. Sometimes when we think there are bad feelings and good feelings, it makes us walk on egg shells. Which is a a less authentic experience. So we have to give proper meaning to emotion. Me I keep saying meaning, but, like, we have to allow emotion to just mean what it means.
And sometimes that can be really simple, like, I'm flipping afraid right now. Sometimes people are really afraid in love. And it causes them to doubt their relationship abilities. And sometimes it causes the end of relationships. But if we could just learn to say, I'm afraid, I'm really afraid of the vulnerability, and I don't feel brave all the time right here.
We can just, like, make room for that. It's part of the deal. It doesn't mean we have to leave. It doesn't mean we can't learn. Okay?
So there are some skills that you can learn in order to make a little bit more room for what we would typically call bad feelings. One of the skills that I think is really important to do when you are working with gaining emotional maturity and emotional vocabulary, and being able to just express yourself as you are is journaling. We know that journaling is such an amazing way to engage the rational mind.journaling is a way to put our feelings on paper and bring us out of, like, our fight or flight response to bad feelings, and let them be there just process things a bit. Right? It's kind of like, this is how I'm feeling, and this is why.
Right? And so the other thing is, like, We have to be willing to be uncomfortable. And when you gain an emotional vocabulary, and you start understanding how different emotions feel differently in your body, then what you can do is just label them. One time I went to Vietnam on this tour, and it was so fun. It was one of the best trips in my life, but parts of it were really terrifying specifically the driving.
So I'm, like, riding on this bus and we're going out to the countryside to tour a specific area and the guy is driving like a bat out of hell. And I am not a great passenger, and I was absolutely terrified. And so in order to deal with that, instead of being like, I suck at traveling, I don't wanna do it anymore. This is too scary. I can't handle it.
I just sat in my seat next to my travel companion, and I said, I'm really afraid right now. And I'm okay with being afraid. Right? And I just said it over and over and over. This is quite a scary bus ride.
This feels really uncomfortable. My chest is really tight. Right? And in doing that, I eventually came around this idea of like, yeah, girl, you need to breathe. Right?
You need to get present in your life and just be willing to be uncomfortable. When we are willing to be uncomfortable, we can show up with our emotion in such a different way. We stop clipping it and we start kind of allowing for it. So the other thing that you can learn that I just demoed in the club last month. I have this huge as part of my membership, I have this huge library of vital life kills.
And last month, I put in there tapping. Emotional freedom technique, like how lovely does that sound, emotional freedom? Yes, I would like some. Thank you. Tapping is a is a little process that we can go to through.
That reduces the impact of emotional triggers. It basically gets us out of fight or flight and engages the rational mind in order to deal with difficult emotion. So learning tapping is a really good idea for people that want to integrate this idea that there aren't any bad feelings. Feelings, our feelings, our feelings. The most important thing that you can do to gain this emotional maturity that I'm talking about right now is to validate yourself.
To say, this is how I feel and that's okay with me. Can you do that? Can you start there? Can you be willing to be okay with the fact that you have a myriad of emotions on a daily basis and that's never gonna change. And if you label some of them as unwanted and not okay, that's gonna really stunt your process.
It's really gonna have you at war with yourself. So in order to heal that, you wanna just turn towards yourself and go, yeah, dude, it's okay to be afraid. It's okay to feel vulnerable. It's okay. To feel awkward, to be uncomfortable.
Validate yourself. Often and always. That I hope will help you to understand that all emotions, all feelings are good feelings. I'll see you next time.
