[COVID Crisis Series 5 of 25] Dealing With All the Feels
Summary
- “Because sometimes feelings just really are, there’s nothing we can change. We just have to let them be. We have to sit with them, we have to let them be part of our day, but they don’t have to own us and control us”
- Our feelings lose control over us when we name them
- Write in a journal, take a walk, phone a friend, say what you’re feeling out loud
Quotes

Transcript
(00:00):
Hi friends. Happy what day is today? Thursday. Happy Thursday. Oh my gosh. Are the days running together for you because they are running together for me and I have to remember each day what, what the day is. Anyway, I’m want to talk to you today about all the fields. Hey Jen, good to see you. We are having all the fields. They might be just bubbling below the surface for you or they might be crushing over your like tsunami. And for me, they have been both. How about you? Who here feels like all the fields are just, you know, right there below the surface waiting to crash out, waiting to kind of take you out or you’re working really hard to stay on top of all of the feelings that you’re having. But there’s this thought that you should be able to feel a certain way and we’re going to come back to that.
(00:47):
We are in unprecedented times. I was talking with a client the other day and the comment she made to me that has stuck with me, she said two things. One, we are an unprecedented times. We’ve never ever lived through something like that. This before, where we have this global pandemic, we have uncertainty about our own personal health, the health of the ones that we love, our friends, our families, our colleagues, and we are being asked to isolate ourselves to help spread this helps contain the spread of this disease. And so it is unprecedented. We don’t know how to do this. So let yourself off the hook. There’s no right way to do this. You know, there’s just doing it and we’re doing it together. The other thing she said that really struck with me is that makes it very disorienting. I feel very disoriented and that’s a word we don’t often use.
(01:36):
I don’t, it’s not part of my vocabulary, but it, it just made sense to me. It’s kind of like trying to navigate in a new city with no GPS and we’ve become so accustomed to our routines and our habits and the way our life was kind of rolling. It’s like we hit a brick wall and you know, everything kind of blew up and we don’t know what to do and how to do this kind of new way of living. And so it brings up a lot of feelings, feelings of frustration. Hey Kristen, how are you? Good to see you. I’m going to, let’s see. Hit the weight. Learning this whole new Facebook live thing. So thanks for all your patience with me and thanks for being here this morning. But what happens with our feelings? You may be feeling angry. You may be feeling disappointed, you may be feeling discouraged, frustrated, afraid.
(02:18):
I use the word angsty. I’m angsty. I get kind of snippy and angsty because I have this, you know tension that comes up and I end up wearing my shoulders as earrings and I have to like take a deep breath and kind of get them back down where they belong and let my real earrings sparkle. You know, we just have all these feelings and they just are. And I think what happens is, is we forget that it’s okay to feel. Now, a lot of people in our world aren’t real comfortable with feelings. I mean, we’re not raised to be comfortable with expressing our feelings. I’m in the business of talking about how people feel and I’m also a feeler in the whole kind of personality thing. But I have a husband and my kids are my kiddos. They’re not big feelers. How are you doing?
(02:58):
I’m fine. Great. I’m good. You know? How do you feel about, you know, this disappointment or that that job didn’t go? It’s okay, I’ll get over it. We’re doers, we’re pushed the brewers. We tend to define ourselves by who we are, what we do, what we think. And we rarely pause and go, well, let me tell you how I feel. And it’s interesting. Our grandson, he’s 18 months old, his name is grant and we were FaceTiming with him the other day and he wanted the phone and you could see we were talking and I could see him kind of walking towards the phone. And my daughter went back up and he’s walking towards the phone and she went back up and he realized, you know, he’d reach out for it. He wasn’t going to get the phone. And after about the third time when he figured this out, he plopped down on the floor and just worst into like crying because he was mad that he wasn’t going to get the phone.
(03:41):
And it caused me to pause. I mean, I laughed. You know what you’re not supposed to do, but I guess when you’re a grandma, you get to do that. You get to laugh at your grandkids instead of do the right parent thing. But when we’re little kids, our feelings just come out of us because we don’t have words. And sometimes I’ve been you know, tempted like a toddler. Have you ever seen that toddler in the grocery store who’s just mad and sits on the ground and just, and I’m like, I feel that way too. The crowds are bugging me. Not recently. This would be like at Christmas or something, but they’re not monitoring in their head how they should feel. They’re just feeling. And that as we grow up, we, we hear this, we’ll use your words, use your words to describe your feelings.
(04:18):
And so then we in our, you know, young elementary school years, we get to use our words to talk about how we feel. We feel angry, we feel frustrated, we feel disappointed. And, and that’s part of learning and growing. And then this terrible, terrible, terrible thing happens. We get told somewhere along the way, between our tweens and teen years, well, you shouldn’t feel that way. Well, don’t feel that way. Well, suck it up, buttercup. And all of a sudden our feelings get buried deep inside. And we get really uncomfortable with our feelings and we start doing this thing. That is one of the worst things we could do. And that is we should all over ourselves. We say, I shouldn’t be feeling that way. I should be able to handle this. I should, I shouldn’t. And one of my mentors once said, stop, shouldn’t all over yourself, Susie.
(05:00):
And I had a great line. Just don’t, don’t burden yourself with this. Should I should be or I shouldn’t be just be. And so that sounds like a really nice thing. And if you know me at all, you know I talk about, well how, how do I do that? Then Suzy, when I’m feeling angry and I think in my head I shouldn’t be that way. How do I stop that? Well, I tend to say, well, don’t shoot all over yourself, Suzy. Just be angry. And what do you want to do with that feeling? I’m feeling angry. I’m feeling disappointed, I’m feeling disoriented, I’m feeling angsty, I’m feeling frustrated. All of the fields can be named and when we named them, they began to lose their power over us. Then they’re not inside of us, kind of trying to be buried down and they’re not like waiting in the wings to crash over us and take us out.
(05:47):
If we can name our feelings, then we can feel our feelings and then we can do something about our feelings. Often when I speak in train at corporations and events, I have this slide and there’s this really calm pool of cool water and a beach ball on it and it’s the best. So I kind of perched on top of the water and it’s one of my favorite illustrations for talking about feelings because if you’ve ever tried to hold a beach ball underwater, you know, it pops up somewhere. The other illustrations we’ve ever tried to like get into an inner tube or sit on a beach ball in the water, it pops up sideways, it comes out and it’s skidding across the pool and you know, it’s out of control. And that’s what happens with our feelings when we don’t name them, when we don’t own them, when we don’t feel them, they come out sideways, they come out somewhere and usually in a really inopportune moment.
(06:32):
I was feeling really anxious yesterday just about some information I’d gotten about the Corona virus and some things that as a high risk person, we’re really trying to be careful with. And I didn’t really name this to my husband John, but he made a comment and I kind of turned around and looked at him and was like, well, why on earth would you say that? But it came out of that ugly tone and it came out with this sense of, well that’s dumb. Well, he just made a comment about something that, you know, let me give you the context. He goes to the store, I stay home and we were talking about gloves and masks and safety and he was like, I don’t really think I need to wear gloves. I wear, you know, take my hand sanitizer and I’m okay with that. And I looked at him, I was like, well, you know, why would you think that was enough when I’m this high risk?
(07:12):
And it was really this ugly moment for me and he didn’t deserve that. He’s being very careful and he’s taking very good care of me. And I realized that the energy behind my comment and the tone of my comment and the volume, I talk about the volume, sometimes it gets turned up really loud is not matching the context of what we’re saying. What I was saying, what I want to know is why did he think that the sanitation wipes were enough when maybe he should be wearing gloves. That’s really what I wanted to know, but that’s not how it came out because all of my feelings behind it. My fear is my anxious anxiousness, my own you know, dealing with my frustration that I can’t go to the grocery store for him because my doctor has advised I stay very isolated. All of that came out in like this hush of ugly at him and you know, thankfully I’m been doing this long enough and we’ve been married long enough and that I was able to back it up and go, I’m sorry that came out all wrong.
(08:07):
That’s not what I wanted to say. One of the clues when our feelings are driving us versus the content of what we want to say is when the volume is loud, when instead of it being a two or three volume, which is about the context of that statement, it comes out like a five, six, seven, eight, you know, just go up the volume just got really loud. Let me turn that back down because something else is going on. That’s a big clue for you about your feelings. When you name your feelings, when you own your feelings, you get to be a whole lot more in charge of that volume dial. Okay? You get to be a whole lot more. I’m not in control like I should control myself, but aware and intentional about how you say what you say. So one of the things I really want to invite you to do, Hey, John Rogers, good to see you.
(08:50):
One of the things I want to invite you to do, we’re talking about feelings today, John. Every man’s favorite topic is to name your feelings. And it might be that you know, there’s not a safe place for you in your home to name them. So you need a journal. Then you may need to go for a walk and say them out loud just to get them out of you. You may need to phone a friend who can handle your feelings, who can just, you know, carry them. And you might say, you know, what, can I just tell you I’m having all the fields and I just need somebody to be in it with me. You know, can I kind of, I use the language, don’t my box. I just dump on you for a minute. I’m feeling angry about this and anxious about that and destroying about that and all these things that are coming up for us right now because we feel so out of control because we’re so disoriented because there is so much uncertainty and when we live with uncertainty and all these feelings come and we can name them, Hey Karen, good to see you.
(09:39):
And we can name them, we can get them out of us. They lose control and then they’re not going to come out like that snarky comment I made to John, they’re going to come out more in the volume level that’s appropriate to what we want to say. You know, I’m feeling anxious and fearful about, you know, you going out and coming in and these are my tactics for handling it. You know? What do you think was really more the way I could have given that message? Or even if you disagree with me, would you be willing to do these things because it’s important to me. That’s a much better way of delivering that. Then that snarky, well, why would you say that or why would you think that? And whenever we have that kind of ugly angsty behind it, we have to pause and remember or remind ourselves that there’s something going on beneath the surface that really is far more about feelings that we haven’t expressed.
(10:22):
One of the things I’m going to cover next week is this idea of grief. I think we all have, we, I think we are all experiencing some grief about what’s happening, what we’ve lost, what we’re out of control of. And so before we get there, cause no one says, Oh, I’m grieving. That’s not often what we lead with. Lead with. We lead with, I’m angry, I’m sad, I’m disappointed, I’m frustrated, I’m fearful, I’m anxious. And those kinds of feelings, if we can begin to get them out, it helps them lose their power. And you might need to be the specific, I think not my, you probably should be the specific I’m angry about. So for me today, I’m supposed to be, we’re supposed to be traveling this week to see some friends and I, I’m not just disappointed, I’m angry. This was my big trip I had planned for the spring.
(11:07):
You know, I have a really good friend who and my niece actually two who aren’t going to get to walk at graduation at this point. They’re seniors, they’ve done 12 years and they’re, they are angry. Hey Lauren, good to see you. They are angry and they’re disappointed and they’re discouraged. And what I said to my sister was, let her say why. So say why to yourself say, because I’m angry because I was looking forward. So for my niece to wearing that dress under my gown and the cool pair of shoes and, and the, you know, decorating my hat and I didn’t, I’m not going to get to do that. And so when we, when we look at what we’re feeling and we can unpack it and all the because is, and all the wise suddenly number one, we feel a whole lot less stress.
(11:49):
We feel our might feel sad and we might feel our feelings more, but we will get up from that kind of session of talking about our feelings, feeling lighter. I promise. I promise you this works. And when we are honest about the, because is behind it, then we can kind of look at maybe some creative ways to address them. Cause after we feel our feelings, our feelings are period, end of sentence. That’s a full thing. Feel your feelings, name your feelings, get them out of you. And then you can decide what you want to do about them. So for my niece who’s terribly disappointed, we talked about some brainstorming ideas about what she and her friends can do. You know, can they petition the school to do the graduation and another time they’d go to a private school, can they do a mock graduation with a group of families when we are allowed to be together in groups of more than just, you know, two or 10.
(12:36):
It allows creativity to come in. Thanks Krista. And that helps a lot. She’s like, you don’t know how much I needed to hear this. It allows creativity to come in and we begin to resolve problems. We began to find new ways to handle things and at the very least, you know, there is no new way to handle the fact that my trip to see my friends get God canceled. And that’s a really big deal because I live in a tiny house with my husband. I don’t live with community and my, Oh my gosh, all these feelings are coming out of my eyes, like their tears and I’m missing seeing my girlfriends. And that’s a big boost for me and a really fun part of what my life looks like. And so I can’t fix that. I can’t get creative about that. I mean, we have FaceTime, we have chatted, but even if we can’t fix it or creatively adjusted, we can just be sad about it.
(13:20):
We can give ourselves permission to feel what we feel and be honest with ourselves. And then you know, that I get up and I washed my face and I do the next thing. Because sometimes feelings just really are, there’s nothing we can change. We just have to let them be. We have to sit with them, we have to let them be part of our day, but they don’t have to own us and control us. And so friends today as we talk about all these fields, I would love for you to take the time to be honest with yourself about how you feel. If you are feeling shaky, feeling angsty, you know, DM me, message me, I’ll sit in your feelings with you, I’ll carry them with you. And then the other thing I would love for you to do, and it’s interesting, my friend Karen’s on here, she sent me a text this morning.
(14:01):
She was one of my friends I was going to get to see this week. And she said to me, I hope you find some joy somewhere in today. And that really struck me because in the midst of all of these hard fields that we’re having with all this uncertainty, I think that we’re forgetting more and maybe you’re not, but I’m forgetting to look for the joy to find the moments. We’ve had beautiful sunsets here and I’ve started posting those. Like, there’s a beauty out there, there’s beauty in your family. There’s beauty in those kids, rough and tumbling on the floor, you know, even in puppies in you know, in meme is my husband’s coworker sends him these hysterical mediums and I regularly, throughout the day we’ll kind of, you know, laugh out loud and to end to find that moment of laughter and levity, but then to find joy.
(14:45):
Joy is something that we can find inside of ourselves. And usually it comes from gratitude. So a lot of times we want to hop from being anxious and angry to feeling good. I think we have to walk across the bridge. If I named my feelings, I’m feeling my feelings. I’m not letting my feelings control me. I’m going to do this with my feelings. And then we have moments where we can be like, you know what? I’m going to focus on what I can be joyful for today. And part of my joy every day in a really interesting way is meeting with you guys and talking about what’s real and talking about what’s going on. So all of you being on today has been part of my joy and I really appreciate that. Pop in the comments below. What is something if you’re a courageous that you’re feeling that might be hard.
(15:24):
And if you don’t feel like sharing, that’s okay. Wherever you are is fine, but you could also just pop in a piece of joy. Maybe you’ve already had some today. Maybe it’s from yesterday, and we’ll celebrate that together. If you have anything you want me to cover, it means the Facebook lives about the category of relationships, relationships with God, with ourselves, with others. I am happy to do that. Pop up in the comments DM me and let me know what they are and I will address them in future lives. These, sorry. Allergies are terrible here, but I will address them in future lives. Finally, if you need some sanity savers there is a link where you can grab some sanity savers. I think it’s a few down. I will put it back up it after this as well to help you stay sane with all these fields. Thanks for joining me today and I will see you tomorrow 12 Eastern time and thanks for being here. Okay.