I Declared War on My Emotions. I Lost. (And I'm Glad.)

Image credit: Sydney Fielding 

Experiencing an emotion and processing an emotion are not necessarily the same thing.

Welcome to the “F-line” (Feelings-line) of the Process of a Thought. A few posts ago I gave an overview of the process a thought goes through — and pointed out that most of the time, we're unaware of that process and feel like a victim to life's circumstances. Last post got into more detail on the first two elements. Today, we're staying with just one: Feelings (I use "feelings" and "emotions" interchangeably).

Quick reminder from last post: it's not the circumstance that creates the feeling — it's the thought about it. Someone could say something awful about you at a party clear across town, and you wouldn't feel a thing until you found out. Once the thought happens, the feeling follows — whether you notice it or not.

Before we get into it, a little credibility-building. Or, more honestly — a confession.

Somewhere around age 12, I started an intentional war on emotions. I'd decided that people who cried in church were doing it to look spiritual, and it felt like a lie to me. So I set out to prove you could be spiritual without the tears — and got very good at holding them back. (I'll spare you the details of how good.)

Fast forward to adulthood. This girl could organize and out-accomplish 90% of the population, and I was proud of my getter-done-er-ness. Emotion didn't fit that identity. Stopping to cry, or admit I was tired, wasn't an option — it went against who I'd built myself to be. I didn't think about it consciously at the time, but looking back, there was a good amount of fear underneath it. Fear that if I let emotion in, it would take over — take my productivity and the identity I'd built on it, right along with me.

So why the embarrassing stories? Because I want you to know how much time and suffering I could've saved myself if I'd understood how important feelings actually are in this process.

Two things I didn't know back then:

• No emotion is good or bad — they're information. When we shun them, we block the information.

• Emotions are fuel for the next step in the process: our behavior, our actions.

I was convinced there were good emotions and bad ones, and, good girl that I was, did my best to bury the bad ones.

Here's the thing about burying emotions: they push back harder the more you ignore them. They're like a toddler wanting your attention while you're on the phone. Or a beach ball you're trying to hold underwater. Ignoring them doesn't save you time — it costs you time. That was the opposite of what I believed for years.

You may have heard that emotions, physiologically, move through us in under two minutes when we actually let them. Which is wild, because most of us carry things for years. The gap between those two numbers is usually the difference between experiencing an emotion and processing one.

This is the mistake I see most: people think they've processed an emotion when they've only experienced it. They cried when they were sad. Punched a pillow when they were mad. Ran a mile when frustrated. None of that is wrong — it can genuinely help — but it doesn't necessarily mean the emotion got processed.

Here's the simplest way I've found to actually process an emotion:

Name it. (Getting the exact right word isn't the point — the point is pausing long enough to name anything.)

Then imagine a hula hoop circling your body, starting at the top of your head, slowly moving down. As it descends, notice what's happening under your skin. Any tightness? For me it's usually chest to abdomen, sometimes shoulders, occasionally neck or arms — but keep noticing all the way down to your feet. Then find the spot that's "calling" the loudest, and just stay with it. See what happens.

Sometimes an image shows up. For me it's often a stone lodged near my heart, or a lead pipe running up my sternum. Yours might be totally different — I've heard people describe colors, or movement. The first time I heard someone describe it that way, it was completely foreign to me.

One more thing people get wrong: they're not patient with themselves. Because I saw others process so differently than I did, I spent a long time assuming I was doing it "wrong." There's no standard way an emotion shows up in a body. It took me a solid four months of practice — frustration and discouragement included — before it clicked enough that I started to trust the process. I was sure I'd never get it. I was also determined to figure it out if it took the rest of my life.

That's the how. Here's the why it's worth the four months:

Processing gets your CEO brain back online. When emotion is high, intellect is low — test that theory on yourself, or just watch it play out in the people around you. And once that intellect is back online, you can actually choose the next thought — one you believe — which generates a more useful emotion to fuel what comes next. Try writing an important email while upset, or having a hard conversation from a place of self-righteousness or frustration. It rarely lands the way you want. Process first, then think, and the outcome changes.

I do this constantly with people who already know all of this in theory — the smart, cerebral types who are sure they can think their way through anything. Usually what's happening is a thought loop: turning it over and over, trying to figure it out — and those loops have a way of showing up in every waking hour the second you're not going 90 miles an hour. The minute you slow down enough for it to catch you, there it is again. Cerebral horsepower is a real gift — until the thing you're spinning on isn't a thinking problem.

That's usually where a second set of eyes helps. It's part of why I still have a coach myself — someone to help me see what I can't, when I'm too deep inside the bottle to read the label.

If you know all of this in theory but still catch yourself reacting instead of processing — that's exactly the gap I help people close. Let's talk: https://www.outofsmallthings.com/schedule.

High five! ✋ 

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