Click HERE to listen to this episode on iTunes or HERE to listen on other platforms. You will find the episode transcript below. Enjoy!
In this episode we talk about how people often confuse thoughts with emotions. This confusion can make the idea of honoring emotions confusing and unhelpful (because we don’t want to honor unhelpful thoughts even though the resulting feeling is valid). Not all thoughts are truth and this clarity can really help in figuring out how to actually change your life where it matters, right where you live it. Enjoy!
Hello Everyone,
I hope your first week-ish of the new year has been amazing, but amazing things contain challenges. This year is not going to be free of challenges and things that test us right? No matter how many times people repeat a mantra or say things they believe, there will still be thoughts that can come in and sort of catch us off guard and cause challenges.
This week I had a bit of this and it dawned upon me, with a lot of the language I have been hearing and even hearing myself think or say sometimes, how helpful it can be to clarify what our emotions are.
That sounds silly, right? This idea that we need to clarify emotions? I mean, we all know what emotions are,.. don’t we? OR DO WE?
Okay, so I talk a lot about thoughts and about how important our thoughts are. I talk about where our thoughts are, but you hear people constantly saying their thoughts as though they are their feelings.
You hear, “I feel like I am a terrible mother”. Or “I feel like I’m failing” or “I feel like I can never catch up”.
So when we say this, and we say this as though it is an emotion or a feeling, then we can get really stuck in that thought, BUT the truth is that these are NOT feelings… these are THOUGHTS.
You see, your emotions or feelings result from the thoughts you have. When we believe the lie that we are a terrible mother, this is a signal to us that our brained judged a circumstance and made a thought as a verdict of WHAT THAT CIRCUMSTANCE MEANS FOR US.
This is powerful because when we can really understand what is happening and recognize what the actual feeling is then we can gain the clarity and perspective we need to get out of that thought that is sabotaging our way of thinking.
For me, this has been a great week, and yet as I said before, it has not been without challenges. One thing that can happen with me however, as I continue to work on my perfectionist tendencies, layer after layer, is that I can get really stuck in my head making circumstances mean something for myself that I have habitually jumped to making similar circumstances mean, and then when I notice I feel terrible, I feel totally bewildered as to how I got there.
But when, again, I am able to stop and remember that it is what our brains make a circumstance mean for us which creates a thought, and that thought creates a feeling and resulting actions and perpetuation of the feelings and actions; I remember that I have done this for my entire life, and thus these patterns of assumption for my brain are habits, and so as I retrain my brain, there will still be areas where, on autopilot, I might find myself a little caught off guard as habits kick in that I have not quite kicked or worked on yet.
So, this week, my boys and I went to the optometrist. Both of my boys do vision therapy which, if you’re not aware, is where we go to a developmental optometrist that also has therapists that help my boys to learn exercises that work the brain in various ways to help with vision. My youngest, as many of you know (especially if you listened to last week’s episode) has been doing vision therapy since he could because he was born with strabismus, or an eye turn. I drive an hour south to a doctor who is out of network to work at this vision therapy office and have been doing that for over two years. However, my eldest son was evaluated over a year ago to see if he had any areas of concern given struggles he had with attention, focus, tracking and other areas I was seeing struggles with our homeschool activities. We found that he would benefit from vision therapy, and over the past year he has been seeing the therapist monthly for these sessions, with homework exercises he does each week in between. This week we went in to have progress checked and his vision has drastically improved, however his eyesight (different from vision) is actually more far sighted than formerly suspected and he needs to wear glasses according to the optometrist.
So, if you my traditional thought struggles from listening to the podcast, you know what this used to do to me. This kind of news in the past would have set my brain spinning. I would have been googling everything, buying books, finding another option for natural eyesight programs, posting in Facebook groups and anything else I could to FIX THIS and FIX THIS NOW. My traditional habit in my brain was complete and total resistance to whatever circumstances were unexpected and potentially disappointing or challenging. My former thought patterns would be my brain making this mean either that the doctor was wrong or that I had failed Dezzy in some way, and I could not handle it being my fault so it had to be the doctor… I either would spiral in the shame of this being my fault while trying to fix it, or find myself in denial and total rebellion to the doctor’s findings.
What was amazing this week is that I actually found myself noticing this internal reaction starting to happen. I noticed my shoulders and neck and stomach tense and my heart beat increase. I noticed my thoughts racing to find a solution, and found my brain searching for how to explain it to my husband so that he wouldn’t think I’m a terrible mother.
What’s cool about thought work is that the more you do it, the more you separate your worth from your thoughts and can see how interesting your patterns are. When you are doing thought work you start to learn to give yourself that space and notice what’s going on, AND KEEP PRACTICING both listening to the thoughts, giving space and dissecting the thoughts and moving through the emotions so you can change the thought that something helps you.
So, this experience was challenging for me and yet incredibly exciting because I got to experience it and not allow it to take over. I got to see so tangibly how much better my life is.
What is also important, is understanding that there will sometimes be thoughts you have not yet figured out or acknowledged but the more you notice thoughts and give space in this way the more you gain the perspective needed and ability to step back; to step outside of the situation and not become only reactive to your brain but an observer that gets to choose.
This doesn’t mean I can’t choose to still take other actions, such as try to find some ways to support my son, or get another opinion or whatever. This never means you don’t take responsibility for your actions. This just means you don’t allow the thought from your brain, that says this means this or that for you which produces fear or shame or just simply makes life feel terrible ,to be accepted as truth. It means that you hear the thought, because those thoughts still come, they still happen from time to time, and you, first of all, don’t get scared of the thought. The thought is not powerful. It’s trying to tell your story, but it’s just one version. AND Second of all, you recognize that that’s just one interpretation and you decide what interpretation makes sense from a perspective that actually empowers you.
I talk over and over again about how important it is to choose the way your story is told. It is not about lying to yourself. It’s about choosing the voice, the narrator that will tell your story. Will your story be told from a victim narrator, from an imposter narrator, or from a hero narrator?
So, when you notice your brain offering up an interpretation of your circumstances, don’t ignore it because it feels icky. That isn’t thought work. Don’t tell yourself it’s stupid. Stop, and notice the thought. Acknowledge it completely, so you can see what your brain is doing, and then figure out what love would say about those circumstances? How would it feel to not believe that thought and instead believe a powerful thought about what that means for you?
For example, when I started to hear the thoughts that I needed to fix this, and what should I do. I recognized the voice of fear. I recognized it was coming from a former belief I had that I was not a good mother, and this my brain was trying to propose was me failing my child. When I was able to accept that this thought was there, I was able to fully and totally understand how that felt for myself and notice and allow the shame to move through me and then see that I am a human mother. A mother who loves my kids and does so much for them constantly. A mother who will never do it perfectly, and trying to be perfect doesn’t help anybody. That truth instead allowed me to shift to asking questions about how I want to proceed in a way that empowers me. I was able to accept what the doctor said without an urgency, and stop and sit with it so that I could figure out where I want to go from there without fearing the end of the world and my sentence to eternal shame and total failure.
So, I have a few powerful things I want you to work on this week.
First, when you start to “feel” icky, name the thought. But change the words because that in and of itself is powerful. Write “I am having thoughts that are telling me that…” about whatever the circumstances are. Remember the circumstances are the facts that are beyond your control. Your brain is making them mean something for you. And calling out the thought, separate from the emotion can be incredibly helpful clarity for you.
Then, Once you can see what thought you are hearing, then you can write down what feeling that it is resulting in for you. Your feelings or emotions are not thoughts. They are shame, fear, hopelessness, rage, etc.
You can then ask yourself “what would it feel like not to believe this thought?” as Byron Katie and Kara Lowentheil talk about. Then, ask yourself what the voice of unconditional LOVE would want you to believe? If you were talking to your child, or a loving mother was talking to you about this, what wisdom coming from real love would that person say about these circumstances? What would it feel like to believe that thought instead of the one producing the terribly difficult feelings?
Sit with that. Write it down. Share it with me. I would love to hear how it’s going.
Alright my friends, I really hope this is helpful for you this week. I am so excited about this year and ready to tackle more of my challenging thoughts as I dig deep, layer by layer and I love hearing from you. Send me an email over at theradicalimperfectionist.com or follow me on Instagram. Share this episode with any friends that need to hear this. Remember, you are not alone. You never were. We are in this together, and you have always been enough. Keep rocking your year and keeping it real with yourself. You are not supposed to be perfect; you’re supposed to mess up and learn from it and then repeat. It’s about growth. Have an amazing week my friends.
Until next week, this is Holly Ann Kasper, the radical imperfectionist.