How to cope with difficult emotions as adults

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To teach your children you need to understand yourself:

I have been wanting to put something I have recently discovered down for you all around coping with difficult emotions. I say recently because until recently, I have been a bit of an 'avoider'. Not deliberately and not completely. I have always been in touch with emotions in general. I have never been uncomfortable around other people's emotions (with the exception of anger at times). Today though, I am talking about those deep buried emotions that we try our best to avoid or ignore. Those emotions we deny because of the fear and negativity we experience when we feel them. The ones we think will swallow us up whole, never returning us to the light.

All emotions, including happiness, have the potential to be difficult:

The reason for this is because of the experiences associated with the emotions and what these emotions mean to us. Fear is one of the big and uncomfortable ones. Fear is also something we enjoy in certain contexts such as watching a horror movie or going on a ghost tour. There is a huge market for spooky things for Halloween due to our love of getting thrills and chills. Why is this? Why can we invoke fear on one hand and build up massive defences against it on the other?

It is not the emotion we are fearing:

It is not the emotion that gets us so to speak. As children, we are driven by emotions and our 'felt sense' or how we perceive the world outside of thoughts and logic. We have the strongest instincts when we are children because we are unable to understand other people's feelings outside of our own experience of them. We don't talk ourselves out of feelings. We don't anticipate what loss, anger, sadness etc. will feel like. We live in the present and take each experience as it comes. We don't fear emotions. What we are afraid of is the lack of understanding, the unknown.

This fear of emotions comes from childhood and feelings we have experienced that have not been made clear to us. We have not understood our emotions within a difficult experience and have had to find ways of making sense of them without the tools of logic, learning and reason. Many of us build up defences in order to cope with these tough emotional experiences. When we feel something that unconsciously (or consciously) reminds us of this difficult experience, we logically assume it is the emotion that makes us feel this way. That the unbearable nature of what we are feeling must be due to our anger or fear or pain or sadness etc. We build up walls against these particular emotions and feelings and attempt to move out of them as quickly as possible in various ways. I hope I am making sense?

Let me give you an example:

My father was not a part of my life. Fundamentally I felt abandoned and rejected. I felt sadness and hurt that he 'didn't want me'. My mother did her best to compensate for this by believing in me and expressing how much I was wanted by her. She tried to explain to me all the reason why he couldn't be a father to me. As much as she tried to help me to see that it wasn't because of me as an individual that he wasn't around, I still felt abandoned by him. I still felt loss and sadness at the fact that my father was not around and didn't want to be. This sadness was not attended to, by my mother and then later on by me. The reason was due to it being misunderstood and it was not something she was aware of in terms of my emotional needs. Sadness and emotional pain has always been quite difficult for me on a fundamental level. The deep sadness. Even in my grief, I struggled with truly experiencing this on a full level. I shoved it down and moved on from it as quickly as possible. I built up a world of defence mechanisms to cope with feelings of sadness, rejection and abandonment. One of my biggest defences is anger (an associated emotion I developed). For years the feelings I have felt towards my father have been anger. Anger has been a much easier emotion to bare, it has protected me and given me a false sense of security and justice. I have also developed the habit of trying to 'fix' other people when they feel sad. I have always felt sadness and pain is something that needs to be fixed or something I need to help people to avoid. As a therapist I have had to work extremely hard at allowing people to be in these emotions without trying to move them out of it and give them solutions. People will heal from discovering their own solutions.

The truth is though, in order for you to feel relief, you need to fully experience your feelings!

The pain comes in when we bury them or build these defences up against them. We take these defences on board and keep using them way beyond their necessity. In my case, the anger has been holding me back in so many ways. My lack of ability to experience sadness fully has also held me back from being who I really am. It made the significant loss I have experienced incredibly hard and drawn out. It effects my relationships (all of them). It prevents me from being true to my own needs and living in a way that is in alignment with who I really am and would like to be.

To overcome difficult emotions, you need to allow them to come up to the surface:

Think of something at the bottom of your tea cup, it is much harder to reach inside the cup and dig it out than it is to scoop it out when floating on the surface. You may just burn your fingers trying. Your buried emotions are the same. You need to have patience and understanding as each emotion starts to float. It won't all come at once although it can often feel like it does. To reassure you, your higher self or unconscious is in tune with your needs far more than your conscious self. In the same way as our dreams, we will never be given more than we can bare. If you are experiencing a difficult emotion, know that you are strong enough to cope with it. It wont feel good. That is to be expected.

The minute you let go of your expectations around how you should be feeling, you will accept and work through how you really feel. If you can allow the emotion to come through and have your full presence, your organic, natural and instinctual self will integrate and work through it. Once you have worked through it, it will be released. It will not only be released but you will be much better for it. You will learn from it and grow from it. You will feel relief and you will no longer have to bare the weight of the heaviness that comes with holding it in. This can take some work, especially if you are like me and have a lot of resistance to your difficult emotions. Start with trying to identify how you feel in your body.Get to know how you experience emotions and be gentle with yourself. Find time to be by yourself to think, feel and behave in the ways you need to. I personally like to be by myself to grieve and cry. I play sad music, light a candle and look at photos. When I am angry I like to vent, play heavy rock music or to sing or write. I am starting to honour the complex nature of my emotions and feelings and I have taken control back. I make it a point to understand all of the emotions and appreciate the importance they have in my life. In all our lives. The key to happiness and relief is in you, in being true to who you are and what you honestly feel.

There is no such thing as a bad emotion! Only bad experiences associated with emotions.

Love and light XX
Paula

Shame on me, Shame on you

Please check out my video's on my Youtube channel or like my Facebook Page for parenting support and information XX

Hi folks,

This was always going to be a tricky blog to write because of the vast impact the emotion SHAME has on pretty much all cultures and groups of people. And to be the bearer of bad news, the links to the negative impact of this emotion stem from childhood and how this emotion is misunderstood, under regulated or even inflicted by parents and/or guardians of the child. This topic can be triggering for people who have experienced trauma in the form of shame and I urge you to notice how you feel and pay attention to any resistances that emerge for you. Treat yourself with love and compassion when tackling shame.

What is Shame?

Let me start off by explaining shame a bit as it can often be confused with 'guilt'. Guilt is when you feel you have done something wrong. Shame is when you feel that your being or who you are is fundamentally wrong. Still confused?
Shame basically makes you feel inadequate or lacking in some way (or all ways) on a deep, personality/character, fundamental level. People who feel this way spend their lives attempting to hide this from the world. It becomes so ingrained that you begin to hide your shame from yourself unconsciously. Like me, many of you will be completely unaware of your shame but well aware of your insecurities and fears. So many of us have insecurities it actually becomes unusual not to have them. Some cultures, like mine, celebrate a level of humility and look down on over confidence and high self esteem. A certain level of shame is almost expected and considered normal in some Western cultures.
Have a think about yourself and your levels of self esteem, I have described a few,what I call 'shame bombs' below:
Perhaps you hate getting in a swimming costume in front of others or have issues with you body or the way you look. Perhaps you get intimidated really easily and feel your opinion will be laughed at or put down. Perhaps you struggle to trust your significant other or friends. Perhaps you have a fiery temper and are unable to control it and your reactions. Perhaps you have an addiction of some sort or battle with substance abuse (Some of you may be familiar with the term 'Dutch courage',which is fondly used to describe how alcohol frees your inhibitions and makes you brave). Perhaps you have a phobia or suffer from a mental illness (eg depression, anxiety, bi-polar, borderline personality disorder, narcissism etc). Perhaps you are either the perpetrator or victim of domestic violence. Think of the impact of low self - esteem, what kinds of feelings associate with this way of being.What does shame FEEL like?

I have discovered my own shame in my journey of self discovery. Perhaps to ease the blow of your own shame being identified, it may help you to hear about mine.

My Journey of self discovery:

I had no idea I was sitting on a bed of shame. What I knew is that I had something big inside that was unprocessed and frightened me. If you start to study psychology and counselling, you develop a theoretical knowledge about things like shame. You know that to work with shame therapeutically you work in a similar way to trauma, carefully and gently. Despite having a real interest in this emotion, I did not make the links to my own experiences and reactions. Those who have read my previous blog will know I lost my mother when I was 17. I always attributed my unexplored pain or what I called my 'vault' to unprocessed grief and some issues I had with my mother as a teenager that were not resolved when she was killed. I am a person who reflects and is not afraid to work on herself. I believe in this process and feel it is vital to understand my way of being and experiences in order to help other's understand theirs. I never ask anyone to go anywhere I wouldn't go myself.

The problem was, I had no idea what I was up against and despite numerous efforts to resolve my grief I was struggling with anxiety and feeling like I was losing myself more and more, the closer I moved into my profession. This was actually quite the opposite. I was starting to grow frustrated with how I was reacting to things. The more I worked with children and families, the more I started to burn out. It was my eventual burn out at the end of the year that pushed me into therapy with someone I chose specifically. My therapist is also my mentor and I absolutely love how he works and thinks. This is important.The relationship between you and your therapist is fundamental. Why you may ask, because this process requires trust and vulnerability. You need to work up to a level of trust to allow yourself to revisit your childhood or perhaps a better way of looking at this is 'inner child work'.

My mum was empathic, loving and warm. Not a day went by that she didn't tell me she loved me when she was alive. Anyone who knew her would be shocked to hear me speaking like this. I did not accept any of this easily either. Week after week I tried to resist this concept, this shame. In terms of attachment (relationship bond, critical to healthy childhood development) I am not secure. To be specific, I have an 'insecure preoccupied' attachment style from an 'anxious ambivalent attachment' [John Bowlby's attachment theory - for those wanting to know more]. What this means in non clinical terms is that my mum was inconsistent at times and I lacked boundaries. My mum struggled to say no and despite very early childhood discipline such as spanking and enforcing rules, I was often given far too much control and say in my upbringing as my childhood progressed. If my mum was unhappy about something, she placed the decision on my shoulders but made me feel guilty for 'wrong' decisions. I lacked guidance in the form of structure and routine. My mum lacked conviction and confidence in her rules. I ruled the roost. My attachment style means that my mum and I were very expressive and close but our emotions were far too entangled and volatile. I was always mature for my age, due to being given too much responsibility too early on, which encouraged the belief that I was able to hear things that were not always appropriate for my age. This was not limited to my mother, most adults forget my age and still do. The role of child and parent was often confused and not clearly defined. I have always been pretty good with my brain and learnt how to manipulate situations into my favour from very early on. We all create defence mechanisms and these are dependent on many things, namely our personality and family culture I believe.

My Shame started as a baby:

Unfortunately this did not all begin in childhood. It started earlier than that. And this is difficult to convey because I do not have clear memories. My shame started as a baby. Shame may occur when needs are neglected. I want to stress that none of this was intentional in my case although I am aware that this is not true for everyone. I have discovered that I wasn't consistently attended to. I had to piece bits of memories together like a puzzle. I wont go into detail but will share a few. I remember my mother saying things like she was lucky if I slept 20 minutes at a time. I remember her suggesting to a young mum to leave her baby to'cry it out' at night. I have seen a photo of my extreme distress when having a bath. I have temperature issues now which suggest I was not attended to in terms of being too hot or too cold. My mother believed that babies don't feel the cold like adults do. So as you can see, there are little things, often based on beliefs from that era, that show neglect but not intentionally. I also needed to take into account the fact that my mum was a single parent, we struggled financially, my mum had her own past trauma's and had health issues (osteoporosis). I have a suspicion she may have suffered from Post Natal Depression, but not much was known back then and support certainly wouldn't have been free in South Africa.

I want to highlight the most important part in this - inconsistency. As a little baby, without thoughts or brain development outside of instincts and drives, I was completely dependent on my single mother to keep me alive. If I needed something, I would have cried or cooed and attempted to get attention. As a baby, my instinct would have been one of extreme fear and anxiety if my needs were not met. This is because on an instinctual level I knew I would literally die if not attended to or left alone in the world. Thus if you leave a baby to cry and cry and ignore them, this creates fear and anxiety due to survival needs. This can be true for children in their formative years too (under 4 or 5 years old). When the child is hungry but does not get fed, or feeling pain but does not get comforted and looked after, or is cold but does not get given something to keep them warm etc, the child becomes insecure. The world does not feel like a safe place. They are not able to understand the complex reasons for why the parent is not attending to them. When a baby is unable to see or sense their parent or an adult, they do not have the brain development to understand that the parent still exists and will come back. They learn that they are not worthy of this attention or the attention is conditional if parents are continuously inconsistent in meeting needs and this creates 'shame'. Even babies will start adapting their behaviour to attempt to get their needs met, thus learning they have to be something else in order to receive love. They live with a fundamental fear and as the years go on this fear and belief that they are unworthy becomes completely embedded and internalised. They learn that being who they are and acting on how they feel is not acceptable.

Every individual is different:

Each individual person will react differently to this and develop their own ways of coping. These coping mechanisms are often valuable in childhood but become maladaptive later on. For instance I developed a temper. If I felt someone was attacking me in some way, I fought back. I developed structures and things in my life to 'prove myself' and I like control.In fact I need control and even as a child I was extremely bossy and battled to share. I don't take to authority well. I become overly familiar with people quickly and my close friends are like family to me, yet I always feel this is conditional. Underneath I often feel like I have to give something in order to receive. I question people who love me for me and for years accepted that people like me for certain parts of me but would not like me if I expressed what I really felt or what I really needed. I wasn't dishonest, I just showed people parts of myself depending on what I thought they would respect and like. I am lucky because I am extremely good at reading people and have made this way of life something almost innate- but not quite. This, I believe, is the reason people say that you can feel lonely even though you have so many people in your life that love you. This sentence is another shame bomb. You feel lonely because you are alone. No one is seeing you. No one is hearing you. No one truly knows or understands you. You don't even know or understand yourself.

Shame creates a feeling of emptiness:

People with shame often feel an emptiness inside that cannot seem to be filled. It's that feeling of lacking, of not belonging. This is shame. Many of us have learnt to repress certain emotions such as anger or sadness. A good example is gender stereotypes where men are discouraged from the more 'feminine' emotions such as sadness and fear. Thus my culture is full of men who suffer in silence and are unable to even talk to their friends about their pain. Shame is a powerful emotion and is bigger that most people know. We use every trick in the book to avoid feeling it and often these include destructive or harmful behaviours.

Why punishment creates shame:

Understanding what shame is and how it operates is extremely important for all people. Punishment is often our first port of call for pretty much most 'bad' behaviours. Punishment, without understanding and help for the person, exacerbates problems. Look at the prison system or issues with substance abuse for a good example of this. We need to be tackling shame and helping people find ways of healing this. Teaching people why they feel the way they do and helping them to find healthier ways to react. Bringing shame out to the surface releases it's power on you. Punishment creates more shame. This is why I am completely against spanking. This is one of the most shaming strategies a parent can use. If you have already done this, it is important to spend some time building on your child's self esteem and teaching them about emotions and how to better react to them. I know this is hard to hear, but spanking a child for a bad behaviour is like punishing them for your lack of ability to teach them the correct behaviour. I always find it ironic that parents will spank their child in order to teach them not to hit, or bite, or push etc. You are not modelling the correct behaviour when you do this, rather they can see that you hit, so the problem must not be the hitting,it must be them, they are the problem...shame bomb! Children are resilient, you can completely turn this around! Teach your children about emotions and give them appropriate ways to cope with how they are feeling.

There is always hope!

All is not lost for adults too. The trick is to re-parent, soothe and nurture yourself. For those who struggle, my best suggestion is to make use of a therapist that understands and works with attachment trauma (most experienced practitioners do). Always be kind to yourself and notice when you are being your own abuser. Actively aim to stop this. Cut yourself some slack and start honestly asking yourself what you really need.

XX
Paula