Meeting Difficult Emotions with Compassion

Can I Tell You A Secret

Pssst.... Here's my secret 🤫. I started this email almost a month ago! January 29th to be exact. I found myself struggling to finish it at the time because I think I was honestly in the middle of being overwhelmed. The irony is truly everywhere as I was talking about burnout...

Now I am coming back to write, I hesitate to delete what I started because there is still value in the words below. They are useful, honest, and can represent how things take time to work through and process which is what I want to talk to you about today. So feel free to take a peek at what I started and then pick back up with me to hear my current thoughts and what I have learned along the way this last month. 😊

Hello Lovely,

I hope you are having a good day and end to your last weekend of January. The new year has officially started and wow, it seems like time is just flying by. I have started to notice the sun staying out for longer and our days are growing bit by bit. I know January can be a really difficult month. The weather is a bit gloomy, seasonal affective disorder is at an all-time high, and the joy of the holidays is over leaving not much else to look forward to. You may have been dealing with some emotional unloading after the holidays as they can bring up comparison, perfectionism, and anxieties all associated with that time of year and being around other people in large amounts. I know I experience variations of those feelings most holiday seasons and am still working to lessen these effects each year. All this to say, if January is a hard month for you and your mental health, I hope you can give yourself kindness, acceptance, and love. You can join me now, maybe placing your hand on your heart (or another place where you feel a connection to yourself), take a full breath, and see if you can bring a sense of compassion to mind. Can you allow that compassion to spread through your body, or hover over your heart?

I am writing with a few vulnerabilities today. I know this community is one where acceptance thrives and my words and experiences will be held with soft hands. I am very grateful for that and for you. My personal self-compassion practice over the past few months has been centered around overwhelm. There has been a lot of deep work in therapy around my connection and reactions to overwhelm (shout out to my lovely therapist Jenny) .....

And that is where we left it.

I had plans to talk about how you can battle and overcome overwhelm with certain strategies and give some (hopefully) helpful tips. I still want to do all those things but with new insight and context. I was feeling a big block around talking to you about this topic while it still felt messy, imperfect, and muddled hence why this email didn't make it out to you last month. Who wants to read something muddled and messy? Well here's the thing, when it comes to topics like perfectionism, burnout, overwhelm, and even mental health in general there is a lot of messy, muddled, middle stuff in fact most all of it is messy middle stuff 🤷‍♀️. If you have ever stepped into self-reflection and started challenging your own beliefs you know this feeling. Changing the stories we tell about ourselves can leave us feeling stuck or lost in the middle without a clear answer to move forward. This is frustrating, scary, and debilitating but it is also transformative ✨. Who wants to watch a movie where the hero knows exactly what to do and simply fixes their problems with a few simple steps? We know the messy middle is where the growth happens but it is also hard to be living through.

In the past few Monday night group classes we have been diving into discussion all around meeting difficult emotions (I had to look up the right title as I default to calling it 'dealing with' difficult emotions so that shows you where I am on the subject HA!). In her self-compassion workbook, Kristin Neff outlines 5 stages for meeting difficult emotions. I won't go into each step here but, the middle 3 steps are very hard and messy. One participant stated how she found herself continuing to get stuck in stages 2 and 3, and I think that is the whole point!

Even after we feel like we have the perfect solve or solution with a step-by-step process forward a few days later we are back again in a similar spot. This is because there is no 'one' answer. There is no solution to get rid of or "deal" with difficult emotions. Life is entirely cyclic. When you are brought back to a similar moment or emotion how can you remind yourself what you learned the last time you were here and then move forward fully knowing you will probably bump into it again? That is where your growth comes from, not the big win, perfect solution, or "fixing it" but practicing processing and cycling through the emotions.

I don't want to share how to battle against overwhelm, perfectionism, or burnout. I want to share how you can learn through your cycles of emotions and come out the other side with a new understanding, a deeper compassion for yourself, and the knowledge of how to meet up with that emotion again. Battling against it would be battling against yourself and you don't need any more battles to fight, especially those coming from your own mind. As always with these topics I am learning and gaining new understanding as we go along too. I am right there with you in the messy middle💪.

So, here is what I learned after this past month of overwhelmed and deep perfectionist cycling 😬.

There is not one great thing to solve these issues. If anyone tells you otherwise, I would caution some questioning and checking in with yourself about the truth in that statement. I have pushed through new strategies, planning, routines, books, and mental bargaining with myself saying I just need to figure out the magic secret to handling everything in my life and I won't have to feel these feelings anymore. If your internal dialogue sounds similar followed by critical thoughts of yourself when you can't figure out the magic recipe, I understand and my heart goes out to you because I have been there too. How do you check back in with reality? How do you have the honest conversation with yourself to slow down and not be mad when you can't do it all? I have been trying to find compassion while in the messy middle. Can you have grace for yourself when meeting your feelings and care towards the inner optimist which continues to try and hold on to the false belief that you can and need to be superhuman? Can you allow yourself to be human and let that be more than enough?

Here is how I have been practicing not pushing away these feelings but finding ways to meet them. It starts by unraveling the block. I often see overwhelm and burnout in myself as a failure. The internal dialogue becomes "You didn't plan well enough, you could have done better then you wouldn't feel like this, it's your own stupid fault for letting it get this far". All of this shaming talk to myself makes me want to hide and bury those feelings far far away where no one, not even myself can see them.

I don't think I am alone in this. It's why anyone in a professional or personal role who is butting up against burnout does not want to talk about it. It is lathered in shame, critical self-talk, and comparison. "I should be able to handle this, everyone else can." "What is wrong with me, why can't I do this and get things figured out".

But here is what we know about processing through and meeting difficult emotions when they are connected to shame.

1. We have to name it to tame it. If we don't stop long enough to recognize what we are feeling our brains won't have the full knowledge for what to do and it can trip up our fight, flight, freeze response. Pause and name your feelings, and bring them towards the light.

2. We have to feel it to heal it. Pushing the emotion aside, burying it down underneath layers of shame, and never letting it see the light of day is not helpful. I know it sounds very obvious but, I see this in myself a lot. If I don't acknowledge it exists then it can't hurt me. The other side of that coin is, that if you don't acknowledge the hurt is there you can't give it medicine, love, or healing and it just keeps hurting.

3. We have to give ourselves compassion to keep moving forward. I think of this as a co-step with the one above. Since we know when shame is latched on with another emotion it becomes incredibly sticky and hard to untangle them. This is why knowing the antidotes to shame can help separate it from the other emotion and gives us space to process through it. Once shame is out of the way we can begin to heal and soften. The two biggest antidotes to shame are to talk about it and not let it hide in the darkness and fester. Talk about your feelings with someone who has earned the right to hold your story and your heart. Then give your heart compassion. Talk to yourself like you would a friend, a child, or a pet who is feeling the same thing you are. This helps to uncover your compassionate voice which can be hard to find if we are more used to listening and speaking with our inner critical voice.

In my experience, once you have moved through these steps it is significantly easier to meet your emotions and process through them. It's not foolproof, it's not a magic recipe or the secret sauce to fix it and get rid of the emotion. I do know it helps your emotions become more transient, where they can ebb and flow naturally and we can experience their full ranges as humans.

And one last reminder: it's a practice, it's cyclic, and it never needs to be perfect.

Thanks for listening (reading). In response to processing my own overwhelm and emotions I have decided to connect with you here via email bi-weekly. Also, I know it can be helpful for me to send these out on the same day every week, but that doesn't fit into how I want/need to show up and connect with you so be on the lookout for these emails anytime throughout the week. In the meantime, please know you can always find me in the studio, on social media, or in my inbox. I would love to chat with you about this topic and get your insights in any of those spaces.

Lots of Love from my heart to yours 💖

-Janae