Feel Your Feelings

We’ve been talking about how to Drop the Mom Guilt. Guilt is a feeling which comes from your thoughts so if you don’t want to feel it, just switch the thought. Easy enough, right? Well, easier said than done to actually figure out what you were thinking that causes the guilt and also not so easy always to think of what to think instead. But beyond that, sometimes “thought swapping” doesn’t “work” because we are trying to do it in the “heat of the moment”.

I find that guilt is an emotion that i’m feeling after the “heat of the moment” so doing thought work if pretty effective to replace my guilty thoughts with compassionate ones. But especially if it’s escalated to shame, even the guilty moments can turn into their own “heat of the moment” moments also.

If that doesn’t instantly make sense, let me illustrate. Your kid just hit another kid. You think some sort of thought that makes you feel angry and you yell at kid number one and forcibly jerk them away from the other one. Then a lecture ensues about being nice and she’s younger than you and bla bla bla meanwhile you’re not anywhere close to being nice to this person who is much younger than you but you get your anger out on older kid in a justified moment of rage because you were the younger kid once and it is extra triggering for you when the big kid picks on the little kid. All of those feelings that you are feeling are in that heat of the moment. Defensiveness, anger, rage, etc. Which you did not deal with in your ideal mom sort of way. So later, after you’ve cooled off and are seeing things more rationally, you begin to feel guilty about the way you showed up in that interaction. You start with the shoulds. I shouldn’t have yelled. I should have kept my cool. I should have this, i shouldn’t have that. Which makes you feel guilty. Then you remember what you’ve been learning from this blog this week so you try on compassion. New thoughts with grace like “I shouldn’t have but it’s ok. I”m a human. humans make mistakes. especially with baggage from my own childhood to deal with. I’m doing the best i can and so are the kids. they have big emotions they don’t know how to deal with and so do I. we’re all a work in progress and it’s all good.” etc. This is thought swapping after the fact. Easier to do when you’ve switched back to your higher rational brain.

Thought swapping in harder when the prefrontal cortex in the brain is offline and you are running on primal instinct. That is what is happening with your child and yourself in the hitting/yelling scene. So you probably won’t be able to redirect your own brain in those moments and that’s when feeling your feelings comes in. When we feel an emotion we can react to it, act out on it, or just feel it. The first two options are primal and very practiced. The third may be a whole new concept for you. When we think a thought, our brain releases a vibration into our bodies which we have labeled as a feeling. The brain is sending the body a message and all we need to do with the message is receive it. Feel it. But a lot of these vibrations don’t feel so good so instead of just feeling them, we try to get rid of them as fast as we can. So in the example above, when we yell at the kid for hitting his sister, we release that burst of emotion we just had and temporarily feel “better”. But after the fact we feel a new bad- guilt- for handling it that way. So, in the heat of the moment instead of reacting to the emotion we can just feel the emotion. How? I’ll teach you that tomorrow! stay tuned.