NOTE: Released the day after the 2024 election. Content reflects timely audience concerns.
Hey Fuckers, I wasn't particularly expecting to put this episode out today, but I am squeezing it into my morning.
So we're back series within a series within a series for the spooksters.
And it's a particularly appropriate day to discuss having some hard inner issues.
If you try to love yourself...
And therefore, try to get into yourself and spend real quality time with yourself as a whole, undistracted being after perhaps a very long time away and perhaps in some very challenging circumstances....
The next lurking thing that you might find is... sadness, grief, and anger.
And a terrible amalgamation of infinite feelings that might come grabbing for you.
Let's talk about the big, negative, drowning emotions.
First up, what do I mean by sadness or grief or anger? Aren't they dissimilar? Shouldn't we know?
Well, they are actually all related, and we're going to start here at the bottom.
Sadness.
Sadness is a sign that a human need is not being met.
We have a lot of important human needs, more than you probably are aware of. Please visit the nonviolent communication episodes to learn all about them. (Or find them here)
Sadness exists in order to tell us that an emotional need is going unfulfilled. or fulfillment has recently been lost.
In my experience, you can have pockets of sad that are split up by these needs, so that there are layers to your sadness for you to uncover.
And sadness feels like a lot of things. It can include being bored, frustrated, watery, or wanting to just be alone.
Many moods and behaviors can be birthed from the sads.
In its purest and most acute form, it feels like semi-sharp clustered pains in the chest and organs.
But over time, sadness sits differently and in different selves and that includes how it sits differently in the same person across time.
Now let's talk grief.
Grief is lingering sadness due to a significant loss.
Possibly, emotional needs were being met through a relationship and the other party is now gone, physically or relationally or both.
The result is grief, telling you, this sucks. This was important to me. Something huge is missing now in the needs department. They're like black holes being punched into your internal galaxy that you can only feel the space around.
Grief also presents in a billion and one ways like sadness, but in its pure form, grief feels like a resonant, aching pain in the chest and guts, or like a void.
You might consider it to be the echoes of the pangs of sadness ringing through your being.
Or you might see grief as the void of a response, the non-answer after one's sadness has been calling out for a person who once filled some need, but that situation or person doesn't exist to meet the need anymore, to answer the call.
The silence, the lack of answer reverberates through the system and you get grief.
And anger is the preferred form of sadness and grief for many of us.
Anger serves a lot of purpose in our lives.
It protects us, it motivates us, it pushes us out of avoidance.
It's a signal that something is off which feels risky to us. And that can be in the area of real survival or ego survival.
Also, anger is the secondary emotion that many of us prefer to feel and generally live with as compared to the alternative choices of being bummed out.
Because anger often gives us a thing to do, or a thing to fantasize about doing, or a fake conversation to have, never-endingly, all alone.
Anger keeps you busy and keeps the impression of having some pathway to control or emotional retaliation.
Whereas sadness and grief tend to halt us in our tracks, lost in emotion.
So all of this being said, you might notice one or two or all three of these big negative emotions.... and any number of other emotional entities getting pulled in by your bad vibes.
Once you're living with buried sadness, grief, and anger, it's not too different from an ancient Native American burial ground underfoot.
Bad things tend to start happening.
We can even have these large emotional conglomerates, as I call them, that start sticking together.
Conditions in which sadness doesn't stop changing form or proliferating, like the bad negative energy, creates similar thoughts and behaviors that create more similar emotions.
More and more negative feelings begin spawning, which also tends to create negative events in your life, which then create more negative feelings.
It's like feeding a mogwai after midnight and growing your own gremlins.
So you may be a bundle of frustration and sadness, boredom, aggression, helplessness, et cetera, et cetera, that makes no sense to you at first.
All the feels are sewn together and they can't be pulled apart as easily as saying, for instance, "yep, I know what this is, sadness because I'm not feeling regularly positively collaborative in my work environment. And I know what that is, frustration because my one coworker won't answer my goddamn emails on time."
It can be a lot more confusing than that.
And what do we do with emotions that are in this big tangled state?
Well, the first question is, are you in a condition to do work with them?
There are times in life when we're primed to make breakthroughs and process difficult things that we're carrying.
And there are times when this is not well-starred:
- We're in a destabilized state.
- We're surrounded by even more negative events and emotion.
- Our wounds are too fresh, et cetera.
Do we do work or not do work with these emotions?
It's challenging because there are also times when we really don't know HOW to do work because we don't know why we feel how we feel.
We might not even be able to name how we do feel.
- Maybe we're still in the situation that's causing the confusion.
- Maybe we're sad about something that we didn't know we cared about.
- Maybe we're affected due to the demons of generational trauma passed down through methylation or verbal transmission.
- Maybe these are emotions or curses we've held on to for our parents and others for so long that we don't know any different, and we don't register them as being emotions at all. This is how we think life feels.
There are times when our feelings are mysterious to us and getting up our own buttholes about it, trying to sort it all out really doesn't help us to solve that enigma.
There are times that we're just poking the bear when we try.
Attempting emotional work
And also, we can't forget that our emotions... sadness in particular, they're potent self-work material.
So we do at least want to try to do this work.
Recall this graphic from the semi-recent post, What Does Inner Work Really Mean? (below)
Emotions have the ability to pull up our dankest issues from the core of our beings so we can make them conscious, check for logical holes, and edit for accuracy and self-authenticity.
Not having or investigating our emotions deprives us of these useful tools, these methods of connecting with our oldest wounds and fucked up core beliefs so we can change them.
Having the emotions and refusing to make sense of them forever is also a self and relationship partner disservice.
There might be times when it feels like we can't do all of this difficult work.
There might be times when it feels like we want to block out our feelings.
But truly what we need to do is have them and process them. Otherwise, you become emotionally backed up, numbed out, and unavailable as you drift through hordes of ghostly feelings for a long time afterwards.
I'm saying I do at least recommend attempting to distill your big negative, often rather clusterfucky emotions, down to their simplest form so you can work with them.
That form is sadness.
Working with sadness
The most negative emotions we have are related to the sads somehow or another.
Even anger, outrage, deep confusion about recent political events.
The feeling is distorted into different experiences as we try to protect ourselves, bumbling through the world as we can.
But underneath all of that is the sads; recognition that one of our needs or many of our needs are not being met.
So do your best when you're with yourself, when you're working with yourself.
Try to give yourself permission to explore underneath these other emotions.
What are you sad about?
If you have clues, things you've been thinking about consciously or unconsciously, that's useful.
Watch your dreams, watch your thoughts in between thoughts. Pay attention to memory blips and notice your impulses.
What are the things that you keep giving your attention to? What is slipping out in conversation with only yourself or when others are involved?
Your brain gives you clues.
Watch it, investigate, and you will find out what your emotions are tethered to.
The purpose of sads: needs fulfillment
If you can, try defining what is causing the sadness.
Through having the emotion and bringing it to the logical prefrontal cortex for strategizing, you can figure out how the sadness relates to your innate mental, emotional, and biological life needs.
What's missing that your conscious mind has not noticed, but some parts of you have?
Or your conscious mind has noticed, but maybe it's not paying attention to the actual need underneath, it's getting caught up in that outrage spiral instead.
If you figure this out, if you find out what needs are not being fulfilled that's creating sadness, you can then plan out how to apply whatever this information is telling you.
So your needs can be fulfilled in your future endeavors.
If you're in a shitty demoralizing position, it's time to start searching for a job.
If you're always on edge at home, you are lacking a sense of safety... Maybe it's time to get rid of your roommate or move elsewhere. Create new space in your place. Start therapy.
If you have no community, you might want to figure out what you really care about and start to do that thing in public.
If you are having a deep sense of unsafety and fear and are not finding satisfactory need fulfillment on the other side of that right now in particular, well....
What can you do to start building a sense of safety and control in your own micro environment, since you can't control that of the entire nation?
And you get it. Identify the missing need, patch that hole slowly over time as you figure out how to, and you build your strength.
Thus, you end up reducing your sadness permanently, which will also cut back on the anger, resentment, frustration, rage, demoralization, even mental and emotional exhaustion, which can all be caused by unmet needs and ignoring your starved cries for help.
I'll say that again.
If you are sad or pervasively negative, something is missing.
A need is not being fulfilled.
You might not know that you have this need. You may have written the need off as impossible to fulfill. You may not know that you are in control of fulfilling this need, that you can give yourself your own sense of peace and safety and security outside of what's going on in the nation around you.
Regardless, your system is screaming for these things to be accomplished, for your needs to be met, with a mighty case of the blues, which often gets distorted into heavier genres.
If you can have the emotion safely while watching or expressing your subconscious stream, you can possibly learn what it is that you need and then make amendments.
Thus, these emotions can dissipate forever.
But.
A big problem that might be blockading all of this work is not being able to let yourself feel the emotions or to honestly feel your authentic emotions.
Maybe you KNOW that you're sad, grieving, pissed, but there are corks in all these bottles cemented into position months, years, or decades ago.
You're not terrorized by these emotions, but you know that they linger.
Then what?
Ways to work with blocked emotion
Then change things up so your "manager parts" that normally keep a lid on your big inconvenient feelings goes out fishing.
Make sure that you have time away from your work and obligations.
Get into a new place. Don't try to feel your feels in a space where you never let yourself feel your feels.
And make sure you're far away from other people if that helps you while you do it. Some of us can't have feelings around people for the shame of it. Some of us can only have feelings around other people because they were conditioned to believe that other people allow or validate or make it safe to have feelings. Figure out which camp you're in and use it.
Use prompts from your childhood when the emotions possibly flowed little more easily.
Use personal effects like pictures or childhood interests like a certain Disney movie and try to spark some recognition of how you feel, which will probably connect you with even deeper emotional states from your youth.
And finally, use empathy for your benefit. You're feeling how others are feeling? Great. Feel for the ones who are sad.
Hint, there's a good chance that you're not empathizing, but projecting. When you notice a big negative empathetic moment, go ahead and see if that helps you to have your own feeling yourself by turning it around and investigating.
These tips might help loosen the stranglehold on your feelings, especially the buried sadness.
And if you are angry...
It's logical to think that that's the end of it. You're just mad. It's big. It's loud. It makes a very convincing case.
But also, try to consider if this anger is a protective layer to peel back, to get to the sadness, to get to the unmet needs.
A covering, a hard shell, might exist that you normally don't let yourself remove.
To do this, it might especially help to be in a new environment as compared to your usual digs.
There's a very good chance that you've sown so much anger and angst and anxiety into the places you normally pace that that's all you can access there.
Beneath your angry thoughts, your outrage, if you explore a level below them, if you don't take your loudest, most conscious yelling and run with it, but instead slow down, get into your own little cocoon, get softer, get quiet, and investigate your more elusive thoughts and feelings...
You might find a stabbing pain or a cognitive poke, a thought that leads from hurting to raisin' hell. A logical bridge that exists inside of you from "ouch, ouch, ouch," to, "and this is how I will exact my revenge!
It's easy to get caught up on that bridge, to run between sadness and visions of thrashing someone verbally or figuratively, especially as a way to release mental steam, (we think).
But when you run an angry gauntlet, consider what would happen if instead you slowed down?
... If the sads would start rising, if they would start overtaking and flooding the logical panger bridge that exists in you between sadness and vengeance?
Could you get down to just the sads and try to investigate the meaning of the hurt as it rises up from inside of you?
Emotional dissipation
That said, even if you do do all of this work, it doesn't mean that these emotions will immediately go away.
And it might not be the right time to try to understand or resolve them.
The work might not work. You might just need to have your feelings without expecting anything afterwards... Because there's a lot more digging work to do to comprehend them, or because there's nothing you can do right now to change them.
Grief, for instance, just needs to be had.
You can't rush healing from a loss.
So let me state rather plainly, these big negative feelings, they take time.
You probably won't tap into them today and find them gone tomorrow, unfortunately.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
And there's nothing wrong with you.
And you don't need them to be gone in this moment or any particular moment when you snap your fingers and wish for the best.
These emotions are here for your own development to understand what's really important to you, what you really need and value in so many diverse pockets of life.
To disband your emotions immediately would suggest that you really don't care about a goddamn thing.
Start seeing your feelings as signs of all the shits that you give and start seeing that as being a positive quality.
But in these cases, when there's nothing you can immediately do about a feeling to make it go away.
Or really, if you're just not sure what to do about any of your big ghastly emotions that are coming up.
You need to have it. You need to allow the experience....
But if you struggle with that, without having a next step...
Feeling without fixing trick
What I do is state the emotion out loud. Claim it. And make up a song about it as my replacement behavior for trying to rush off and fix it.
Don't worry, a song which is no more complicated than singing the statement of my own emotion aloud several times over and making it pretty fucking stupid.
If anyone could observe me at home or working outside or going for a long hike, they might hear me often singing....
"I am sad. my God, I am so, so sad."
It's the way that I stop myself from jumping into distraction or fixing behaviors that aren't going to work.
And instead, I just state the truth to myself. Balls. I'm sad. Like all the time.
It often gets more descriptive over time as I stay with myself and my feelings.
"Holy shit, my guts are twisting. Jesus fuck, I am seriously crushed. Sad, sad, sad, sad, sad, sad. I'll even include some follow ups stating what the bigger issue is as I start to uncover it. Yeah, I'm sad and I don't know what to do about it. None of this is fucking fixable. I don't even know what I'm so goddamn bummed about."
And I assure myself...
"But I am sad and I notice it. It's okay. I can feel how I feel. I can cry. There's nothing wrong with that. Except ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch."
Yeah, I know. It's stupid. And if any part of you thinks that I'm joking, I am not.
This is my strategy for allowing myself to have negative, painful, drowning, horrible feelings and staying with them.
Instead of disassociating with distractions and comforts, instead of flying into get shit done mode where I try to "responsible" my way out of pain, instead of pumping myself full of chemicals, instead of shaming myself for feeling or panicking about what it all means, or becoming obsessively analytical or angry...
I just have the feeling.
I state it to myself repeatedly, make it as silly as possible, and then just like with stress, this allows me to be with the emotion without leaving my higher observer brain behind, without losing overarching control and getting lost in the emotion.
The best part is.
This strategy is not stagnating.
You can have the emotion and stay with it while doing other shit and reminding yourself that it's allowed. So you stay self-associated while you are actively engaged in the world.
And this is a big step for a lot of us.
Just sing your song to keep yourself tuning back into you and your feelings and your existence.
And in this way, you also begin to integrate action with emotion in a way that helps with digestion.
Movement often assists with jangling emotions out of place and then breaking their energy down, transmuting it into action.
So doing errands, chores, driving, preparing for the day... I sing my emotional naming song and don't have to give up my to-do list for sadness.
You can do the same thing with any of your emotions.
"Fucking Lord, I am frustrated today. Seriously resentful at the goddamn world. Stay away from me because I'm a fucking psycho this week. Dick and taint, I want to drive this person off the goddamn road. I'm so pissy. What the fuck? I'm a danger to everyone."
"But it's okay to be angry as long as I don't act on it or hurt anyone. I'm probably really just sad."
It helps. Because it t pulls in your education and your higher mind to reframe and contextualize what you're feeling.
It cuts out some of the piss at the same time because it's pretty difficult to be mad when you're being this ridiculous.
Changing behaviors
You can even use this little sing song trick as a way to break your behavioral patterns.
When anger is about to create a behavior that you are not happy about, instead of doing the behavior, you can state it or sing it to yourself.
"Wow. I am really going to yell. shit. I want to slam this fucking door right now."
But then don't.
It works again as an effective replacement behavior and continually makes you more in control of the time that you have between your emotions and your reactions.
That's a big trauma win.
So's this:
Self-Care in emotion
Overall, when it comes to these big negative lingering emotions, expect to the big three, sadness, grief, and anger....
plus a lot of spicy toppings in your own personal flavor profile....
Practice noticing what's happening inside of you and not trying to change it or stunt it, but instead maintain acknowledgement of the emotion and adjust yourself around it.
Bend with the emotion, physically, mentally, and behaviorally, rather than rigidly holding yourself in a particular state or condition that rejects unwanted, inconvenient, or difficult emotions, as we usually have to do in life.
For instance, the grief you know that you've held for years or decades.
Maybe it's time to experience it, to give yourself the respect of being heard and staying with you, even in your resounding, echoing pain.
Not shaming, not shunning, not stunting any of it.
Just hearing your pain and confirming, yes, self, it hurts. "You're right, it hurts. I hear you, I feel you, I'm with you, we hurt."
Stay on your own side.
Hold your own hand through the darkness and the depths.
You are okay. You are not wrong. You're in pain and it's alright.
You're heard and you're not alone.
It is a noble goal, feeling those legacy feelings.
And you might want to do so by just stating plainly what it is, and what it's about.
"It hurts. My rib cage is aching. I am sad. I grieve. Holy shit, did I mention it hurts? But I'm okay. I am breathing. It is okay to hurt. I hurt because I miss my family. I miss who this person once was to me."
"I miss feeling safe and protected. I miss this emotional connection that helped me to feel alive and seen. I'm sad, I hurt, I grieve. And that's okay. I'm not wrong. I'm not alone."
Remember to tell yourself also that this will take time to release and that you're going to give it to yourself.
"While I stay with myself incrementally, throughout the days when I can muster the effort, I will be here with me. There is nowhere more important for me to be."
You can say it straight, like I just did. You can make it into a jingle, like I annoyingly did before that.
Or you can get real deep. Go, Eilish. Go, Roan.
"S-A-D it really sucks. my God, this fucking sucks."
I don't know. Match your mood and work with that mood, trying to improve it even while you have your hard feelings.
And know the benefit.
Benefits of the work
No matter what. If you are staying associated with your feelings and you are associating with recognition of your lifetime, it will start to move the dial for you, allowing you to view your feelings, identify them, and start placing them without trying to force it, without trying to make this a find and fix it experience, without avoiding and rejecting your own emotion, which is a method in which we reject ourselves.
Feeling your feelings is self-acceptance.
Trying to fix your feelings or pretend they aren't there, it's continual self-rejection. Dismissal of your needs, your past experience, and your forward-directed life.
It's stopping you from ever reaching the goal of having self-compassion or self-love, self-care, and self-supported growth, which come from that self-compassion, keeping you trapped in trauma to keep rejecting your own emotions.
Conc
Let's have some feels and use them for our own evolution.
Report back. I'd love to hear your lyrics if you get sing-songy with it, especially in this current day. I think they might be rather creative.
And please know that there's nothing wrong with being sad.
It isn't a sign of weakness or waste or worthlessness. It doesn't mean you're too sensitive or focusing on the wrong things.
You don't know how you're sad and you don't have to immediately. You can just be fucking sad. It's okay to have the emotion.
And there's nothing wrong with the slowdowns that it inspires either.
They're meant to get you to stop what you're doing, to reconsider your life, to focus on your unmet needs that you are not paying attention to.
But first, this happens in the human system by making you rather...
sad.
And plenty of other big, drowning, emotions.
This has been sadness, grief, anger, giant negative emotional conglomerates, the big drowning feels that many of us are processing on this day.
And I'll see you at our next attraction, which we will all arrive at safely in one piece.
