Episode #19: Getting Real & Honest With Your Emotions

Do you let yourself get real with your emotions?

Or do you emotionally gaslight yourself?

Collectively, we’re still way behind in terms of emotional intelligence. So it just makes sense that when we’re uncomfortable with our own deep or dark emotions, that we’ll also be uncomfortable with other people’s.

While we’ve gotten really good at ignoring or minimizing our emotions, that’s not the same thing as healing!

Listen in to get inspired to hold more emotional space for yourself-and for those who you love the most.

In This Episode:

Find out why it’s so difficult for us collectively to face our emotions
Learn why emotional honesty with yourself is so important
Get inspired to hold emotional space for those around you
Much more!

Learn How To Accept Your Emotions Episode 19 Transcript

Hello, gorgeous baby. Welcome back to the podcast. It’s your girl Jenn, and I’m so excited to be here with you today. I’m a coach and healer and creator of the Self-Worth project.

I think I updated you last week that I had just created a website and started doing more social media stuff for this specific podcast. Even though I have like basically no followers still on Instagram, I get feels just really good. Everything feels really aligned for me right now, and I’m just really excited to bring all this beautiful information to you in this pretty new package.

That is also secretly a reminder to come and follow me on Instagram. If you love this podcast, if you like my work, then you want to join me over there as well. I’m still active on the Aligned Life account as well, but I thought we were going to justmix it up and kind of keep these things separate for the time being. So be sure to follow me there. I’ll leave a link for that in the show notes.

But today’s episode is super powerful.

I actually recorded a whole episode for you earlier this week, and then I ended up throwing it out. Sometimes when you do something, you feel a little bit out of alignment with it. And that’s exactly how I felt about that.

Honestly, sometimes I come and sit down and record a podcast for you. And then almost as soon as I’m finished it, I think, oh my god, like what did I even say? And then when I edit it, I’m like, oh, actually this is actually good. Like I actually did make some points. Like I guess I go into a weird trans and don’t remember what I’m actually saying when I’m talking to you guys sometimes.

But I didn’t even listen to this full one.

This is round two for this episode this week. And today I want to talk about the power of being authentic, but specifically in regards to our emotions.

We’ve touched on emotions in, I think, two episodes ago when I was speaking about how if you were not able to have a full emotional experience, when you were a child, if your parents could not give you emotional support.

The Children Of Emotionally Immature Parents

Can I just say, yeah, in the 80s and 90s, I don’t think our parents were learning how to regulate their emotions and also figuring out how to parent us and support our emotions. That just was not part of the parenting conversation.

I do talk about generations sometimes in the way that we were raised. And I know every time I do this, someone’s going to come to me and say, like, oh, I’m Gen Z. My parents didn’t do that or whatever.

They’re going to try to review what I’m saying based on the generation terms that I’m using. And it’s not really about that. I’m not here to like just always diss the boomers, although there’s a lot to diss, to be fair.

But that is not the point.

The point is just that we have all been collectively growing and changing and shifting as a society. And thank God for that. Thank the goddess for that.

And one of the things that we have learned collectively over the last, I would say, 20 years is more emotional intelligence.

But I still look around in the world and I see just how uncomfortable emotions still make people and not only our emotions, but the emotions of other people.

I’m going to get into both of these things today. One of the things you really need to do as a life skill, just to be a happy, productive, confident human is to understand your emotions and to not be afraid of them. We think that we are logical creatures, then when we have something like a bad habit, we get really down on ourselves.

Like, why do I do this?

Why do I compulsively go back to doing this thing over and over again?
When it turns out that the bad behaviors, the buffering behaviors, the addictive type behaviors, those aren’t there because we are weak or because we are lacking in moral fiber.

They usually happen because we are avoiding feeling a certain way. Many times you are running away from shame, many times you are not wanting to face a fear. Many times maybe you just don’t even want to bring up anger or judgment or whatever it is.

Stop Intellectualizing Your Emotions

I think part of the confusion here is that we know how to intellectualize our emotions, but we don’t know how to feel them.

You know when somebody did something to you, you might feel upset about it.

Like the breakup example, I talk about this quite frequently. I find that we live in this culture that really like hurries people through the breakup process and tries to hurry people back out and to start dating before they’re actually ready.

That is a form of emotional gaslighting. And it’s on one level, a person not being able to be comfortable with where they are, not feeling comfortable with admitting that they are in pain and that they are hurting.

That’s when you start to gaslight yourself. That is when you start to push yourself to do things that you probably wouldn’t do in that particular situation.

That means like ending up dating somebody that you probably wouldn’t date because of course you have to lower your standards a little bit when your drive is to just get into a relationship rather than getting into one that is good for you, right?

Stop Emotionally Gaslighting Other People

The second part about that is the societal part. Like I said, we also shame other people for experiencing emotions.

I’ve had this happen as well in this exact same situation, like feeling that pressure from friends that are just like, oh yeah, just get back out there. And again, we know that like rushing from one relationship into another is not the best thing usually.

Usually you are taking all your wounds. You’re not coming into it healed. You’re coming into it with even more emotional baggage. You haven’t had time to process the lessons.

Then when you involve another person with this, like this situation, like very often falls apart dramatically somewhere down the line. And that just really isn’t ultimately that great for either person, right?

Not to say that every rebound relationship is doomed to failure. But let’s just say that most of them are not in our best interests.

That’s a very specific example, but I hope you can see what I’m trying to say here. It is our inability to sit in that discomfort, our inability to not admit how we’re really feeling. That is the form of self-gast lighting.

That is how we trip ourselves up because there really funny thing is here. When we run away from that and when we pretend to be somewhere else and when we pretend to be someone that we’re not quite yet, we’re not healing.

It feels like you’re healing maybe in the moment because you distracted yourself from the pain, but that pain is still inside and that pain and that shame and that feeling. It will come out one way or another, but most of us just keep putting a lid on the same thing.

It’s like we put a lid on the pot and then the lid pops off again. We put the lid back on the pop and the lid pops off again.

It just gets harder and harder for us to keep that lid down because we never dealt
with the core feeling.

We could never admit it to ourselves when it was happening and now that it’s months or
years down the line, it’s even harder to admit that because you also have this logic now like I should just be over it by now or that was so long ago it shouldn’t matter anymore.

You Lose Your Power When You Pretend To Something That You’re Not

But again, that is not the way emotions work and we are just really doing ourselves a
disservice by pretending to be anywhere else than where we really are. So I want you to think about that right now.

If you gave yourself permission to really just sit and lean in to whatever is happening for you right now, life is far from perfect and we face negative emotions all the time. We just don’t like to admit it when you meet somebody out in public and they say, hey,
how are you?

You say, I’m fine. We don’t want to tell them about all the darkness, all the pain, all the shame. And I mean, that’s fine. Like when you’re just saying hi to somebody on the street of course, that’s one thing we don’t need to trauma dump and tell everybody everything.

I hope that you have some people in your life you can be honest with. I hope that there is somebody around you that can hold space for you and that can let you just beat where you are without rushing you to feel better without judging you for what you’re feeling. And if you do not have this person, I suggest that you go and find one and that can be a friend, it can be a lover, it can be whomever. But that process begins in you.

Own Your Inner Experience

It begins with ownership. It begins with feeling okay with it like removing that shame around what we’re feeling. I mean, that’s really the crux of it. We are emotional feeling creatures who are ashamed at that very thing. So let’s just be a little bit more emotional. Again, not trauma dumping and that doesn’t mean you have to cry all the time or tell everybody every last detail of your life.

What if you could just be okay with what your internal state is and just let yourself feel that? What does the sadness feel like? What does this anxiety feel like? Where are these sensations showing up in my body and what messages are they trying to
bring forth?

That is a beautiful starting place for a self-practice for your emotions. As I mentioned, I also want to bring that into the larger context. So that means also being able to be that person for other people. Again, I think it’s really important to have those kinds of friends around you. I’m giggling right now because I’m thinking back, I have this one friend who she admits it. She’s not good at this stuff. And if I ever bring up a big, heavy emotion like that, she just tries to tell me that it’s not really there.

I know what to expect from this person now. So when I have that kind of situation, I either just don’t share or I just don’t expect to be supported, which is kind of a sad thing, isn’t it?

I’m not going to send her a message and ask her to do this for me. Although maybe I should do that. That is a good point.

I just have to accept that some people are just fundamentally uncomfortable with emotions. And that is not just my emotions in particular. They are just uncomfortable with their emotions and with other people.

Emotional Acceptance = True Love

So you see how the self-love and self-acceptance practice, it becomes so much bigger than that. I want you to think about a time when you were a little child and you were crying, somebody hurt your feelings, pulled your hair at school or something, whatever. And you were crying and you were running to your mom or your dad or your parental figure. And you told them what happened.

And they listened and they let you cry and they let you be angry. They let you be. And you felt in that moment seen and supported. They couldn’t go back in time and take away whatever happened. But they could be there for you in that moment. They were not pushing you away or telling you to grow up or get over it. They were accepting you and they were holding space for you.

That is so beautiful.

So then why as adults can we not do that for people? Why can we not do that for our friends or for our partners?

Again, I think collectively we are still so uncomfortable with big emotions. We like to pretend that we can be happy all the time even though that isn’t possible. And so when we’re gaslighting ourselves into putting on a happy face and pretending everything is okay all the time.

Of course we don’t know how to deal with our own emotions much less the emotions of somebody else. But if you can start this work on yourself and start holding that space for yourself and then challenge yourself to take that to the next level.

Be that calm, open, receptive, supportive space for someone else. So that doesn’t mean you let them trauma dump. That doesn’t mean that they come home from work and have to tell you every terrible detail about their day.

That doesn’t mean that they are going to hold you responsible for their emotions. Our emotions are always in our own state. But we can let people be where they are without making a story about it. It doesn’t mean anything about you for someone else to be sad.

You don’t have to play the emotional superhero to try to cheer everybody up. Oh gosh, I have been the emotional cheerleader for so long in so many relationships in particular in romantic relationships. And I’m not going to do that anymore.

It’s not like I’m going to ignore people and tell them to go deal with it on their own. I will let people express themselves and I will let people sit with their emotions. But unless it’s going above and beyond. And of course I’m not talking about professional contacts. But that is it and that is really all most of us need.

I challenge you to think on that. Think about how you have been self-gaslighting. Think about how you have been intellectualizing your emotions. And challenge yourself to step just a little ways out there into that emotional field. I promise you, if you let yourself complete that emotional feeling, it will complete. Those are also not forever and we do not need to fear them. They are such an important source of wisdom yet we are collectively cutting ourselves off from that wisdom. And we’re continually trapping ourselves in this cycle of pretending and resisting.

Hold Space Emotionally

It starts with you, my love. Hold space for yourself. Be honest enough to admit where you are and let yourself lean into it. It doesn’t have to be all day every day but if you lean into it for five minutes. Imagine how you will come out the other side without that fear, without that need, that constant anxiety because you’re constantly trying to control it. And then imagine sharing that gift with the beautiful people in your life.

I can honestly think of very few other ways we can truly honor the people that we love
and admire. So I challenge you to think about that. Think about giving them this beautiful gift and think about giving it to yourself.

Final Thoughts

That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much, my beautiful friend. I really appreciate you being here. If you love this episode, please do me a favor. Leave me a review over on iTunes or hit the five stars on Spotify. I would super appreciate your support in growing in this little podcast.

If you want to learn more about me and work with me, I invite you to come join me inside my Healed membership community where I’m taking so many healing tools and giving you practical tools like hypnosis and tapping to help you work through these things. So I’ll leave a link for that in the show notes as well and I’m wishing you a beautiful week.