A few weeks ago I shared a video about ‘Why It’s Important to Feel Our Feelings’. This week, I’d like to follow up on that thought because for many of us, feeling into our emotions can be one of the scariest
things we ever have to do. In this new video below, my intention is to shed some light on exactly why so many people often feel overwhelmed and even frightened by their inner emotional landscape.
As always, I invite you to leave comments below the video with your thoughts, feelings and experiences on this topic. I would love to hear from you.
I’ve also included a transcript at the very bottom of this email just in case you have any trouble with the link.
Here’s the video…
With love,
Shari
Video Transcript:
The Three Reasons Why It’s Scary to Have Strong Emotions
Number 1…
When it comes to emotions, most of us are in unfamiliar territory. That’s a funny thing to say because we all have emotions, from the time we’re born and before. Yet, no one ever taught us how to navigate our emotions and we have received a whole lot of distorted messages about what emotions even are so that we confuse our emotions with thoughts. So inside, we become a tangled up mess and have no way of actually being present with ourself when we’re triggered and instead find ourselves in this muddy world of having no idea what’s actually going on or how to untangle what’s going on.
Number 2…
We’re really afraid that if we get into really strong or intense emotions, for most of us, we’ve been told it’s actually not okay to be with intense emotions. So those intense emotions, when they come up, can be really scary because we’ve been continually given a lolly or distracted or whatever when those strong emotions come up. So we don’t know what’s going to happen and it’s scary. I remember a situation where a girlfriend who was very close said to me, ‘I don’t know you’, and I was so totally by that, that I found myself in such an intense emotion that it reminded me of what it was to be scared of the unknown depth within myself.
The third reason why it’s scary to be in strong emotions is that’s the very time we often say things that we regret. And we aren’t thinking clearly necessarily and so that’s the time when we can say things that later on we will wish we hadn’t said. For those three reasons it can be really scary to be in strong emotions.
NVC gives us a clear way of being with those emotions so that it’s not scary. It actually gives us a way to navigate our inner world so that our emotions aren’t scary.