What To Do With Feelings You Don't Like

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Welcome today's episode of the show. How are you doing today? Fantastic. Enjoying your Covid holiday 5,000 experience? I don't know where you are and what's going on in your neck of the woods, but different places have more or less restrictions. Maybe you're with family, maybe you are alone and maybe that feels lonely and maybe it feels like a relief. So it doesn't matter where you are and what you're experiencing. It's okay. Welcome. All of you is welcome here. All of your feelings, all of your experiences, you being you. And it's something that I highlight all the time in this show is that confidence is not that polished image of you. That's like, haha, I'm perfect and I have it all figured out and everyone wants to be me. That's significance. That's an image. That's a fun thing to cultivate and play in sometimes. But we gotta be able to take off the mask, we gotta be able to be real. And the truest confidence comes from the truest authenticity. When you can be 100% you. You can say what you think, share what you feel, be who you are. And the more you can do that in more environments, the more confidence I believe you have. So you can do it with one person. That's a certain level of confidence, right? You can do that with people you know, new people, people you're connecting with, someone you're dating, showing up fully as you in more and more environments with more and more people because there's more potential rejection, but still able to do it. To me, that is confidence and that is freedom. And speaking of freedom, that's what I want to share with you today. So what I'm going to do this week and next is something pretty cool. I'm going to share an in depth answer to a question I received. I have a feature in my Mastermind, my year long Mastermind program which is called the Unstoppable Confidence Mastermind, where members can submit questions to something called Ask Doctorzeez. And I give in depth answers to those and I record audios and we have a growing database of all these answers and I typically just share those with them. However, a couple of these questions were so good and I thought, you know, why not take the answer there and share it with you? So you get a little sneak peek on the inside of what people in the program are working through and how they're growing. And of course there's, you know, names are removed and identifying information is taken out. So it's really just something you can relate to. And this week the question was all about feelings. About feelings. Maybe you get angry at yourself when you feel anxious or you feel angry and then you feel guilty about it. And so this question is all about how do we deal with those feelings that we don't like and how do we really start to create more space to feel? So I give some in depth answer here and I'll come back at the end of sharing that with your action step. In working to be more expressive in the moment, I'm realizing I struggle a lot with meta emotions, both negative negative and negative positive. I didn't grow up in the most expressive environment. And even now that I'm going through a separation, my mother's constant advice is, be happy, be cheerful. I don't want to hear you sound sad. Don't let it bother you. I find I have feelings about my feelings. I feel guilt over being angry in some situations and I feel like I should be understanding and give people the benefit of the doubt and put myself in their shoes. I feel angry at myself for being sad and feel like after all this meditation I do, etc. Why can't I get through and feel through this? Do you have any advice on how to let go of the meta emotions and feel the primary feeling without the extra feeling about it? This is a great question and I think it's something you can all relate to and it's only intensified when you're going through a challenging circumstance like a separation. So when you're asking about meta emotions, you know, sometimes another word for that would be called secondary emotion, just in case people haven't heard of that who are listening. But so there's. The idea is there's primary and secondary emotions, so there's what you feel in response to a certain situation and or your interpretation of that situation, and then there's how you feel about your feelings. That's what she's talking about here with meta Emotions, right? So I'm feeling angry is maybe a primary emotion. I don't like what someone's doing, or I have an internal no to something. Or I don't like my mom telling me to be cheerful when I'm going through a divorce. And then I. There's another feeling that comes that's maybe guilt, right? Oh, you shouldn't feel. You shouldn't feel angry. You know, a common one is someone feels desire or something like that. And then it's like, oh, you shouldn't feel desire for whatever, for another person, for a substance, for a food, for an experience, and so on and so forth. So not surprising that you have this experience, right? Because that is the message you consistently got growing up and clearly are consistently getting now, which is don't feel. What she's saying, in other words, is always be green zone. We have these zone chart that we taught our kids when they were young so they could understand the basics of feelings. And there's four colors. Red, red zone, pissed off, angry, want to hit something, break something. Yellow zone is like agitated. You could be agitated, irritable. Or you could be agitated, excited, a little ungrounded, buzzy, though kind of energy. Then there's blue, which is sad, heavy, maybe tired. And then there's green, which is energized, optimistic, more upbeat. So when I taught him this chart, I realized, though, as time went on, that I had a lot of judgments about all feelings that were not green zone. And I wrote about this in the book on my own side. I talked about always be green zone. It was this subtle pressure that I put on my. Myself. And so to the point where even if my kids, I mean, they knew this terminology, and sometimes we'd ask them, what zone are you? And they would ask me what zone I am, and I would feel shame or embarrassment if I wasn't green zone. And sometimes I catch myself saying I was green zone or denying I was yellow zone. And I clearly was irritable. Right? So this is not unique to you. I think this is extremely common that we learn to only be a certain part of ourselves, and that's what's acceptable. That's what our parents want, you know? And why does your mom want you to only be happy, be cheerful? And I don't want to hear you sound sad. And don't let it bother you. It's because when you feel all, the whole rainbow, the whole spectrum of feelings that you're going to feel when you feel that she feels right, she's empathic. She's attuned to you. She's your mother. And mothers, I mean anyone can feel other people's feelings. Depends on how empathic and connected you are. But especially mothers with their kids at any age. I mean, but you know, they did, there's all kinds of research on this, but you know, kind of the mother's intuition and mother's sense. Mothers can energetically, they're linked with their children across distance. So they've done this, they've experimented, experiments with kittens. And they'll take kittens from their mother cat and they'll put them in another room, you know, and it's a separate building or separate far away. So they can't hear anything, they can't see anything. You gotta love science. And then they'll threaten the kittens, they'll do something that scares them and they have measurements on the mother and her body will physiologically respond. Her heart rate will go up, she'll have stress response in her body because her infants are threatened in another building. It's, you know, there's a lot that's transmitted through the quote, empty space between all beings. It's not empty. It's full of insane amounts of energy and transmission of information and data. So your mom feels a lot and she hurts when you're hurting. And you know how your mom deals with uncomfortable feelings. Be happy, be cheerful. I don't want to hear, you know, that's been her strategy probably for her whole life or she adopted it somewhere along the way. What you're seeing is it's not the most effective strategy. It just doesn't work, not in the long term and especially not when we're dealing with challenging situations. Feelings unfelt feelings buried alive, never die. So you can put a happy face on and be cheerful. And if you're ignoring all those feelings and you're suppressing them and pushing them down, they will come back. They come back in all kinds of weird ways. You know, people get panic attacks and they don't know why. People get depressed and they don't know why. People have body pain and they don't know why. And a huge source of all of these things and more I could go on and on about all the health issues that come, both mental and physical and emotional and spiritual that come from a disconnection from ourselves. Self alienation. So there's two things here. There's your mom and there's you. First things first, we gotta start with you because you're gonna change your mom. I don't know. Good luck with that. Most of us have had a little to no success in radically changing our parents. Not to say our parents can't change. And I've seen this actually occur and seen some pretty amazing changes, especially in my dad, but not with me trying to change him. Me focusing on changing myself and loving him as he is and then stepping up and being more boldly me around him has opened him in some ways. You know, not just me doing that, but just probably life has opened him. He's aged, he's had challenges, he's softened in some ways. And I think that can occur for people, but we don't control that. We don't know if that's gonna happen for the parent. So let's focus, starting with you, because you have taken that message in and you have a part of you who is being that. Be happy, be cheerful. Don't feel this. Right? You know, it comes in different forms. It says, oh, don't be angry. You should be more forgiving. Oh, don't be sad. You should be more energized right now. Or, you know. Yeah, exactly. I feel angry at myself for being sad, right? So don't be sad. Come on, what's wrong with you? And I know these voices well. I mean, I have this, you know, this kind of internal police force that would basically any feeling that was not Green Zone, and it would be like, all right, let's get to work. What the hell's wrong with you? Come on, stop feeling that way. So let's just take a moment to see that pattern for what it is. Insanity, right? There is a feeling here. It is arising. No, it's not. No, it's not. So shouldn't be. Get rid of it, right? It's denial. It's crazy making. And so we want to start with some basic permission statements for you as a human, for all of us as a human. As a human, I am allowed to. I have permission to. I will experience the full spectrum of emotion. In fact, instead of trying to feel less of certain feelings or feeling less, how about we set the goal to feel more and feel more skillfully, get better. Because your mom's approach and many people's approach is like the waters of emotion. Oh, God, I don't even know how to. Those are stormy. Forget that I'm going to stay on land. Try to avoid the whole thing. But then the tsunami comes and washes down your house when you're, you know, when you're not expecting it. So what if we say, you know what? I'm going to get better at sailing on these waters. I'm going to get on, on that boat. I'm going to figure this out. So that's kind of a frame or a metaphor, an image to think about. Now, how do we actually do this? Well, I'd be curious what you're doing with meditation, because sometimes meditation can be used in a variety of ways, but one is an attempt to escape or suppress or bypass feelings. And if that's the case, then we want to allow feelings to be part of your meditation. So there's many different ways to meditate. But, you know, one common one is you become more present by focusing your attention on your breath, and then you notice what's arising. And it's usually thoughts are coming, body sensations and feelings. And so what you can do is you can bring more awareness to those different elements of your experience. So there's, oh, there's thinking, there's images in my mind, there's sensations and then there's feelings, especially the feelings. And so when you notice a feeling, like usual, maybe we'll experience a feeling and like first as thoughts, right? Like, I don't like this. Or you notice the reactionary secondary feeling like guilt or something like that. You notice it often as thoughts, negative thoughts, critical thoughts, upset thoughts. And then there's this tension, there's this emotional tension in your body. And so this is where we want to bring more of that awareness to the emotion. Just say, ah, thinking, ah, feeling. And you still bring your attention to the breath, but then you also invite in awareness of the feeling, what is the feeling, and focus on the energy of the feeling, the sensation of the feeling, the motion of the feeling. I mean, feelings are fascinating, aren't they? Can you point to a feeling? Can you see a feeling? No, they're sensation, they're energy. I mean, they're amazing. They're energy that's transmitted from one human to another. They call it emotional contagion. That's why panic spreads the fastest across organisms, especially humans. So it's this invisible force, just like gravity, just like magnetism. So it's an invisible force that we feel. So can you tune into that and soften? That's the key word. Can you soften? Literally start with your body. Can you soften your belly? We hold it in so tight, you know, we gotta look good, keep it up, you know, but just when you're by yourself, you're just sitting there. You can put your hands on your belly. Ah, soften your. Anything else, your jaw, your neck, anything that you're kind of, you know, when we feel a feeling, and it's uncomfortable. We kind of go into hunker down mode. Like, brace myself here, here we go. And just notice there's any level of that happening and just soften and see if you can create as much space around and in and through the feeling. You know, a lot of our suffering comes from that blocking. And then we bind it and then it gets this sort of permanent sort of quality or feeling to it. But instead, what if you just open to it? And I find actually sometimes literally opening up my arms to either side, bringing my shoulder blades together, lifting my head a little bit, kind of this very open posture. It's like a receiving open posture. That's right. And then, you know, for many years I would do something like this and be like, okay, I'm feeling it, I'm feeling it. Is it going away yet? And that doesn't work. Doesn't work. It's a fundamental shift. And it goes from like, I only want to feel good and I don't want to feel bad to. To like, I'm here to fucking experience this life. Give it to me. Like, show me everything, let me feel everything. And it's a whole. It's like a life philosophy, a spiritual philosophy at some point, right? Cause like, what are we doing here? And we grew up in a consumer culture, most of us, that says, hey, you're here to experience pleasure, to buy shit, have fun experiences. Buy this coke, buy this product, buy this technology, buy this thing, you're going to feel great. And we thought life is about pleasure. And then somewhere along the way, or maybe life's about achievement, getting somewhere, being somebody. And you know, most of us at some point experience, either you become a somebody or you get enough pleasure points and then you're like, okay, all right, is this all that we're doing here? We start looking for something more. And, you know, one way to think about what we're doing here is we're here to experience this human experience. Human school, some people call it. And I don't know what your spiritual philosophies are, but I believe that there's some force, there's something that we are all a part of. You can call it divine God, soul. And we're a part of that. It's the Brahman, right? It is the universal energy that broke itself up into little fragments, the 10,000 things that are all experiencing each other. And there's this field of consciousness that we're residing in. And so what are we here to do? Well, our soul is here to experience stuff. What stuff? I Don't know the stuff that happens to us in this life that we're drawn to create. And I don't know if we even have a choice of what we're supposed to experience in this life. I do know that we do have a choice, which is am I going to heed the call and am I going to live fully and take bold action and step into my life, or am I going to stay on the sidelines, hunkered down, guarding my heart and arming myself? And if we fully open to this experience, man, we're going to get it all. We're going to feel pleasure, we're going to feel pain, we're going to feel ecstasy, we're gonna feel thrashed, we're gonna feel deep loss. But what if all those feelings are what we're here to experience? And our goal is not to only pick out the good ones. Our goal is to get more skillful. Because here's the thing about any feeling, they come in waves and there's an intensity factor. But if you can just like ride that wave of intensity, it'll peak and it will crest and it'll go down relatively quickly. If you're feeling a feeling for like five hours or 10 hours in a day, like all day long or depression that goes day after day after day, that's sign that you're suppressing and you're not skillfully feeling. Because if you skillfully feeling a feeling, it'll move through you. Now it might, you know, something like grief that you might be experiencing especially complex grief after the end of a relationship, right? It's sadness, it's anger, it's hurt, it's loss, it's confusion, it's disillusionment. It's all these different things. There's all these flavors to the feelings. And so you might, you know, have one feeling come, the sadness, and then, you know, 10 minutes later, it might be the anger or it might be more sadness. So it doesn't mean that you feel a feeling and it goes away really fast, but any individual experience of feeling will move relatively swiftly if you fully open to it. And being fully open to it. The best way I can describe it is no agenda to get rid of it, just softening and being fascinated and saying, okay, this is what I meant to experience. Now bring it on. Show me. Show me everything you got. And one final thought about this. When we're feeling the feelings, we can zoom out and give them a purpose, give them a meaning. Because if something is painful and sort of unnecessary, it feels way worse. To us, if something is painful and it shouldn't be happening, it's even more pain. It's suffering upon suffering. But if we can find an empowering meaning for our pain, for our suffering, then it actually changes the level of suffering that we experience. The pain feels less painful. And so what is that? And for you, I would focus on the future, right? I mean, you're ending something. You're ending this relationship. And sometimes when we get to an ending, we're like, it's over, Fuck. And it's like, is it the end or is it the beginning? Is it the beginning of something new? And what is it the beginning of something new? What do you want to create? And if there's a voice in your head says, you can't have that, fuck that voice. That's the voice out. And we defy that voice. That's what we do. Because we're fucking unstoppable. And you want to focus on what you want to create. You want to let that vision come to you every day and live from that future place. Say, this is what I'm stepping into. Yes, yes. This pain is here, and this is what I'm moving towards. So it's not about, I'm going to focus on my future and I'm going to not feel my feelings anymore. It's just letting you know that, yeah, there's stuff I need to feel and heal from and learn from and grow from. And those painful emotions grow us faster than anything else. It's the growth. You need to be able to step into the new life that you have the courage and the boldness and the willingness to create. I respect you for that. I hope this serves you. You might want to listen to it several times to really open up the freedom to let yourself feel anything and everything. That brings us to the end of the ask. Dr. Aziz. However, I do have a action step for you. Based upon what you just heard. Time for action. Action. Action. Your action step is going to be a little experiment. So for today, and you know, if you're listening to this at night, then it'll be for tomorrow. What I want you to do is bring more awareness to your feelings and particularly your feelings about feelings. So if you notice that you're feeling upset in some way, notice if you're reacting to some feeling, am I judging myself? Am I angry at myself? Am I scared of a feeling? Like, how am I reacting to my feelings? And start to bring more awareness to it and then apply something that you learned from this episode to it. Just do this for a day. I mean, you could say well do this forever and eh, that doesn't stick as well as just saying okay, contained length of time just for a day. I'm gonna be more aware of that. And of course you want to, you know, keep growing in that awareness. It can start to become an ongoing way of being, which gives you an immense amount of ease, confidence and relaxed ability to be in your own skin. So obviously, if it works for you, keep doing it, but just experiment with it for one day. Fantastic. Thanks for being with me. I hope you have a fantastic holiday here as we get close to the New Year. And until we speak again, may I have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Azeez. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free vlogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com. Sam.