Do you allow yourself to feel emotions

Hi there and welcome to Bend and Snap Active People Getting Back on Track. Please, apologies for my voice. I'm having a little bit of an illness this week. It's a bit of a weird throat, a bit bit of a weird chest, and for some reason it's affected my voice slightly. So I probably sound a little bit different to what you're used to hearing me sound like, but I'm gonna do my best and I'm gonna keep going. And I'm gonna talk to you tonight for tonight's session about— well, the question is, a question is the title: Do you allow yourself to feel emotions? And hopefully my voice will clear up the longer that I speak for. Sometimes that happens. Um, so yeah, tonight's session is going to be dedicated to all about emotions. And welcome to anybody new that's joined the group. Thank you so much for being here. If you've not met me before, I am Joanne Lee Smith, and I am a neuroplastic pain and symptoms recovery coach. And it's absolutely a pleasure to have you here, and thank you for anyone that's joining me live. Please type in the chat if you have any questions or any comments, and I'll check them afterwards because for some reason they don't come through in lifetime anymore, which is a bit disappointing, but I'd rather go from a laptop than from a mobile phone and look at the tiny little screen. So apologies if they don't come through. One day I'm hoping that they'll start coming through. So here we are. What qualifies me to talk about emotions and the connection between emotions and chronic pain and chronic symptoms? So a little bit of a history is that when the original Dr. Sarno, the doctor who first of all discovered that there is a connection with the mind and body, And the doctor that figured that the pain was not being created in the body for his patients who were waiting to go through spinal surgery, he made a massive connection right back in the 1970s. And he wrote his first book in the early '80s called Healing Back Pain. Apologies if I've got that wrong, but it was one of the healing back pain books. And basically He realized that there was a huge connection with his patients, and he realized that the kind of patients that he was seeing were not releasing emotions. So basically how he described it is that they had repressed emotions, emotions that were not being released out. So they were just getting, you know, a lifetime of experiences and not actively feeling the emotion. It's a natural coping strategy that the body would do for— that we do for survival. But he noticed the big connection, and when he started educating his patients on these things, he realized that people were getting well. So there is a huge connection with emotions and pain, and there's some really great studies where they have done MRI scans on people's brains and they've looked at what's happening inside of the brain. And they may have, for example, 2 groups, and they're looking at a group of people who have got chronic pain which has gone on longer than 3 months And a group of people with chronic pain and a group of people where they actually did hurt them, like scratches with needles and things like this, and they look at what part of the brain lights up. So the people with— well, they had a group where they would help initiate emotional pain, for example. So they— this particular group were people that had suffered from rejection from a relationship, and they like showed them photos of their ex-partner who they were really emotionally hurt from them being rejected, and then scanning the brains, comparing them with a group of people with physical pain, and seeing that the same parts of the brain were lighten up and that were affected. So we know that this is scientifically proven, there's research, it's not a lovely idea. And to be fair, most people can make the connection for themselves because they're a human being and they've experienced it. They've experienced feeling kicked out or rejected or feeling really hurt by a cruel comment that might have been aimed towards them, and they felt physically within their body how it would feel. So such a big connection and such a lot of work going on in this area. Sorry about the voice, I'm just going to get a little drink. So for example, when I was a child, I can remember not really having a clue about feeling emotions. And an example which I have, which is quite real to me, is that about expressing emotions. So I know that this has always been a challenge of mine, like, for a lifetime. So I know that my brain would have protected me from feeling an emotion that it felt was going to be more dangerous to me than having a different response, or, um, or a stomachache, or an asthma attack, or something else, to protect me from what it would have deemed the emotion being more dangerous to me. And also, um, what, what used to happen to me Was that when I was young and I should have, like, the most appropriate emotion would have been sadness, but instead I'd laugh. So I can remember a time when my mum told me some really sad news, and I really enjoyed being with my, my nana. I spent a lot of time with her, and I was, I was, I should have been really sad. But when she told me that she'd died, I actually laughed. I can even remember having a laughing fit, like a hysterical laughing. No sadness came out, but naturally what happened with me was that I started laughing. And that would have been an example of my brain deciding that it was gonna repress the sadness. Jo can't feel sad, that's too much of a threat. to her, and it would have just shoved that down. And again, there was some, clearly, some fear about feeling an appropriate emotion. And that's just a personal example to me where instead of crying, I would laugh. And again, what another thing that I wanted to share was So feeling an emotion, whether you're feeling like an emotion about, like, when you, when, like, when we're growing up, it's like you might be like, don't cry, don't get mad, don't make a fuss, getting on with it, like those kind of things. It's feeling the emotion is not like a bad thing, but it's just something that naturally happens to some of people. But how do I explain this one? So it's not that you're going to go and act on it or do anything. So if I was to get angry or something, I'm not going to go and get myself in trouble. But basically, I think, long story short, I'm trying to connect the experiences for many of us growing up. Who may have not been shown or told or having conversations about healthy feeling emotions. Healthy, like that it's okay to be annoyed or it's okay to be sad, it's okay to be happy, it's okay to be any of the feelings that we've got, and that it's safe. So for many people, if they've grown up in different environments where it might not have been or felt safe to do those things, then it might just be a case of, I'm never going to do that, I'm never going to allow that to happen. And it's not a conscious decision, it's just something that can happen just naturally based upon our experiences. Like, there was no way that I consciously decided that I'm not gonna let out my sadness or allow that to come to the surface. I had no choice over that. That's just something that happened. But what can be really useful is when you start to learn more about this, the connection is so massive that symptoms of pain and symptoms of other kinds of symptoms that you might have in your body, whether that's stomach pains, headaches, gastro issues, reflux, all of these things can improve as we begin to understand and learn how to actually feel an emotion and show that it's safe to feel an emotion, because ultimately For many people, what's happening is the brain is deeming that emotion as more dangerous to your survival, and it needs to raise an alarm in the form of a physical symptom to protect you. Um, which was life-changing for me to learn that, because I never connected the two. And most people wouldn't. Because it's not really common knowledge. So for me, I genuinely did have to spend quite a bit of time even being able to label how I'm feeling, because— I'll just show you a little diagram. This is what we call an emotional wheel. So that's an emotional wheel. I've just printed that off so I could show you. And And if you really don't know how you feel, it can be really useful to actually just look through it and pick one out and be like, oh, how do I actually feel? Because when you're in back pain and it's not holding up, Dr. Sarno said, think psychological, don't focus on the physical. Which is counterintuitive, but it's magic. It's ingenious. It's not even magic, it's just how it works. So when I began to learn about this, and instead of getting a cold pack and rubbing my back and massaging it and doing all these stretches, instead what I began to do was exactly what he said. And I started to put a label on how am I feeling. And I might be like, oh, for the first time in my lifetime, I'm like, I'm actually really, really disappointed because I've been in pain for over 15 years. This is back then. And actually, I began to draw attention to it, and I began to scribble down some things about how I was feeling, what I was thinking. And for the first time, my brain began to form new pathways and have new experiences that I had not really had before. And in the beginning, I had my initial reduction in the severity of the symptoms that I was experiencing enough to know that this is not crazy, not made up. This is like, this stuff really, really works. So to the point where it wasn't an overnight thing, and 2 years down, almost 2 years down the line, and I'm still learning so much more about how this stuff works. But I just want to really, like, reinforce the message that this connection is huge, and the day that you're able to Begin to look after your own emotional feelings, and it doesn't have to go any further than yourself. It doesn't have to be done in real life. Nobody needs to know, nobody needs to hear it, nobody needs to— nobody needs— the feeling doesn't need to be put upon to someone else. It's like, for me, it's something that we do for ourselves, an act of compassion for ourselves, to take that little bit of time to recognize what's really going on. Because if we can release or take a little bit out of the If you imagine there's an imaginary reservoir, which is your emotional reservoir, in, in, inside your, um, you know, if you like, between your, your belly and your chest, and that is filling up and up and up, a bit like a volcano. And if all of those emotions throughout a lifetime that have— this is not intentional, but if they've been building up, People call that, like, emotional baggage. It's really, really heavy. Very, very heavy if you've been pushing through, getting on. No time for that. No time to feel like that. Anger's bad. Anger means I'm not a good person. Sadness means that I'm weak. Whatever it might be. Eventually, It has to warn us one way, shape, or form. And just through the simple act, really, of actually just paying some attention towards that— can be done in so many different ways, there's no one way. It can be done in the form of thought, it can be done in the form of having a little look at a diagram and just writing down a few Things. So because I knew I was doing this session today, I thought I'm gonna spend a day doing the feeling your feelings. Yeah, which I've got. I don't really need to do this intentionally anymore because I've got better at doing it over time. So I'm just going to read out to you a few feelings that I've written down just from today. So I wrote down, I've wrote down 1, 2, 3, 4. 5. 5, 6 different feelings that I've had today. So the first one I wrote down from this morning was frustrated. And where did I feel that? Well, maybe because I didn't feel well all day, but I wrote I felt it in my body, in my throat and chest. And then I described what the sensation felt like. So I wrote— this is interesting actually to read this back— I wrote down that my frustrated Feeling was in my throat and chest, and it— I described it as smooth, airy, and jumpy. That was just how I did that. And then a little later on, I went back and I wrote down I was feeling insecure for some reason. A feeling of insecurity came over me. Who would have believed it? But this is the raw, real deal. This is like us. Getting really real, because we're doing this for ourselves. Like, it can be— it can get messy, it can get ugly. There is no right, wrong. There's no right, wrong way to do this. So I felt the insecurity in my stomach coming up into my chest, and I described this sensation as energy inside and heat. And I can't even read what I wrote there. Heat. And something beginning with an S. Smooth. It was smooth heat. It doesn't matter. I'm just focusing on how I'm feeling instead of physical. Anyway, I moved on. Later on in the day, it must have become anxious. I felt anxious for some reason, and I felt that in my face and my jaw, and I described that as hot smooth. And I can't read my writing again. Anyway, Later on, I felt mad. Don't know where that came from. I felt mad. That was in my chest and my fists. I felt it in my fists. They were tight, stiff, and stretchy. And then later on, I didn't put a time on these. I should have wrote down the time. I then wrote down that I felt relieved. Oh, that's a good thing. Oh, clearly this stuff works because I was feeling relieved. And I've written down all over the body. I felt a sensation of loose, soft, plain, and fluffy. Ooh, how nice is that? And then guess what came next? This is— I mean, obviously there's been a few hours gaps between these. I've got bored, a feeling of boredom again all over, and I've described this sensation as zigzaggy, bumpy, jumpy, and wavy. Okay, so that was just like a simple day in the life of Jo's feelings, um, and obviously I can add to that after this session, and I can guarantee you that that will be relaxed, happy, or something along those lines, because if I was to do it right now, that's what I would write down. And I'm feeling the warmth. So however it is for you, whatever it is, please begin to draw some attention towards it because there's a reason why we have emotions. There's a reason why we have them. They're not designed to be shoved down and never let out. It's just that's not the way that we're designed. We're designed to feel those, whether they're good, bad, ugly, positive, negative, whatever they are. It really doesn't matter. It's about not judging them, not pushing them down. I haven't got time for this, that kind of thing. It's just about being able to express it safely. We don't— like, I describe repression as something that happens unconsciously. We don't know it's happening, it's just happening. And suppression is where we actually know that we're feeling a bit sad, but we suppress it. It's like we're doing it on purpose. And somebody might ask, how are you? And you might be like, I'm good, thank you. Auto-reply, auto-response. But really, you're not feeling good at all. You've pushed it away. And really, if you think of yourself like I mean, I like a good old volcano analogy, like the lava bubbling up, bubbling up, bubbling up, waiting to erupt. Or you could think of it like a pressure cooker. If we're constantly pushing the lid back down, pushing the lid back down, no, you're not allowed out. I'm fine, I'm fine. Other people have it a lot worse. It's not too bad. You've got to remember, our experience Is our experience. It doesn't matter how other people have it. It's more important that we recognize what's happening for ourselves. Like, it doesn't matter whether you think that another person has it worse. It needs to be recognized. We've got like a 5-year-old inside of us which is screaming, screaming, screaming for the attention. And the worst thing that we can do is ignore that. So really simple measures that can make a massive difference in the world of relief for ourselves. It's such an important part of this recovery. Um, so you might not even have a clue where to start or how to do this, and I didn't in the beginning. It doesn't mean you need to sit there and analyze everything that ever happened to you in your lifetime and going over and over and over about all the things that ever happened. It doesn't mean that. It's just about noticing, how are you feeling? Am I angry? What? Allow it, feel it. Where is it? Notice it. You don't have to fix it. You just need to teach your brain that it's safe to experience it. And once your brain realizes that this is safe to experience, then it will stop raising the alarm. And I've simplified it, but it really is that simple, to be honest. So another really nice way to describe this is And I got this from Dan Buglia, and he describes it really well in his book Pain Free You. I'm just gonna get another sip. He calls it holding an open house for your emotions, and I really like this because he says it's like, imagine that the emotion is knocking on your front door, and I'm probably going to do my own version of this, but it you'll get the idea. And you've got, say for example, the door, knocking on the door, and it's anger, and it's like, can I come in? And if you say no, you're not coming in. And then another sadness comes knocking on the door, and you say no, you're not coming in. Fear comes knocking on the door, no. Grief, no. Joy? Can I come in? Maybe. But we need to allow every emotion to come in and just invite them in. Let them sit by your side. They can join you, whatever you're doing. Let them be there. You don't need to do anything. You just need to allow them to be there. You don't have to get too involved. You just need to— you don't have to chase them away, push them away. You don't have to act on anything. You don't have to act on any of those thoughts or those things that might come through, just allowing to experience it, you know, and then you can guarantee that they'll come in and they'll leave. Come in the front door, go out of the back door, whatever it is, just make sure the doors are open and that they're allowed to come through and sit there for as long as they need. And then pass by. So I quite like that analogy. And so they call it opening, opening, leaving an open house for your emotions. There's many analogies, so you'll find one that, that kind of rings a bell for you that can be helpful. Um, but yeah, because if you think of it like this, the brain is always scanning, looking for, am I safe? Is everything safe? And sometimes if we've learned as a child, and I don't know where I learned it from, that it's dangerous to feel a certain emotion, like for some people anger. I clearly learned that crying was dangerous or that crying was a weakness. And I also actually was really, really good at anger. I was pretty good at that one. But again, we can be really good at some and not at others. So some of us have a dominant emotion that we're really good at doing, but really we need to experience all the different emotions. Without any judgment and knowing that this is safe to do. So the goal is to teach the brain that you can feel any emotion from the many different ranges, and there's so many on that wheel, and it can still be safe. And I can still feel angry, and I don't have to act on the anger or do anything. And think this— I don't know any of the— I read so many different things that I hear different things from so many places, but what they say is that people who actually do this in their vision— so I'm actually doing a course at the minute called Emotional Awareness Expression Therapy, which is an approach for people with chronic pain and chronic symptoms which has been in the research, it's been shown to be the most superior approach for the best outcomes compared with current approaches like Acceptance Commitment Therapy and CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which has unfortunately in the research been shown to have actually no effect on reduction of pain, which is really disappointing, I guess, when people are going for these treatments and not getting better. Whereas the EAET, Dr. Schubiner and Dr. Lumley, Mark Lumley, this is becoming more of a well-known approach and it's incredible. And I've been implementing this in my sessions recently and After spending hours and hours and hours learning and watching many, many training tutorials, I've begun doing this with my clients. And wow, the results are incredible because a lot of people have never been able to access these emotions, and this type of therapy is genuinely allowing them for the first time to experience these emotions and I've never had one person who hasn't experienced a relief and a reduction. It's incredible. And you can also do this in your own— on your own too. So it doesn't even need to be anything that anyone else would ever even need. And it— yeah, it's really, really good. So it's just about teaching and experiencing. Maybe for the first time in your life, and then just seeing what happens, because the connection is just real, it really is. What else did I want to share with you for today? Yeah, I think that is enough to summarise everything. It's just about, first of all, recognizing that what we feel is connected, and the brain can create symptoms or pain due to it believing we're in emotional danger. Yeah. If it believes that the immersion is more dangerous to our survival because it's learned that it's not safe to feel anger or sadness or whatever the massive range, then it will protect us in the form of physical symptoms, and we'll get carried away spending years and years and years trying to figure out what's wrong with the physical And if we continue to neglect the emotional health, the emotional part of us, then it will continue to be a chronic issue. So yeah, the cure is here for so many people. And I'm gonna leave it at that. So I hope that my rambled speech for today, with a bit of a croaky voice, I still managed to speak, didn't I, for 30 minutes. Has been a little bit helpful. I hope you've heard something in there. So please don't be disappointed if you've tried journaling, you've tried writing down. Just know that you still may not be able to access and feel these emotions if The brain will do everything it can to create a layer of doubt or to not allow you to access it deeply enough. So it really does begin with practicing, and then it will deepen as you do more. And don't worry that you can't do it or cope with it, or that you'll get everything's gonna go to ruin and you're gonna end up— if you end up crying, that you're never gonna stop. Like, please don't worry, there's no negative or dangerous side effects to this. The only thing you're gonna risk is a massive relief of the pain and the symptoms that you're having. Like, people get scared. What if I re-traumatize myself? What if I dig up a can of worms that's gonna make me worse? Well, trust me, the choice is what hurts or what hurts most. And going there— let me explain this properly— staying where you are is going to hurt a lot more than the potential to have this huge relief. So Nicole Sachs, who I've also done training with, The Saxs and Sarno Solution, they do what they call journal speak. She always says, life is the choice between what hurts and what hurts worst. And doing this, a lot of people don't want to do because it hurts worst. But trust me, your brain's— that's part of The neuroplastic symptoms, that's part of what Dr. Sarno called TMS. Um, the part of you that tries to stop you from doing the thing that you need to do is part of being the whole process. So what emotion do you find the hardest to feel? And start there. Just start there. Just have a go at feeling it. In the privacy of your own space, in whatever way feels good. So yeah, hope that this has been helpful, and I'll see you all next Tuesday. Have a really great week, and hopefully my voice will be back to normal. It will be. I've just been talking a lot today as well. So I'll see you all next week. Bye!