Voices In My Head (The Rick Lee James Podcast) - Episode 528 - Facing Grief with the Wheel of Emotio

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host Rick Lee James, and I'm so grateful to have you here with us today on this another podcast together. Uh, thank you so much for listening. I know it's been a couple weeks since I was able to do a podcast with you. And let me say, first of all, I'm sorry for those of you who listen every week. I'm grateful for you. I have been in a very busy time of life and it does not seem to be slowing down. I know I seem to say that every week, but I ended my time as a resident chaplain at Kettering. So I don't have the long drive ahead of me every day. But I began as a PRN chaplain in Springfield, Ohio, about 3 miles from where I live. I am still music pastor at my church. I'm still releasing music, and I also— the biggest thing in my life right now is that I'm back in master's classes, and I have 3 full-time, very big classes that are— honestly, to be perfectly honest with you, I am very overwhelmed. And so I would appreciate your prayers if you could, whenever you think of me. I'm one of those kind of people that I love to learn, but I really do not enjoy being a student. In fact, it produces a lot of anxiety inside of me, so to the point that whenever I am in school, in master's classes especially, I'm— I don't know how else to say it. I was telling my wife the other night, I pretty much just feel miserable for the entire experience. I can't sleep well. My eating kind of subsides quite a bit. I get lots of anxiety. I get nervous. And I just, I don't enjoy life for the remainder of the time that I'm in school. So, it always feels like I put life on hold because from morning until the time I go to bed and then even when I'm in bed, my mind just does not turn off. I'm trying to catch up and I always feel a little behind. I don't know why I'm that way. I tend to usually do pretty well in school once it gets going. But for whatever reason, that is one of my anxiety points. But it actually gave me a good way to talk about today's episode, which by the way, I want to let you know, coming up, if all should go well, I'm scheduled this Friday to have another conversation with my friend William Willimon, and he has a new book coming out about Advent and the Incarnation. So I'm excited with Advent coming on in the days ahead to have another new resource for that, and it's always fun to be able to sit and talk with Will. So just know that's coming. And also on On October 2nd, if you want to mark your calendars, I have been invited to come on to the Catholic Faith Network, which is a television channel. You can get it on if you have a streaming platform like Amazon— what's that called? Prime TV, Fire TV, something like that. Or if you use Apple Television or any streaming service, you can look up the Catholic Faith Network, and I will be on live on October 2nd. Somewhere in that 9 o'clock to 10 o'clock hour. And they graciously have invited me on, and I'm so thrilled to talk about my new song, Keep Watch, Dear Lord. And I'm just thrilled that I get to be a part of that. They actually have wonderful production values on that show, great conversations, and just the fact that they have welcomed me in, I just feel incredibly grateful. Well, to the topic at hand for today, I just told you about my emotions, my anxieties that I have when I'm in school. The way that I get this kind of miserable feeling. And one thing that I'm grateful for in CPE, when I had my Clinical Pastoral Education, is they gave me some tools to try to help and work on things like that. So what happens for me, I have tried to stop and notice, and maybe this will help you, which is why I'm sharing it today. I'm not just sharing it to say, "Feel sorry for me, I'm miserable." I mean, you can feel sorry for me if you want, I don't care. But I really want to say in this, those don't have to be the only voices. That's one thing that I'm trying to learn from CPE is that if I can acknowledge the things that I'm feeling, the things that I am going through in my heart and my mind and my body, that that's actually a way to help move through it. And it's just like when you're going through grief because in some ways I feel like This may just be my own theory, but I feel like almost everything that we have, almost all of our anxieties, almost everything that we encounter in life that causes us to feel this tension, and we feel it in our bodies. Some of us, we may feel a tightness. I know that I tend to feel kind of a shakiness, a tightness in my body, in my chest, whenever I'm feeling especially anxious. And if we're able to identify some of those things, I often find that that the source of that is grief. We call it by many different names. Some people get agitated, they get angry. Some people get overly emotional in different ways, but a lot of the things that we're dealing with are grief. And I want to explain that as I talk about the wheel of emotion today, or the emotion wheel, which we have on our refrigerator in our home. When I talk about grief, I'm not talking about grief as related to a death. It can be that, and it most certainly can be that when we have deaths in our life, we are going to face grief that causes a great amount of anxiety. They can— it can make us live out of bad places and fear and, and great unhappiness. But it can manifest itself in different ways. And the grief that I'm speaking of this morning is the grief that comes just from experiencing losses. And not realizing that it's grief that you're going through. In some ways, there was a great deal of grief that we faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. We're in the endemic stage, as they call it now. It doesn't mean it's not with us anymore, but it's not pandemic. It's not affecting us the way it once was. And there was a great amount of grief, not only that was unacknowledged by the greater society. When you lose over a million people to a disease that would have still been here otherwise, wise, just in our nation alone. And then you have half of the culture saying it doesn't— it's not real, it doesn't exist. And then you have people say, but I lost my family member to it and I'm grieving that. Aside from even the deaths that are there, there is the grief of life changed. There's a grief of the way that we knew things to be is no longer. And I think we're still facing that grief in a lot of ways. We are facing loss the way that we used to do things. We no longer do it that way. I'll give you an example of this. We were at the point where CDs were on their way out. I'll talk to you about it as a musician this morning. So whenever I would make a new album, I would put them out on these compact discs. And just before the pandemic hit, I had had a new album. I created all these CDs at great expense, great time. You have to design album Walmart and things like that. I also had record made— records made. And not long really after that album came out, I did some touring with it, but when I was really ready to hit the heavy touring, COVID hit and I was not able to sell those CDs or those vinyls at this point. And now it's a couple years old, time has passed. I'm likely going to end up with a lot of these things in my basement now because it's not that I couldn't sell these CDs Except that people aren't using them anymore. During the pandemic especially, almost everybody went to streaming music even faster than they would have before. Music, movies, television shows, everything went to streaming platforms, to the point that even movie theaters, when they were not opening, people were just streaming things. And so now if you walk into a store, whereas a place like Walmart Walmart. They used to have a bin because CDs were on their way out before, but they used to have a bin of CDs where you could go in and $5, you know, you get a CD, get an album. You really don't see, at least at our Walmart, when I walk in, I don't even see a section anywhere that has any music. We have some vinyls. If I go to Target, same way. If I go to any of the stores that offer those type things, it's just something that doesn't exist very much in our society anymore. Most people don't use them. So that's a form of loss. Now, that's a kind of grief in and of itself. If you're a musician, if your livelihood has depended on a while for things like selling CDs and you put a lot of money into a product and then you realize there's no way to recoup that cost, that's just a loss. Emotionally, that's a loss too in some ways. Now, it can be a lot of different things. It can be a new stage in life. Your children starting another grade of school. For them, that can be a grief. You know, how many children don't even know they're in grief, but they are. Summer has ended and it's not just a matter of starting school again, but they can't do the things they enjoyed in their free time all summer long. And it's not even just a lack of free time, it's losing that stage where you were. You don't get to go back to that grade that you once had. You don't get those— nothing ever is quite the same in the same way again. So I wanted to introduce to you, I think I've talked about it before, but if you have not had a chance to look it up, there's something you can find online if you just look it up called the Emotion Wheel or the Wheel of Emotion. We keep this on our refrigerator in our home and I need it. There are nights when the anxiety gets the best of me. And right now, especially because I'm in this very intense master's program through Loyola University, I am feeling it almost constantly. There's a heaviness in my chest, there's a tightness. So I first start asking, "Do I feel this anywhere in my body? This tension that I feel, where do I feel it?" For me, it's in my chest, it's in my stomach, it's in my arms. I can just feel it in those places. But then I start asking, "What is this feeling in me telling me?" And I will look at the Wheel of Emotion, and right in the middle of this wheel— if you have your phone or if you have a computer in front of you or you have a chance, you want to pause this and come back later when you can see the wheel— you can see in the middle of the wheel there are these emotions like happy, surprised, bad, fearful, angry, disgusted, sad. And those are the basic emotions that we tend to feel, but then they branch out into other emotions, how those things manifest themselves. So I'm gonna use myself as an example. The other night, it was about midnight, I couldn't sleep. I woke up, I had schoolwork to do. And I was just feeling overwhelmed. And I looked at the Wheel of Emotion and I discovered, okay, what am I feeling here? I'm feeling worried. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I'm feeling inadequate. I'm feeling inferior. I'm feeling worthless, like I don't have worth to do this task. I feel somewhat excluded was another emotion that I was feeling, because I've ended one chapter and started another. I no longer have the same traveling companions that I had for the last year and a half in my CPE program. And I realized all these emotions that I was feeling, the overpowering ones, the anxieties, the insecurities, weakness, rejection, feeling scared, they all come out of the fear emotion. And it helped me to be able to name it and say, "Okay, right now I'm not living out of a healthy place. I can pinpoint what it is. I'm feeling fearful. My fear is coming from this new stage of life, this new job that I'm starting. There is fear based on the unknown. There's a fear that I will not be adequate for the task of school ahead of me. There's a fear that I won't I'll be able to keep up with the reading. Which, by the way, I wanna tell you how ridiculous that will sound to you, because before the classes even started, I read every single textbook for every class cover to cover before the classes even began. And yet I already feel behind. That's just where I am when I operate. I feel very insecure when I come into school setting. So there's all these projects to do, there's all these things that are happening, and in the midst of it I feel fearful. And when I said before that I feel miserable when I'm in school, it's because, as I've been able to pinpoint, I'm living out of a place of fear. So for me, acknowledging that fear, just kinda doing some kinda to myself therapy today— this is the kind of things that I do when I need the help— I will name it. I will realize that that fear, it comes out for me from a place of loss. There is a loss of things that I've left behind. There's the challenge of the unknown. There's the surprise that's ahead that I don't know what'll happen. But I also have to acknowledge those don't get to be the only voices in my head. How about that, since I'm on the podcast Voices in My Head. I have to acknowledge you don't get to be the only voices that talk to me. Because while I could let the fear take over, that's not a healthy place to be. If I acknowledge why I'm feeling fearful, if I acknowledge why I'm feeling inferior, if I acknowledge why I'm feeling worthless, this can help me to actually come into a better place. And then I can start looking at the wheel of emotion and I can start looking at, but what are the places that I want to go? Where are the places that are healthier? If I look at the happy emotion, I can start seeing things like courageous and creative and loving categories and loving feelings and thankfulness. And I start thinking more about like, what are some things that I love? And things that I'm thankful for. And, and, and what are some things that make me feel courageous? However, this past year and a half in this journey, what is— what courageous steps have I taken? How am I courageous right now? It takes some courage to step into the new and the unknown, and that does make me happy. And so for me, it's this way of finding out what I'm feeling and then discovering what I want to feel and how I need to get there. And what are some other things I can acknowledge about myself? What are some things that make me happy? Well, my family makes me happy. My dogs make me happy. Making new music makes me happy. Being able to go on to this talk show that's coming up, that makes me happy. That's exciting and it makes me feel proud. And so suddenly those voices of fear and anxiety don't get to be the only voices in my head. So we don't want to push those things out. We actually want to welcome them to the table. So I'm in my house right now and I'm literally looking at our dinner table. And the worst thing I could do would be to say, "That fear that I'm feeling, the anxieties, all the worry, the inadequacy, that doesn't exist. So I'm just gonna push it out of my mind." No, the best thing to do, and I got this from Chaplain Matt Sanders, by the way, who was my guest a few weeks ago, is we welcome these things to the table, we acknowledge them, and we say, "You are an important part of myself. You are a part of me. I get it. I am fearful. This is where I feel inadequate. This is where I need to grow. This is where I need help. And you are welcome at this table, but you don't get to be the only voice at this table." there are other chairs with other voices. There are other spots with other emotions. And God has not given us a spirit of fear. And this loss that I feel, I only feel that loss because we are in the already and the not yet. You know, when you're in a graduate program, you are definitely experiencing the already and the not yet. You're where you are, but you're kind of stuck in limbo, but you're hopeful for things to come. For me, it's already starting the work that I'm feeling called to do, while at the same time being held back because I can't do it as fully as I would like because there's still school that's, that's taking most of my time. Anyway, today this was just as much for me as it was hopefully for you if you're listening today. I just needed to express what I was today, and it helps me sometimes to put that in podcast form. As I say goodbye on this podcast today, I'm getting back into a mountain of papers and a mountain of reading. And even though I've already read the books, I've got to reread them, and I've got to go back and do projects and all the things that come along with it. And I'm only on my second week of class. I have about 14 weeks to go, and I already feel like, oh Lord, help I am just miserable, and I need help out of this place. There's no time for relationships. There's no time for friendships. There's no time hardly to pet the dogs. And yet somehow I still have to be a dad, still have to be a husband, which I'm grateful to be, still get to be a pastor and a chaplain. All these things that are still there, the reality of facing that. So do me a favor, if you would, pray for me. I'll be praying for you in the days ahead as well. And thank you for listening to this podcast. I hope it's been of benefit to you in some way. I look forward to sharing whenever I can. And I want to make this disclaimer right now: I don't know that I'm going to be able to keep doing the podcast every week because school is so intense and work and life and family. The podcast is probably going to have to take a back burner. We'll have interviews, like I said, ahead with Dr. Willemann. But I just want to let you know, just because I've gone away doesn't mean I'm not coming back. Uh, there's the promise of resurrection always for us believers, aren't there? So whenever I can, I will be posting, and whenever I can't, I just won't. And I'm going to not feel guilty about it because there are other things I have to do in this season of life right now. As much as I love and grieve, as I just talked about, it's another grief having to leave I'll leave the podcast behind from time to time. I really wanted to hit 600 episodes this year, but I'm not sure that's going to happen, so we'll see. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. Thank you for being an important part of this journey with me. God bless you, and I pray that as you go your way, that God will bless you and keep you. Lord be with you today. Have a great one. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.