EPISODE 16: No, Your Partner Didn't Make You Feel That Way - Your Feelings Are Your Responsibility

I remember i was crying there and the kid who tagged me out looked at me and said big boys don't cry.

Hello and welcome to the pillow talks podcast we're your hosts vanessa and xander marin i'm a sex therapist with twenty years of experience and i'm just.

A regular dude we share the ups and downs in our relationship while giving you step by step techniques for improving.

Yours so make sure to subscribe for your weekly double date full of totally doable sex tips practical relationship advice hilarious and honest stories of what really goes on behind closed bedroom doors and so much more it's the sex education you wish you'd had is there anything that makes us feel more uncomfortable than feelings feelings are very very challenging for us to deal with on our own and in our relationships and i think that's because very few of us are taught how to actually navigate our own feelings you know most of grow up with really negative messages about feelings things like you know don't be a crybaby don't be dramatic you know we're not taught how to have a healthy relationship with.

Our feelings oh yeah one of my earliest memories is i think i was four years old i was playing baseball with some kids in preschool and i got tagged out pretty hard skinned my knee open in the gravel you know ultimately i had to go to the doctor and like get it like stitched up i remember i was crying there and the kid who tagged me out looked at me and said big boys don't cry ooh and that memory is seared into my memory i remember the name of the kid i remember his full name i remember exactly what he looks like i mean my knee was wide open bleeding that's so sad yeah.

I have a memory that comes to mind from when i was in grad school getting my psychology degree of learning about family dynamics family therapy i talked to my mom about feelings because growing up we didn't have a super feelings heavy household there was a lot of love but there wasn't a lot of discussion about feelings and so i asked her about that and she said well most feelings aren't rational so why would i bother with them interesting you know my mom very well so i'm sure you can imagine her saying that i.

Can i can and credit to your mom because she's probably listening hi mom she is she has moved the needle a lot in this area since i since i've known her i think that if you're listening to this i think that you are really good at feeling feelings now and i appreciate that as.

Your son in law wow just trying to get some mother in law points.

Huh oh yeah always.

So today we're going to be talking about feelings we went over to our instagram audience and we asked them do you ever feel overwhelmed or taken hostage by your emotions and ninety percent of people said yes then we asked do you or your partner regularly struggle to discuss emotions with each other and seventy two percent said yes i'm actually shocked by that one i think it should be about ninety nine percent yeah i want to hear.

From those twenty eight percent of people that don't struggle because even though vanessa and i have done a lot of work on this and i feel i would say that we do this well most of the time yeah not most of the time we do struggle so.

If our feelings are very overwhelming we don't really know how to deal with them what ends up happening when we do feel kind of taken hostage by emotions well we tend to blame other people for them and if we're in relationships we tend to blame our partner so we actually asked this question on instagram do you or your partner ever blame each other for your feelings so do you ever catch yourselves saying things like you made me feel this way and eighty two percent of people said yes we actually got quite a few dms from people saying i'm shocked it's not one hundred percent like anybody who says no is lying all right so.

There are like a million different dynamics that get wrapped up into this whole thing of like the blaming other people for your feelings but one really major thing like a really major psychological concept is called the fundamental attribution error and this is not like solely responsible but i think this is this is at the root of a lot of kind of interpersonal things that happen so the fundamental attribution error basically says that when something bad happens to us we tend to try to find something externally to blame for it i fail the test and be like oh well this teacher is mean to me this teacher has it out for me the teacher told me that the test would be on subject x and then i walked into class and it was actually on subject y something like that whereas when good things happen to us we tend to find internal reasons for why the good thing happened if you get an a plus on your test you go oh man i absolutely killed it on that test i am so smart i i prepared so well even if let's say you didn't prepare really well and just as luck would have it the test was really really easy we always go to like positive things about ourselves this is totally pervasive in our everyday lives you can't really stop this type of thinking but you can be aware of it and so in the case of feelings when something objectively bad is happening to you like having a feeling is uncomfortable you feel it in your body it doesn't feel good no we're going to tell you that you do need to feel your feelings that doesn't mean that they feel good so you're having an objectively less than positive experience everything inside your mind is wanting to shift the blame for that away from yourself and onto someone else so pretty logical that if you've got someone right in front of you who may have contributed to what you're feeling it's really easy to be like you did this to.

Me oh yeah we'll get into that some more too we were talking about this topic yesterday and we kind of started talking about some really interesting gender dynamics that might play into this as well do you want to go into.

That yeah definitely i mean i think with men i can speak from my experience i can speak to the experience that i believe a lot of men have from speaking with other men men are not raised to really have a good relationship with feelings like i described before four years old being told as i'm like bleeding all over the ground like big boys don't cry we learn really early that it's better not to have feelings it's better to suppress them it's better to keep them inside we're told that that's an effective way to handle them in reality they end up just getting suppressed and suppressed and suppressed until they bubble out in some other way think about it this way okay i'm a guy i'm not supposed to have feelings all my like male role models are strong silent type and we figure it out ourselves and we hold it all in now let's say you get into an argument with your partner and some big feelings are coming up and you're like oh my god i'm not supposed to be having these feelings if i was alone i would not be having these feelings because i know how to i have my shit under control but i'm having this feeling so how do you describe how do you explain that it must be yeah it must be somebody else's fault right because oh when i'm on my own this.

Never happens yeah so we went over to our instagram audience and we asked them to tell us you know if you or your partner are struggling with challenging emotions having a hard time navigating them on your own or together like what does that lead to in your relationship and so we heard answers like tension disconnection and distance lack of trust.

Frustration feeling unseen and unheard feeling blindsided.

Defensiveness avoidance feeling invalidated and feeling lonely obviously this is not fun it's having a lot of big impacts on relationships so that's why we wanted to talk today about kind of how to navigate.

Challenging emotions no one wants to feel any of those things that we just listed out these are all understandable feelings to have however if we can improve the way that we deal with feelings with each other a lot of these could be lessened or maybe even cut out most of the time first let's get into the review of the week this podcast and vanessa and xander's instagram has changed my life i have become so much more comfortable talking openly with my partner about sex and lots of other topics i don't know how it's possible that our society has allowed me a thirty six year old woman to know so little about sex even after eleven years of marriage and three kids and feel so ill equipped to learn more i am so so so grateful to have found vanessa and xander they make topics that used to make me cringe so much more accessible and are eliminating a lot of shame i've needlessly felt over the years i look forward to listening to the podcast every week and cannot thank you enough for making this amazing content available party face emoji.

Oh i saw that one and i was looking i was waiting for you to see how you were going to.

Describe it so you know i'm reading this off of my laptop which is you know like not right in front of my face and so i have the text pretty big but the emoji is still kind of small and for a moment i thought it might be like a cat face because i saw the party hat which is kind of comically small in the emoji now that i'm looking at it compared to the size of the head you if you wore a party hat that size on your head you would look pretty silly it kind of looks like a single cat ear and i was like oh maybe it's like a cat with like one droopy ear but no it is a blowing a oh my god what is what is the little party blower.

Thing what did i call them what.

Are they called it's not a kazoo kazoo sometimes though these things make a kazoo like noise yeah tell me what.

Are they called i actually have no.

Idea she has no idea i call.

Bullshit on you it unrolls at the.

End yeah i know exactly what you're.

Talking about please dm us on instagram vanessa marin therapy if you know the name of these little party blower party blower sounds like a different kind of party all right so yes thank you so much for this review that's a great one and just a reminder that we're doing a review giveaway you leave a review for us we are so so grateful it really helps the podcast grow helps us reach more people be able to serve more people and so we do this weekly giveaway you write a review just shoot us a screenshot of it on instagram anessamarintherapy and then every week we will enter you into a giveaway to get advice from us so what you'll do if you're the winners you can send us over your question or description of your situation and we will send you back an audio or a video message of us giving you personalized advice thank you so much in advance for writing reviews it really does make a huge huge difference yeah.

And at this point this is actually really one of the only ways to get truly personalized advice from us vanessa is not seeing clients one on one anymore you're not doing email coaching anymore because we are just so busy with podcast youtube instagram courses all that good stuff so yeah this is like one of the best ways to really get some personalized input and feedback from us.

So first we gotta talk about what the hell are feelings and what are they not because i think this is something that a lot of us just don't really realize there's a lot of misinformation about feelings oh yeah so at the most basic feelings are emotional experiences they're the way that we experience ourselves other people and the world around us and there are some core feelings we're gonna get back to this in a little bit but some of the core feelings are happy sad deceit disgusted angry bad surprised and fearful you feel your feelings in your body and not in your head so they're not thoughts you.

Know the emotional center is in your brain is part of your brain however that part of your brain is connected to your nervous system when you have certain thoughts that trigger feelings you tend to feel those throughout your body because it is connected to your nervous system which is why all these things can happen like your heart rate can increase you can feel high you can feel.

Cold and you might feel happiness as like a lightness in your chest you might feel fear as butterflies in your.

Stomach the fear in butterflies one is so so interesting to me this is one of the biggest misconceptions because i think due to kind of popular culture we have this idea of butterflies in your stomach being a sign of like romantic connection or attraction because somehow that's what you hear about in movies or read about in books in reality the feeling of butterflies in your stomach it is not a romantic feeling it is quite the opposite it is actually the feeling of blood leaving your chest and moving towards your extremities as your body starts to prepare itself to be in fight or flight mode so this actually kind of explains a little bit going for the bad boy or being attracted to danger because we have this idea in our head that butterflies actually means that like we are into someone or that something chemistry yeah that there's chemistry and in fact what your body is trying to tell you is like be careful stay away this person or this situation is dangerous and you need to be ready to run yeah yeah mic drop mic drop on that one the.

Other really interesting thing about feelings is that they are fleeting feelings actually last ninety seconds on average which tends to blow a lot of people's minds because feelings can feel very overwhelming sometimes and we can have a lot of fears about like you know i'm going to feel this way and it's not never going to go away but the reality is that a feeling passes through your body in about ninety seconds if you allow it to yeah i was going to say that's the key should we.

Say properly processed and we'll talk about how to do that but of course that is an average so it doesn't mean that you have a really big feeling come up and you say okay cool ninety seconds i'm going to set a timer and in ninety seconds i'm going to be good you know that means there are some things that last longer but i think it is comforting hopefully for you to know that if you set a goal of being better at understanding and processing your feelings they don't need to last for they definitely don't need to last forever and they definitely probably don't even need to last for like hours or days oh no.

Also feelings don't always make sense feelings can be incredibly random so this kind of goes back to my mom's idea of like you know why would i feel them they're not rational the reality is that yeah feelings don't always make sense it's really tempting for us to want to understand like why am i feeling this way what made me feel this way what happened we can oftentimes experience feelings that we don't understand that came up for no good reason maybe they even feel like the exact opposite thing that we thought we would have felt in that kind of situation so feelings just don't fit in with our.

Rational brains to kind of disconnected from the part of your brain that is responsible for rational thought the part of the brain where the the feelings come from is you know responsible for kind of like lower motor functions and stuff like that so you know it's important to understand yeah you can't think yourself out of a feeling you can maybe think yourself into subverting a feeling just to allow it to come up later but the feelings will always win your lower bodily functions pretty much always win suppression is not the answer you also.

Do not have to act on your feelings so here's another huge misconception i think a lot of us think you know once we feel something we have to do something about it or do something with it and that's just not the truth again we'll get into like how to healthily process and manage your emotions in a second but for most feelings there's nothing that you need to do with them another very important truth about feelings you are not your feelings i think a lot of us overly relate to our feelings in certain ways and we create stories about ourselves as somebody who feels this kind of feeling a lot or like we make a certain meaning out of it i am.

A sad person person yeah or i am a bad person or i am.

Whatever the reality is you know we were saying just a minute ago like feelings can be random feelings can make no sense it's important for you to not overly identify with your feelings like we want to make the space for feelings the permission for feelings but also recognize like you're going to have feelings that are incredibly random sometimes and that doesn't mean anything about you yes just.

Like thoughts you're going to have very random thought i mean typically a feeling follows a thought very closely you know you have a random thought and then that elicits a feeling and you are not in control of those random thoughts that pass through your mind you are in control of what you do with those thoughts afterwards same with emotion you can choose to try to suppress that emotion you can choose to try to feel that emotion you can choose to try to blame somebody else for that emotion but you cannot stop the actual emotion from happening do not have to do any one thing you have a.

Choice yeah i think this one is really challenging for people because like feelings are so personal you know it does it feels like they do say something about us and who we are but i think if we learn to recognize our feelings are not the entirety of who we are and we can feel feelings that are very different or even in opposition to who we know ourselves to be that can just free up a lot of internal space and finally your feelings are not the truth what.

Really is the truth anyway vanessa that's another that's another podcast oh god that's another podcast that we will never be doing because that.

That'S too hard of a question but this is such a challenging one for people because like we were just saying we tend to over identify with our feelings they feel so personal they feel so real in the moment we really feel like our feelings are the truth and i think this leads to so much conflict in relationships we have often very different feelings from what our partner feels and we find ourselves arguing about who is the correct one whose feelings are actually the truth of the matter but your feelings are not the truth we really have to learn to accept that and we're going to talk about that a little bit more because we know that that one is a tough pill to swallow so now we have to get into an even tougher pill to swallow that's an interesting saying isn't it well i can.

Relate with that because my mom gave me a lot of supplements when i was a kid and i feel like she always had those pills that were not actually like filled tablets they were like the hard ones the chalky ones and oh my god i was so bad at taking them as a kid i just like always have these things stuck in my throat and it's funny now i mean i'm a lot better at it i'm good at taking pills thanks mom but god so many so many i just remember being like no not the big ones.

Big boys take their vitamins and don't complain about it all right so here's the really hard pill to swallow the big chalky one your feelings are your responsibility they aren't.

The truth but they are your responsibility.

So if you catch yourself or your partner saying you made me feel this way hate to break it to you but your partner did not make you feel anything you are responsible for your feelings so this is a very very.

Hard concept you're probably feeling defensive hearing that you might be feeling like you.

Are wrong yes it's a very hard one to understand and to agree with especially in relationships i actually remember learning this in grad school and i fought this one so hard i spent a lot of time thinking through all these possible scenarios all these different things like no no no no someone else made me feel that way like i really really struggled with this one and i think it's because you know so many of us do have experiences of like no like this person did this thing to me to feel this way they knew that their actions were going to evoke something for me like it really does feel like other people make us.

Feel certain i was like oh well if i was by myself none of this would have ever happened i could have never possibly felt this way but.

You know as much as i fought it in grad school i finally had to come to the understanding of the you know the reality that our feelings are our responsibility and i also came to realize that you know once i accepted that responsibility and it really helped me move so much faster into having a healthier relationship with my own feelings and a happier relationship with xander and i think that's true for everyone when we can swallow that tough pill i got it right i didn't swallow the big pill swallow the big chalky one you can move into having this healthier relationship with your emotions and with your partner okay let's back this up a second though because i know right now you're listening to this just thinking you guys are nuts like my partner makes me feel things so yes your partner or other people can intentionally try to hurt you other people do say things they make do things of course their words their actions have an impact on us so we're not saying that other people have no responsibility that they can just do or say whatever they please and it doesn't matter because your feelings are your responsibility but what we are saying is that other people don't have responsibility for the exact feelings that you.

Are feeling or especially like the intensity of the feeling and all of the various aspects yeah people contribute the life contributes to how you feel but how you feel is unique to you so.

We'Re going to give you a funny example because we know that this is a big challenging topic that you're probably struggling with right now we're going to talk about xander farting woo xander farts a lot kind of a lot oh my god no that was not a real fart that was a mouth fart just for the record that was a.

Mouth fart i am taking the job of our podcast engineer away so instead of him inserting a fart noise i just did it for him you're welcome.

Art great thanks okay so xander farts and sometimes i get really angry about this i put a great deal of effort into holding in my farts trying to maintain like just a thread of mystery in this relationship and sometimes i just feel like you know what i'm trying so hard to keep this thread of mystery and you can't even be bothered you're just letting them rip whenever you want to like an animal filthy animal i get pissed about this sometimes sometimes xander farts and i laugh at it they're funny sometimes and sometimes xander farts and i don't even pay any.

Attention to it or you just don't notice that happens a lot.

Sometimes you blame them on the dog it is.

Very convenient it is convenient however our dogs fart a lot more than i.

Do i don't know about that actually.

No they do.

So it's the same action on xander's part he's farting in all these different examples he's just farting all the time but these are wildly different reactions on my part right like not even registering it getting angry at it they're very different reactions and to.

Be clear vanessa does feel very strongly sometimes like some really big feelings come up sometimes she's really sad like what does this mean sad what does this mean for our relationship or i don't.

Think i get sad about say sad.

You get angry you get disgusted i.

Said angry i don't get sad sometimes.

You do sometimes i think you're a little sad we're gonna have to have.

A conversation about this after we record the podcast this is gonna be like the our poll podcast is like me crying sad tears over you farting yeah.

Sad fart sad that'll be a fun.

One to illustrate can't wait yeah so xander is he's responsible for the action he's responsible for his farting but he's not responsible for it evoking feelings in me or for the particular feelings that it is evoking because they're so different if you really think about this right now you could think of like something that it felt like someone else did to you and think about what's a different you know an alternative reaction that you could have had a different feeling that it could have evoked for you.

Or an alter like a different time that same thing happened and you felt differently yeah about it and to add another layer onto it it's like specific to vanessa as well like i could have a different partner who just never cared about farts or someone that cried every single time always cried because you know they had fart trauma earlier on in their lives or something like that yeah every different person has a different perspective on farting and and not only that but then each individual time they have the ability to feel differently about it because of all these other situations like vanessa may be angry more often when like maybe she had like a tough conversation with her mom like an hour before and she's a little on edge there's all these other things that can contribute to kind of what feeling gets brought up so this kind of puts her over the edge and i had no way of knowing that and say i just got home i didn't even know she talked to her mom on the phone phone or you know we are just like had a really funny joke that we laughed at and then i fart and she's just like more more laughs is that what you.

Think my last sounds like yeah i.

Really can't replicate your laugh you have a great huge loud laugh i love.

It okay so if your feelings are your responsibility what are you supposed to do like how do we have a better healthier relationship with our feelings especially given that most of us have not really been taught how to do this so we've got two steps for you today and they are two simple steps but they are not easy steps step one is to identify your emotions so we asked our instagram audience when you feel an emotion are you able to identify it and only fifty eight percent of people said yes and when we.

Say identify what we mean is like like name the emotion that you're feeling.

So there's a great little saying i forget who came up with it but they say that you have to name to tame you have to name your emotions in order to tame them so if we want to you know be able to move through our emotions and process them well we first have to even identify what the heck it is that we're feeling so that we can.

Move through it yeah because if we can if it's just like oh this thing feels uncomfortable really the only tool we have available to us is to try to like like push it aside or push it down but once we know what it is we have a lot more options available to us absolutely.

So i think the key here is really being curious we have to make the space for our feelings and be open to them be open to like yeah what is it that i am feeling right now then like i just said a second ago like these are simple steps but they're hard ones so many of us we are told to you know suppress our emotions to ignore our emotions to rationalize them so this idea of like trying to be really curious about them that's gonna feel very hard but it's such an important step to take it's allowing yourself to get curious and say like yeah what is it that i'm feeling what's coming up for me where am i feeling it what does it feel like in that part of my body but what if.

Like i just don't even like know how to even name them like i don't even know what the feelings are like where do i even start i feel like that is that's what so many people especially dudes say i just i don't even know what a feeling is i like oh i don't feel.

Good well we want to introduce you to the feelings wheel then thanks for queuing me up for that one i know i got you nice little softball there so we are going to put this on the show notes for this episode at vmtherapy dot com episode sixteen the number sixteen so in this wheel basically it's designed as a series of concentric circles and so it has in the middle of the circle is the core feelings which i mentioned earlier they're happy sad disgusted angry bad surprised and fearful and then the next circle out from that other feelings more nuanced feelings that fall under that category so obviously like happy is a huge category of emotions there are lots of other specific emotions so a bunch of different concentric circles basically there are just a ton of different feelings on this wheel and you can look at it and help it identify what specific feeling you're feeling so it helps you get a lot more nuanced about you know instead of just saying oh i'm sad okay well is it a loneliness kind of sad is it a disappointed kind of sad if it's disappointment what else might it kind of filter into so it's just a really really useful practical simple tool for becoming more familiar with feelings and more nuanced about identifying and describing your.

Feelings yeah this might sound silly but like print the feelings wheel out take a screenshot and keep it on your phone so that you have it with you at all times because it's just so valuable to be able to have something that kind of jogs your memory of like oh these are the words that are associated with these things that i feel and it can just really help you identify what is coming up because it can be when you see all the names of the feelings on there it can be hard to kind of keep those like in your top of mind all the time to be like oh i feel exactly x y.

Z yeah especially you know again if you just didn't have much of an education in feelings you know you were taught not to feel your emotions to ignore them you know it's just like a really great foundational you know information that all of us really need okay now we move on to step two which is to feel your feelings so again it's a simple step but not so easy in practice our perspective about feelings is that it's really important for you to give yourself permission to feel everything because the only way for us to get to the other end of a feeling is to go through it so earlier i mentioned that feelings only last ninety seconds on average that's if you move through them if you try to fight against it if you try to ignore it if you try to pretend it doesn't end exist your feelings only get stronger we cannot fight against our feelings it is a battle that we will lose every single time and.

I think the other thing that comes up for me when i hear you say this is it gets back to that part that we were talking about earlier of you are not your feelings because i think a lot of people think i'm starting to feel this feeling and it is it doesn't fit with the perception i have of myself of the type of person that i think that i am so i will not let myself feel that or like i'm feeling jealous of something but oh wait i'm not a jealous person i cannot feel this but but if you give yourself permission say you know what i'm allowed to feel something it doesn't mean that i am a certain way it doesn't it's not a referendum on who i am as a person yeah you're going to get through that so much.

Quicker yeah so there's another psychological concept called meta feelings where it's like you know we have our feelings and then we have meta feelings which is our feelings about our feelings so that's when you start judging yourself of like oh i'm not allowed to feel that oh i'm not a jealous person oh you know whatever it is so our feelings are never the problem it's our meta feelings our feelings about our feelings that's what get us into trouble so again like whenever we try to ignore feelings suppress them fight against them they only get stronger think right now like think of a time that you felt a challenging emotion and let's use the specific example of you tried to suppress that emotion so you tried to like i'm not feeling it let me push it down inside let me ignore it let me lock it away inside of me so really think back like did that actually work were you able to successfully suppress an emotion or did it end up flooding out of you later maybe at a really inopportune moment maybe it really shocked you or caught you off guard maybe it was is way stronger than it actually was the first time around i promise you you cannot think of an example where you have successfully managed to suppress your emotions and they never ended up coming back out all.

The dudes out there who are like oh i've been doing this my whole life no problem like i think oftentimes it's not a one for one association of like i suppressed that feeling yesterday and then today it came back out but it's like oftentimes suppressing those feelings they manifest themselves in other ways later it might be days months years later but like we just totally snap and lose it and that is a direct result of bottling and bottling and bottling various feelings over time yeah like if.

You'Ve ever caught yourself snapping about something that seemed really small but you're having this really disproportionately large reaction to it those are your feelings coming out this is a tangent that could be an entirely separate episode but another thing that tends to happen is pain in our body you can store emotions in your body and they will linger in your body as pain tightness cramping there's so like our bodies hold onto everything and even if you don't rationally recognize like oh yeah i'm feeling that sadness how are the state of your tell me about the state of your shoulders right now tell me about your stomach your digestion the body remembers the body remembers everything feelings they don't want to be ignored they don't want to be suppressed all that feelings really want is validation it's like permission to exist and i think that's an oddly relatable experience right like think about when you and your partner are having an argument and you're just trying to tell your partner like i feel sad and you just want your partner to like validate you to acknowledge you to give you permission to feel sad in that moment you know your feelings are having that same experience with you there was that movie it's on my list to watch and i cannot believe i haven't gotten around to it i think it was like inside out or something like that where they had the emotions were i think like the little different characters but sometimes i like to think of my feelings in that way as like just this little character inside of me that's like hey i just i just want to exist i just want to be here like and i think it's yeah it's it's a relatable kind of experience experience like oh you just want to be validated and seen and again if you do that with your feelings they will pass in about ninety seconds on average all.

Right so here's another tool that you can use when you are feeling something big you can as you're feeling it or maybe after you felt it a little bit you can start to think about hey have i ever felt something similar to this before or you know if something happened right before that big feeling you could think has something similar to that ever happened to me before because oftentimes we can trace the feelings that are coming up to us back to these formative or traumatic experiences that we had in the past and that can be a really easy way to tell yourself or just remind yourself hey you know it actually makes a lot of sense for me to be feeling this way because it's like that time when i was a kid i got tagged out and my knee started bleeding i was really sad and in a lot of pain that kid told me that big boys don't cry and then i can be like oh yeah this is kind of bringing up those feelings of shame that i felt of oh i'm not supposed to be crying absolutely.

So another technique that you can use think about how you would want your partner to treat your feelings so i was just mentioning this a minute ago like when you and your partner are having some sort of conflict or an argument or you're just trying to like be seen and validated by your partner sometimes when we think about like how we want other people to treat us that can be a window into how we can treat ourselves so if your partner ever says things like don't feel that that doesn't make any sense it's not that bad you're so sensitive those things never feel good in the moment right and they don't ever make the feeling go away in that same sort of way like don't say those things to yourself don't tell yourself like don't feel that it doesn't make any sense for you to be feeling that the most basic way that you can actually feel your feelings and give yourself that acknowledgment and validation is to say i feel x and that's okay i'm feeling sad right now and that's okay i'm feeling lonely right now and i give myself permission to feel lonely right now and you can even acknowledge to yourself i feel disappointed right now and it's really hard for me to feel disappointed and i really do not want to feel disappointed right now but i feel disappointed and that's okay yeah and you.

Can even acknowledge those meta feelings i feel disappointed and that's okay and there is a part of me that is starting to feel judgmental about feeling sad because i don't want to be a sad person and just naming that meta feeling as well is a really healthy way to get through it because often by naming it we give it so much less power to control us so.

Those are our two steps our two simple but not easy steps for how to navigate challenging emotions on your own step one is to identify your emotions and step two is to feel your emotions obviously feelings is a huge topic there are probably about a hundred podcast episodes that we can do about it and we want to acknowledge you know in a future episode we're going to talk about things like like how to encourage your partner to feel their emotions and to express their emotions how you and your partner can talk about your feelings with each other like we do with pretty much every topic we talk about we always like to start with yourself so you developing a better understanding of your emotions a better relationship with your emotions that's going to be the foundation for you dealing with emotions in a healthier way in your relationships with.

Other people all right so let's get into a couple listener questions then all right vanessa all right i was raised in a family that didn't talk about feelings what can i do now i.

Mean first let's just acknowledge that most of us grew up in this kind of situation like it's just so rare to grow up in a family where your parents are you know they have healthy relationships with their own feelings they educate you about your feelings you know the vast majority of us grew up in households where we didn't you know talk about feelings we had negative messages about it so you're definitely not alone in in this and i think the really important thing to recognize is like yes the way that we were raised of course it impacts us of course if you don't have any experience talking about feelings it's going to be really hard for you to talk about them or maybe you have a partner you know in this situation that you're you know maybe you're more expressive and your partner's the one who just like can't talk about their feelings so our histories our past do affect us and they don't need to dictate your entire future right like you can make a decision to choose to relate to your feelings in a different way going forward so like you know both xander and i shared stories obviously just little stories but we have plenty more of ways that we were taught to relate or not relate to our emotions and we've made different decisions in our lives to relate to our emotions in very different sorts of ways give yourself some validation and some acknowledgement feel whatever feelings might come up about being raised in this family that didn't talk about feelings and you can consciously decide i want to relate to my own feelings in a different.

Way yeah i think a lot of people who have this experience kind of end up with a meta feeling of well i know that maybe i maybe i should be better at this or i would like to improve at this but i just never had a chance because i was raised in a family that never talked about feelings and i don't know what to do and so i feel judgmental of myself of like i don't want to like get it wrong so it's easier to just not try and that's almost sort of like a meta feeling like you're judging yourself you don't want to allow yourself to muddle through this at the beginning because it is hard it's not something that comes easily it's not something like you just listen to this podcast and now you're a perfect feelings feeler like that that's just not how it works but see if you can identify that and be like you know what there's a part of me that just really doesn't want to like not know what they're doing but i need to recognize that this is something that's going to take some time and some effort and i'm open to working on it all right so another question is how do you self soothe when you're having difficult feelings so maybe i'm going to infer a little bit from the person asking this but maybe let's say when you're having a feeling that is perhaps lasting longer.

Than ninety seconds definitely the steps that we outlined above are just the best way to navigate emotions identify them and feel them but some other things that you can do is to journal there's actually been a lot of research done on the power of journaling and it really can help you move through your emotions so much faster so a great exercise is just like freeform writing don't edit yourself don't judge yourself censor yourself just write down what it is that you're feeling any thoughts that you're having writing about our feelings can be a really really useful exercise another thing that has been shown with research to be very valuable is moving your body so moving your body is a great way to process emotions to move through the emotions because like we were saying earlier like we feel emotions in our bodies that's where we hold them we store them we experience them and so any sort of movement you know walking weightlifting yoga anything like that can be really beneficial for for helping you process through your emotions and in particular this works very well for challenging emotions or like trauma responses so if you have a dog you may have noticed that you know let's say you take your dog to the park and it meets another dog and there's this kind of like you know maybe a weird energy between the two of them they walk away from each other and your dog shakes off that's your dog processing its emotions and shaking off the stress and the tension and so in the same sort of way like we can process our emotions by kind of shaking them out it's like a very primal response that.

We have so unfortunately we can't do it quite as quickly and as well as dogs can well maybe we should.

Normalize let's all just like give ourselves a little shakeout whenever we're feeling something.

I'M just saying i can't shake quite as well as our dogs can you.

Can'T shake as cutely as our dogs can but you can shake yeah but i saw you trying to shimmy the other day that true that kind of.

Looked the same way i try i try i'll put it that way but yeah i mean this makes a lot of sense because what i was saying earlier about how that the emotional center of your brain is connected to the nervous system as well so like any so movement can kind of disrupt or alter you know just the way that are you know kind of those lower bodily functions are feeling because like you know say we're feeling some tightness or something getting up and walking is a way to just kind of disrupt that and like send some different signals through our body absolutely all right so the last question is isn't it just better to keep some stuff stuffed deep down.

I think you can already guess the answer to this no it is not first of all you're never going to be able to successfully stuff down your emotions they will come in one way or another but i think that what this one is pointing to is maybe this idea that we were talking about earlier about how a lot of people feel like we have to act on our feelings so i think sometimes people you know they feel a feeling and they're like oh i don't want to feel that because i don't want to have to take any action on that like i'm angry and i don't want to go out and like you know hit somebody or you know hurt myself or something like that and so i think that if we recognize that you know our feelings we don't have to take action on our feelings the only action that you have to do is just feel the feelings but you just sitting there with yourself and saying i'm feeling angry right now you know what it's okay i give myself permission to feel anger that's enough so yeah feelings can sometimes feel very scary it can feel like we have to do something with it then but the reality is that we don't and i think that if we allow ourselves to recognize that if i can just feel the feeling i don't have that to do to do anything with the feeling then that can help us feel more comfortable feeling the wide variety of feelings that might.

Come up for us yeah i think the challenging thing with this one is that many of us do live most of our lives with stuffing a variety of feelings or a variety of memories deep deep down and it's easy you know in many circumstances you're like oh well here i'm living a perfectly normal life knowing that i've completely suppressed this experience or this memory or this feeling and those those kind of in between moments where you're like oh yeah sure like i'm i'm happy things are good you use those as data to be like yeah so like it totally works to suppress this stuff and then there are those not in between moments those challenging moments where stuff does come up you're feeling like underlying stress and you don't know why that's that's just all that stuff that you have stuffed down and yeah if you can get yourself to the point of being like you know what i don't want to do that anymore i'm going to try to let it out you're going to feel.

Better yeah and i think some of the other stuff that we talked about earlier too about like you are not your feelings your feelings are not the truth like go back and re listen to some of those you know that part of the episode because i think once we realize the truth about emotions what they are what they are not it becomes a lot easier for us to actually actually feel them all right well that is it for our episode all about feelings so we want to invite you to come over to vmtherapy dot com episode sixteen that's the number sixteen and we will put all of our show notes there and we'll put the feelings wheel too so you can download it put on your phone print it out and you can help yourself start to identify your feelings in a more nuanced way and then you can shoot us a dm at vanessa marin therapy on instagram instagram and let us know what feeling you're feeling after listening.

To this episode and tell us how you feel about that feeling too all right that's it for today's episode of pillow talks thank you so much for listening as we talk about feelings and how we feel about them.

How we feel about how we feel about our.

Feelings yeah because we can get meta on meta on meta oh shit yeah anyway join us again next week when we are going to talk about allowing yourself to receive in the bedroom oh yeah we'll probably talk about how you might feel about that too probably talk.

About feelings in every episode going forward.

True in the meantime do you have a question that you want answered on our podcast leave us a message at seven hundred seventy four p i l l o w one that's seven hundred seventy four pillow one because we have our very own sex hotline not that kind of hotline but leave us a voicemail we will never pick up the phone we'll answer your sex and relationship questions on the podcast if you leave us a question so we'd love to.

Have you do that all right thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.

Sam.