How to feel sad in a useful way

One of my clients had been feeling “bad” for a long time.  

This client was a C-suite executive at a major regional organization, and a highly competent professional. 

But he was also completely overwhelmed at work, and exhausted all day. He had so much anxiety in his body, that he’d stopped feeling his body at all. He spent all day in his (very smart) head.

This client was desperate to feel better — understandably!

And yet, one of the first things I told him was: “You need to focus on processing your feelings.”

He balked at this. “I feel all the time!” he told me. “If I come home from work and my wife’s not there, all I do is feel anxious. All of my thoughts and worries and anxieties come rushing back in.”

And that was exactly what I feared.

One thing that I have observed — which I think is not said often enough — is that we can “feel bad” frequently — but without actually processing that emotion.

You will know that you are actually processing your emotion when you feel some amount of relief afterwards. There is an experience of metabolizing the feeling — allowing it to flow through you, and become something different.

You might not feel joyful and sparkly afterwards – but you will feel a sense that the intensity is at least somewhat less than before (and, typically, significantly less).

This often requires inhabiting the feeling or sensation much more deeply and directly than you are doing now.

And something miraculous typically occurs when we do this: not only do we feel much better, we also often get useful insights about our lives: information about what we do and don’t want, or what next actions to take.

…

Learning how to process emotions can take some time — it’s subtle and iterative, and something I often do with my 1:1 life coaching clients — but today, I wanted to share a few prompts to begin that process:

1. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and call to mind an emotional or physical sensation you’ve been avoiding.
   
   
   

2. Notice what that feeling is like in your body. Is it a tightness in your chest? A zinging in your belly? A rock in your throat?
   
   (If you can’t feel anything, don’t worry. Many people feel numb at first and unable to access physical sensations. But as virtually all of my clients would attest, it can be learned.)

3. Do not try to change the feeling, push it down, or make it go away. Just let it be there, however it happens to be.
   
   Mentally tell that feeling: You can stay as long as you’d like, and become whatever you want to become — bigger, smaller, something different.

4. The key is then to sit with that sensation, and give it all of the space it needs. I like to imagine kindly giving the feeling an enormous, spacious room to be in, or a wide field. Sometimes it may feel like the feeling gets bigger, more intense. Sometimes new feelings will arise.

5. Allow each feeling to arise, becoming whatever it needs to be. Typically after several minutes of this, you will start to feel better.

When I did this with my (admittedly skeptical) client – he looked at me afterward with some surprise: I feel better, he told me.

…

So many of us spend our lives feeling low-grade bad, but we avoid those feelings for obvious reasons: If we felt them more directly, we’d feel more bad, right?

And yet, the opposite is typically true: when we feel them directly, we end up feeling better, not worse. Typically, the feelings never last as long as we expect them to. 

But the only way around them is through them.

And if you take one thing away from this essay let it be this:

If you’ve been feeling bad, for a long time, it might be time to point your compass directly towards the swamp of messy feelings.

You might blow your mind.

…

As always, I’m rooting for you in the week ahead. You’ve got this.

Katie




p.s. My past and current clients are probably smiling as they read this essay: few of my clients can escape working with me, without learning how to process feelings and sensations better. Almost all of them become less afraid of intense feelings and more capable of moving on from them more effectively.

If you’ve been feeling low-level (or high-level) “bad” for a long time, I’d highly recommend working with me 1:1. The first steps are here.

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