Am I trying to "fix" emotion in myself or others?

Dear EQuipped Leaders,

Hi there. Do you know those moments when all your travel plans fall through at the last minute and you find yourself not at all where you thought you’d be?

That’s where I am right now.

Where are you?

Wherever you’re finding yourself today, thank you for meeting me here.

Today, I want to talk about sitting with uncomfortable emotions. So snuggle in. Let’s get uncomfy together!

One emotion that I’m learning to sit with right now is disappointment.

To me, disappointment feels like I’ve let this balloon of hope fill and fill inside of me and then suddenly, POP, disappointment comes in and sharply and unexpectedly bursts my hope balloon.

What does disappointment feel like in your body? Where do you feel it?

Letting myself acknowledge my disappointment is new for me. I’m trying to learn to not judge it or try to “fix” it.

Judging and “fixing” emotion is usually more comfortable for me in the short term but more destructive in the long term.

Accepting and sitting with emotion is way less comfortable for me in the short term but more constructive in the long term.

When I had my own EQ Intervention wake up call and finally sought the help I needed, I had a lot of misconceptions about what I’d be doing. For example, I thought I was going to therapy to “fix” myself. I thought I was bad. My thoughts were bad, my feelings were bad. Everything going on inside me was bad, bad, bad. So I thought my therapist would help me regulate my feelings, so I could control all my bad and keep it from affecting those I love.

Turns out, I’m not bad. I’m human.

My tendency to judge myself, my emotions, and others was what was really hurting me, not my feelings. All my feelings were okay. The stories I made up about what my feelings meant about me is what was hurting me.

Take disappointment for example. Instead of just letting myself acknowledge that feeling and actually feel it, I would rush to try to “fix” it:

I should feel grateful for what is going well. This isn’t that big of a deal. I just need to suck it up and move on. I’m too dramatic. I need to be stronger.

I thought I was regulating my emotions, but really I was inhibiting and invalidating my emotions because they scared me:

What would it mean to let myself feel genuinely disappointed? What all would I have to face? What if I got stuck in that place? Could I trust myself to feel something that big?

I’m proud of how much I’ve grown my window of tolerance for difficult emotions. I’m proud of how much I can stick with myself and believe in my goodness even when I’m feeling hard things.

I’m also shocked at how much easier it is to regulate my emotion if I give myself just a little bit of time and space to feel it first.

Kids are the best at this. Have you ever seen a kid fall to the ground crying at disappointing news? If you don’t rush them through it, they’ll normally have a moment (be it a loud and tearful and messy moment) but then they get up and start happily playing again. They don’t waste time judging themselves for feeling their feelings.

My default in the past has been to should all over myself:

I should be happy. I should see the silver lining. I shouldn’t make such a big deal out of nothing.

It was exhausting to try to talk myself out of my true feelings. It also didn’t work.

Now instead of using gratitude as a weapon to suppress my emotions: I should just be happy.

I’m trying to learn to use gratitude to thank my emotions just like we teach our elementary students in the EQuipped Classroom:

See emotion: I feel disappointed.

Thank emotion: Thank you, Disappointment, for letting me know I care a lot. I dream big beautiful dreams. I’m alive, and I feel deflated when my dreams don’t work out how I hoped.

And

Regulate emotion: I’m going to give myself all the time I need to feel disappointed. I’m going to write to honor this emotion instead of rushing myself and trying to “fix” it.

Where does this land for you today?

Are you placing any unfair “should” judgements on your emotions? On your students’ emotions?
What emotion do you most often feel compelled to “fix” in yourself in others? How was this emotion treated by the adults who raised you?
What if everything you feel is okay? What if who you are right now is okay? No fixing necessary. What if instead of fixing ourselves, we worked with ourselves?