YOUR FEELINGS OUT
How The Techniques In
These Interactive Exercises Work
Lynne Namka, Ed. D. ©
Okay. You have some anger, sadness or other bad feelings.
It's normal to have all kinds of feelings, even bad ones.
Feelings are for learning. You can learn a lot about yourself
and how you act by watching your feelings. You can learn
how your bad feelings and mood bias how you read things
wrong and can't see clearly.
your feelings seriously. They provide signals that hold
information for you. Feelings are meant to be felt, understood,
explored and then released. Some people run away from their
bad feelings and then the feelings stick around. Learn to
hang out with your feelings and see what they have to tell
you. It's what you do with your feelings that count. All
feelings are okay, but remember that you can't hurt people
or yourself with your actions.
Intelligence is the ability to understand and use your feelings
to get along well in your life. Emotional Intelligence has
been found to be far more important that IQ, technical skills
or experience in how you succeed in the business world.
People who learn and use the skills of Emotional Intelligence
deal better with their stress, anger and anxiety and have
happier, more satisfying lives. You can study your emotions
just like you study any other subject giving you a positive
life-long investment in yourself. If you practice observing
and managing your feelings even just once a day, you will
become a better person for it!
a life-long habit of studying about feelings--yours and
others. The skills of Emotional Intelligence can be learned.
You can appraise your feelings and determine if they are
appropriate for the situation. You can learn to read the
emotions of other people to know how best to deal with or
negotiate with them. You can use your feelings to think
ahead and problem solve to plan for a better outcome instead
of just reacting. You can watch and see how you express
your feelings and how that affects other people. Learning
to manage your own feelings and calm yourself down when
you are upset is one of the most important things you can
do to create a happy life.
and Use Self Soothing Techniques to Maximize Becoming the
Best You can Be
are energies that can be moved and transformed. Ignoring
or stuffing feelings is "out!" What is "in" is to learn
to self soothe so that you, not your excessive emotions,
are in charge! Self soothing techniques are things you do
to calm yourself when you are stressed or caught in unruly
emotions. The new buzz word phase in Psychology is to learn
to "modulate the emotions!" Don't be at the mercy of out-of-control
feelings--learn to calm them down.
exercises help you learn several things to do to relax yourself
and let go of your bad feelings. But you have to do what
is suggested, not just watch the videos. Just do it! Remember,
you did not learn your multiplication tables or to swim
without practice. Practice makes perfect when dealing with
difficult emotions. You need many different kinds of tools
and techniques to be the best person you can be in difficult
circumstances. Practice each technique until it becomes
automatic and your life will be much smoother.
feelings! Little feelings! People differ in their emotional
reactions because they have different types of central nervous
systems and hormonal reactions to events. Some people get
over negative feelings faster than others. Sensitive people
have quicker and stronger emotional reactions than others.
Stronger emotions take longer to recover from. If you come
from a family where you do not feel supported or if you
have had lots of trauma, it might be harder for you to calm
your emotions. If you are more sensitive, you can learn
ways to calm your feelings and deal with your sensitivity.
of these techniques work because they apply a psychological
concept called Reciprocal Inhibition which means that two
emotions cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
You cannot feel hatred and happy at the same time. When
you impose a positive emotion over a negative one, one must
fall out and it usually is the negative one! Relaxation
and feelings of love and good self esteem help break into
fear and anxiety. Relaxation rules! Positive experiences
turn on the pleasure centers in the brain and reduce areas
that sense pain. You can learn to work your emotions to
bring about changes in your brain! The brain is elastic
and can be programmed with stress management techniques.
When you are angry and add feelings of being empowered and
joyful, fear, depression or anger can lessen. What a good
deal--tune into the positive emotions to help counteract
the negative ones!
video has one or more of the most potent techniques available
today that can help you deal with your unruly emotions.
Learn them all and use the ones that you like best. If one
technique doesn't help for your particular problem of the
moment, go to another video and try that technique even
if it's presented with a different type problem. Or come
back the next day and try the same technique again. Try
them all. Keep trying them. Do something--don't just be
at the mercy of your emotions.
decided not include two of the greatest techniques--Eye
Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and Rapid Eye
Technology due to concerns that use of these techniques
might trigger overwhelming memories. They are worth learning
a bout because they are so powerful. Moving the eyes around
in circles, back and forth and up and down while thinking
about your problem can create a relaxed state. Rapid eye
movement can help you bring up and process issues and emotions
that lie underneath your problem. Rapid Eye Movement helps
the right side and the left side of your brain communicates
with each other and helps to break into trauma. Another
of my favorite approaches not included here in the videos
is the Tapas Acupressure Technique. You'll have to seek
help learning these three important techniques with a trained
problems may not be helped by these exercises. If your strong
feelings do not go away after you learn and USE these techniques,
then it is time for you to get someone trained to help you
deal with your problems. When things in your life do not
make sense, get a counselor or therapist who can help you
sort it out. Life is too short to be confused, anxious,
depressed or angry much of the time. You deserve to have
a happy life and if you can't figure how to be happy on
your own, get help! See Finding a Competent Therapist at
the bottom of the Angries Out web page to learn more about
the different approaches and then on to their web page for
trained therapists in your area.
be a slave to your overwhelming feelings. You have the potential
for change due to the elastic nature of your brain which
changes and grows when you learn new things. You can buffer
yourself against poor self esteem by taking charge of how
you react to what happens to you. Learn the different ways
of working with your unhappy emotions. Become a collector
of tools and techniques to calm yourself! It may take a
lot of practicing these different techniques for you to
recover from the strong grip of your bad feelings. You do
have to do them--don't just watch the videos! Do the exercises
several times until you learn many different approaches
to understand and release your bad feelings.
What Works? Ways to Work
with Your Uncomfortable Emotions
by tapping or rubbing your body is a form of self massage
that feels good. Tapping briskly on your body when you are
upset gets your energy moving and helps you relax. The Emotional
Freedom Technique (EFT) combines acupressure with counteracting
negative thoughts, owning the problem and forgiving yourself.
EFT helps calm down the fight or flight response by balancing
your brain hemispheres. This technique helps you release
the strong emotions and negative thoughts and helps you
relax all at the same time.
you are scared, you might contract your body and hold your
breath to try to squish the feelings in order to keep from
feeling bad. Pulling your body in tight and stopping your
breath keeps you from getting good oxygen to deal with whatever
you are scared or angry, use your breath to make yourself
strong and powerful! Your breath is your best friend! It
will always be with you when you want to calm yourself down.
Make your breath go down deep into your body as far as you
can. Deep breathing which goes down past the rib cage into
the belly helps you feel relaxed as it bring good, life-affirming
oxygen into your body. Breathing helps calm the fight, flight
or freeze reaction that you can go into when stressed. Deep
breathing helps bring you back where you can think more
clearly and reason!
of the Feeling
often we run away from bad feelings and they pile up inside.
An antidote for the stuck feelings inside is to do the opposite
action. So instead of stuffing feelings down, address them
and exaggerate them instead! Amplification of the feeling
helps exhaust it. When you push yourself to the limit one
way, the emotions want to swing the other way. Making the
feelings bigger and bigger can sometimes help to use them
up and wear them out. When they get so big and uncomfortable,
you can say "That's enough," and let them go.
powerful imagination can make pictures in your mind to release
unhappy experiences and bad feelings. Your subconscious
mind does not know the difference between real and pretend.
Sometimes you can trick it by using your imagination to
make pictures in your mind to change the feeling. You can
use symbols and rituals to release your anger, fear, sadness
and other uncomfortable feelings.
up a story of somewhere safe where you want to send a bad
feeling--to the moon, to the center of the earth or the
North Pole. See the feelings coming out of you and rushing
off to that safe place. You can picture cooling water being
poured on your anger to put it out or someone loving coming
to comfort you when you are sad. Use your imagination!
Outs add action to your imagination to help "throw away"
a feeling. With Pull Outs, you find your feeling in your
body and then use your hands while you pretend that you
are pulling it out to throw away. Let your powerful imagination
and the wonder of your mind decide what to do with your
scary and unhappy feelings.
is keeping your attention on what is happening in the moment.
You just watch how you inhale and exhale and observe the
thoughts as they come and go. You calm yourself by focusing
on your breath until the negative emotion leaves. Just watch
the events instead of reacting to them. Mindfulness is calming
as your mind shifts the focus to just being the neutral
observer of the events. Meditation can help you learn to
be more mindful. Stop the knee-jerk reactions and keep your
mind in neutral! Like the popular song says, "Just breathe!"
Psychology researches how happy, successful people work
their life. The research on brain function shows that certain
areas of the left side of the brain activate and light up
when you engage in positive thinking. The brain chemicals
which create a sense of well being are turned on when you
keep your mind in a positive mind set. There are many books
written on happiness to show you how to get the most out
of your life. Get in the habit of becoming aware when you
are thinking negative thoughts and learn ways to shift those
children from troubled homes become successful in life.
What makes the successful children different from their
brothers and sisters who continue the family patterns of
chaos and addictions? Resiliency is the ability to bounce
back from life's problems. There is research showing that
one third of children from dysfunctional homes can break
out of the negative family patterns and make a success out
of their lives. The research shows that achievement seeking
and finding positive people for support helps children take
on the values and work ethics of success.
to yourself to calm down when you are upset is a form of
Cognitive Behavioral Psychology. The Super Kid Words and
Helper Words given in these exercises help you break into
negative thoughts and errors in thinking. Self Talk statements
give you a new way of looking at things. You can learn to
be your own cheerleader and coach when you tell yourself
positive words about how you want to be. See yourself becoming
how you want to be. Chill Out Helper words show you how
to talk yourself down when you are upset. Remind yourself
to breathe and keep your cool. Talk to yourself to become
strong and resilient.
Your Feelings Out
heads can be better than one when figuring tricky things
out. Talking about your feelings with a safe person who
can help you get a new perspective. A safe person is someone
who can listen to you and take your feelings seriously and
will keep your private information confidential. They can
help you problem solve and figure out what to do with your
problem. If talking to your friends or parents doesn't help
solve your problems, then you may need to get some one trained
in therapy to help you work things out.
yourself to stop thinking about negative thoughts is called
Thought Stoppage. Anything you do to interrupt your thoughts
and get back to your more positive mind can help change
your mood. Yelling "Stop!" or "Negative thought get out
of here!" puts you in charge of your mind. Distract yourself
and tell yourself, "I'm not going there" gives you more
control of your mind. Adding a gesture such as shrugging
your shoulders or pretending to push the thought away gives
added emphasis. Remember to stop giving negative thoughts
free rent in your brain!
the Layers of Emotions
feelings stack up and hide underneath each other, making
it hard to understand what is going on. You can break a
big feeling down like anger to see what other emotions might
be lurking underneath. There is no set pattern. Hurt and
sadness might be hiding under anger. Anger might be hiding
under fear and confusion. Find the emotion that is on top
and work on releasing it, then ask yourself what other feelings
you might have. As you address each separate emotion, the
whole stack of feelings might start to shift.
Out how You Cope with Threat
your deepest feeling you might find a decision of how you
decided to keep yourself safe after a highly upsetting experience.
Bad things happen in life. The important thing is not always
what happens to you, but how you deal with it. Learning
to deal with your overwhelming feelings is part of how you
cope in life. Now that you are learning about the correct
use of your emotions, you can learn better ways of dealing
you were small, you probably tried to figure out how to
keep yourself safe and keep the bad experience from happening
again. You learned how to cope with threat to keep safe.
You might have decided to stop risking or stop speaking
out. Or you might have decided to get angry to get others
to back off or to get your way. Or you may have tried to
shrink down inside yourself and stop breathing to try to
be invisible and safe. Or you may have learned to give up
when things get tough.
type of coping you figured out as a child may have helped
you survive then, but now that you are older, you can learn
better ways of taking care of yourself. Staying present
in the moment, calming down your wildly swinging emotions
and being assertive while you figure out what to do are
better strategies than collapsing in fear, not speaking
out or exploding in anger.
Write about Your Feelings
about what happened that upset you and your feelings helps
you get them out of your head and down on paper or on your
computer. The research shows that writing about their feelings
and their problems helps people feel better. Writing about
the day's events and the things that upset you is called
Journaling. Consider getting a special book or diary so
that you can write about the things that make you feel uncomfortable
or upset. Or open file on your computer and disguise the
name so that you can write about your feelings in private.
a Tough World Out There!
life is so stressful. Gather all the tools you can to help
you deal with the daily grind that faces you. Learn all
these approaches and use them daily as you go through life.
The "buzz" word today is learn to modulate your emotions--smooth
them out and cope with them. Emotional Intelligence is in
your reach if you decide to study it and practice it! I
hope that as you continue to go through life that you learn
and use these ideas and many new ones to deal with your
emotions in constructive ways.
systematic training of the mind, the cultivation of happiness,
the genuine inner transformation by deliberately selecting
and focusing on positive mental states and challenging negative
mental states, is possible because of the structure and
function of the brain. But the wiring of our brains is not
static, not irrevocably fixed. Our brains are also adaptable."
Cutler and Richard Davidson
The Art of Happiness
Fields of Anger | Squeeze
Your Angries Out