episode
93
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Emotions

3 Ways to Stop Guilt-Tripping Yourself, Untangle Complicated Emotions, & Discover the Joy of Clarity

Episode Notes

Emotions are complicated. They're also beautiful. When you don't honor the complicated mix of fears, frustrations, and also the good things that you feel, you doubt yourself and you doubt other people. You deprive yourself of the opportunity to get real wisdom and to brave healthier solutions. Today we're diving into these complicated feelings together.

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Here's what we cover:

1. Why emotional complexity is a gift

2. Examples of how we guilt-trip & gaslight ourselves

3. How to locate emotions within a larger story

4. Real-life examples

5. The 3 most important guideposts to get started

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Resources

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Thanks to our sponsors:

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Music by Andy Luiten

Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author.

While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.

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Transcript:

Hey everyone. And welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. I am so excited about this episode today to dive into one of my favorite topics. It's a topic I have been immersed in this past year–really these past several years.

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It's a topic I've struggled with personally. It's how to navigate these complicated, conflicting emotions that we all have inside. So often these emotions that we have are in tension with each other; they collide with one another. Those situations where you love someone, and you're also really angry with that same person. 

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Where you love God, but you're also really frustrated with how far away God feels or how distant God feels. Maybe you love your kids and you feel protective of your kids. And you also know that you need to show some restraint. 

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There's so much inner tension that happens inside of us as we go through life, and so this idea of how we begin to untangle the knots of the emotions that live inside of us became the topic of my brand new book. It's called I Shouldn't Feel This Way, and it's coming out May 7th. In this book, I took these last few years to put together a framework, a map, through the inner conflict that we all face, the emotional complexity inside of all of us.

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I believe that our inability to tend to the noise in our hearts and the inner chaos that so many of us feel is one of the most under addressed, under diagnosed and under named threats to the health of ourselves and our relationships, including our relationship with God. and so this book is the third book I've written and it's the most forward facing. 

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If you've read Boundaries for Your Soul, my first book with Kimberly Miller, it's a deep dive into healing the parts of your soul. It's a therapeutic method that goes deep into unburdening past wounds and recovering and reclaiming every part of who you are. My second book, The Best of You, is really more focused on external relationships. It's about the work of setting boundaries in our relationships and how you have to heal the self in order to forge healthy relationships and healthy boundaries with other people. 

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This next book, I Shouldn't Feel This Way, is a set of three practices that we all need to be working through every single day. I've distilled these three foundational practices and given you numerous examples of how to apply these practices in our everyday lives. I'm so excited for you to get this book in your hands. It was a hard book for me to write. 

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Probably the hardest book I've ever written. I write about the process of why it was so hard within the book. It was very meta. The framework I was laying out in the book, I was having to apply to my own complicated feelings while I was writing the book. It stirred up so much of my own inner tensions. 

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And so in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through three of the mantras from the book that are your starting point for this journey. And by mantra, I mean a catch phrase that helps you engage in what I believe is a spiritual practice. This practice of tending to the inner conflict inside of us, the complexity of our emotions, I don't believe it's only in the realm of therapy.

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I believe it's a spiritual practice. It's part of being human. It's a practice every single one of us needs to have, and the fact that we don't have it, I think, is a big part of why we're dealing with so many of the problems we're dealing with in our world today.

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I'm also going to share, toward the end of the episode, some pretty vulnerable examples from my own life that I've had to work through using this framework this past year. 

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Before we get started, I want to announce to you the pre-order bonus items that you'll get when you pre-order I Shouldn’t Feel This Way. When you pre-order a book, it's so helpful to authors. It sends signals to publishers and to all of the digital algorithms, to Google, to Amazon, to Instagram, to all the social media algorithms, to all the powers that be out there that are putting things in front of you all the time.

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When people start pre-ordering a book, it tells those algorithms that there's interest in this topic, that they want to see more of this topic. And so then those algorithms do their job and they put this book in front of more people. It helps get the word out about the book into the hands of people who need these materials. I invest all the profits off of the books I write, off of the podcast ads for this podcast, back into creating more healing resources because my purpose and my driving mission is to bring affordable faith based healing resources to all God's people, everywhere.

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I know they're hard to come by, and it is my mission to get these resources out into the hands of all the people who need them. So that's what drives me. 

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When you preorder, you'll get the first three chapters of the book and you'll get a guided journal. You’ll also get a tool I like to call “the looking tool”. I mentioned it in last week's podcast, episode 92. It's a way of framing the challenges that you're facing in the context of the larger picture of your life. And you're also going to get information on how to join me for a free live masterclass, where I'm going to help you begin the process of applying these three practices in real time. 

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You can attend it live. You'll also be able to get the recording. So to get those bonus items, all you have to do is pre-order a copy of I Shouldn't Feel This Way. You can get the hardcover version. You can get the audio version. You can get the Kindle version. It doesn't matter.

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Purchase your copy anywhere books are sold; you can go to Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Christian Book Distributors, you can go to your local bookstore and ask them to order it for you. That's also another way to really help authors–to request the book from local bookstores.

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So purchase the book, then you go to my website. The website is IShouldntFeelThisWay.com, and enter in the information that it asks, and you'll automatically get emailed those first three chapters, the guided journal, the looking tool, and the information about how to join the live masterclass. 

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So what is emotional complexity? 

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It refers to the depth and nuances of an individual's emotional experiences. It means that we often encounter conflicting emotions simultaneously. It's a beautiful concept that underscores the richness of our emotional life and the complexity of how God made us. 

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The reality is that emotions are complex. You experience multiple, often conflicting emotions, simultaneously. We all do. And in order to become a mature adult with a healthy emotional life, you have to be able to navigate through your own emotions. Now, here is the thing I want you to understand. 

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Complicated emotions are evoked by complicated situations. Something happens outside of you that's hard. Your child comes home from school upset. They've been bullied. It detonates a whole lot of emotions inside of you. Your spouse does something you don't like. It detonates a whole bunch of emotions inside of you. Maybe it's a friend who does something, maybe your family member does something, maybe it's a boss, maybe it's something on the news. 

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There's so much going on in our world. You read a news article, you see a post by someone on social media, and it activates a bunch of emotions inside of you. The problem is, most of us don't have the tools needed to work our way through those complicated emotions. We don't even have that language for it. “Oh, wow, what I'm feeling is complicated.” 

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There are very few situations that have a one size fits all solution. And so when we're not taught how to honor and navigate the different, competing, sometimes conflicting emotions that come up inside our own heart, soul, and mind, we're left doubting ourselves, feeling ill equipped, feeling helpless, instead of being empowered to take action into our challenges, one brave step at a time.

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Navigating emotional complexity is crucial for our own mental health. And it's crucial for the health of our relationships and for the world around us. Research tells us when we understand how to navigate our own complicated emotions, we cope better with stress.

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It enhances emotional regulation and we gain psychological maturity and resilience. We have healthier, richer interpersonal relationships. People with a greater understanding of the complexity of their emotions are better equipped to navigate the complexities of this life. They can process and respond to challenging situations more effectively.

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One of the biggest problems contributing to so many of the relational problems, the public betrayals, the anxiety pandemic, the broken relationships, the low self esteem, all of these things that we're seeing in our culture today, is because we don't know how to navigate our own minds, our own hearts, our own souls, our own inner tensions.

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The more you learn to let the light of God's truth and God's love shine on the inside of your soul, the more equipped you are to let that same light shine into and light up the circumstances around you. When we're not able to navigate our own inner turmoil, our own inner complexity, how in the world can we navigate the complicated challenges in the world around us or help our loved ones navigate their complicated challenges?

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Research shows that on any given day, we process about 11 million bits of information per second, anywhere from 6,000 to 70,000 thoughts per second. And we experience emotions during at least 90 percent of our day, often several simultaneously. This is that emotional complexity that we're talking about. The amount of information we're processing is increasing exponentially in this digital age with the advent of social media and the internet, and so much coming at us all the time. 

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We live in a culture that does not teach us how to navigate complexity. It oversimplifies it. It sends us memes about just thinking positively, or validating every feeling that you have. And these simplistic formulas aren't helpful. Sometimes our faith communities also give us simplistic formulas, or they don't really talk to us much about emotions at all. 

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But even our experience of faith is complex. We have complicated feelings about God. This is normal, but we don't often identify that this is normal, let alone talk about how to navigate the complicated feelings that we have. And so what most of us do is we go on autopilot. We process all of this information outside of our conscious awareness. We react to things subconsciously. 

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And what that means is our responses to what's happening around us are driven by thoughts and feelings and beliefs that we hold that we're not consciously aware of these feelings and these beliefs might be rooted in pain from the past. They might be rooted in unhelpful messages from the past. They might be rooted in patterns of behavior that aren't actually helpful to us anymore, and we're not aware of it because we're on autopilot. 

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And sometimes I use the metaphor, it's as if your mind is like a self-driving car. That car has been programmed and you're sitting back and letting the car drive and you're trusting that the car is going the right way, that it knows what to do when it hits a chaotic intersection. You're just trusting that the system has been programmed directly, but the problem is, what if it's not?

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What if that autopilot that our brain is on has been programmed by past traumas? What if it's been programmed by unhelpful advice that someone gave us years ago? What if it's been programmed to respond to situations in extremely simplistic ways that don't actually count for the nuances of the situation? 

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You assume that you're heading in the right direction. And it doesn't work. You might even be noticing some inner tension–I don't know if I should be trusting this car to be driving me through this crazy intersection, but I don't know what else to do. 

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And because we don't know what else to do, we don't know how to come out of autopilot, we work harder to shut that inner turmoil, that cue inside of us, that something might actually need our attention. We work harder to shut that noise down.

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So many of us are on autopilot. We're reacting so quickly to everything that's coming at us. We're moving so fast, we're driving through intersections without stopping to get out of the car to enter into some of that chaos that we're feeling inside. That's important. That needs our attention before we do something foolish or head down a road we have no business being on. The stakes are really high .

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What often happens when we do notice some of that inner tension or some of those emotions that we don't want to feel is that we've learned to shut them down. We end up sabotaging ourselves. We don't know what to do. So we default to the programming and then we keep doing what we've always done. 

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We try to numb those emotions. We try to shut them down by eating or scrolling or binge watching or jumping into other people's problems. Or we guilt trip ourselves. We try to guilt message ourselves out of feeling the way we really feel. We gaslight ourselves. We try to tell ourselves we shouldn't really feel the way that we feel. 

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We have all these strategies for keeping those emotions down, outside of our conscious awareness. And that's where the title of this book came from; I realized, this is my story. I have a pretty good intuitive radar for picking up on things that are going on around me that aren't really aligned with the truth or that don't sit right with me.

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It's also uncomfortable for me. And so for a long time, I would tell myself, you shouldn't feel that way. Shut it down. That's not your business. Let it go. And it's taken me years to notice that sometimes the very first emotion that I have to identify and name is that feeling of, I shouldn't feel this way. 

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That “I shouldn't feel this way” is often a cue that I do feel this way. And I need to slow down, I need to pay attention. I don't know exactly why I'm feeling what I'm feeling, but I do feel this way and trying to guilt trip or gaslight myself out of it doesn't help.

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When we don't honor the complicated mix of doubts, fears, and real questions that we have inside, we doubt ourselves and we doubt other people. We silently battle ourselves and we silently battle against other people. We deprive ourselves of the opportunity to get real wisdom and real clarity in partnership with God's Spirit. 

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And so instead of working our way through the inner turmoil, through the inner confusion, that I don't know what I think about this, we tend to move down the path of least resistance. We do things the way we've always done them. We risk jeopardizing our own health and the health of our relationships. We don't address the real needs all around us. And we don't bring the full power of our God-given design, our thinking brain, our nervous system, and all the resources God has given us to sift through the challenges in our lives.

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When I was a kid, we had a map on the wall in our basement. It was a map of Narnia based on the Narnia Chronicles by C. S. Lewis, which many of you have read. I loved those books as a kid. And I would stare at the map and imagine myself at different points on the map.

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Sometimes I would imagine what it might feel like to have come through that wardrobe and be in that scary forest. I don't know where I am. I don't even know where I'm supposed to go. This is weird. This is confusing. This is disorienting. And then I imagine myself over in the witch's castle to the north, where it was sinister and maybe even a feeling of evil and the icy cold of what that must've felt like. And how do I get out of here? How do I get away from that? I have a feeling about that. This doesn't feel good to me. I don't think I should be here, but how do I get out of here, and can I trust how I'm feeling? 

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And then there are places on the map where it shows Aslan's land. And I would imagine that feeling of sunshine on my face and Aslan's land, the green grass, the feeling of freedom, the feeling of clarity, the feeling of, oh, this is where I want to be. This feels good. This doesn't feel complicated. This feels beautiful. 

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And how do I get here? How do I get from the forest or out of the evil or out of the toxicity and into Aslan's land? I would imagine myself at all those different places and that's what I wanted to do for you in I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, is begin to map out some of the different places, the different landmines, some of the things that are hard that you're facing. 

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We can get to a better place, but it's a journey. We've got to go through some of these hard seasons in order to get to where we want to be. We first have to name what's hard about where we are now. This is not a formula. This is not a, you do these three things and you'll be all set. That is not what this is. This is a map that gives you guideposts so that you can navigate your way through the forest. 

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It doesn't take you out of the forest of the challenges that you face. You're going to have to do the work of finding your way through the forest. I can't come and rescue you out of it. No one can. And if someone is promising you that they can pluck you out of the challenges that you face, I would be skeptical about that. 

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You've got to walk through those challenges, but this book gives you a guide, a framework so that you don't get lost, so that you're not alone, and so that you have some touchstones, some mile markers to keep you on track. 

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There are three guideposts I want to introduce to you today, because these are three guideposts we're going to come back to time and time again over the coming weeks and months. The first one is, “I shouldn't feel this way”.

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I've been using this mantra over and over this last year. My husband and I now use it–”this is my “I shouldn't feel this way” moment. That moment of recognition, of, oh my gosh, I'm beating myself up for feeling something I actually do feel. 

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It's something I need to face. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to feel activated after spending time with this person, I don't like feeling that way. I don't want to feel angry at this person that I love. I don't want to feel this way about God. I don't want to feel this way about my body, but I do feel this way. 

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So your “I shouldn't feel this way” moment is a recognition of the feeling you wish you didn't feel. I don't like feeling angry about my loved one. It's scary. I don't like it. I don't like that I feel activated by this person, that they don't seem trustworthy. I don't want to feel that way. I don't like that I feel like numbing with food all the time. I don't like that I feel conflicted about God, that I'm checking out at church or checking out during my prayer times. 

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I don't like that I'm feeling stuck in my head and confused and unable to get out of it. I don't like that I feel this way about other people, but I do. I do feel this way. This is your moment of making what's subconscious, conscious, bringing it into your conscious awareness. I do feel this way. I wish I didn't, but I do. And you're stopping the guilt-tripping, the gaslighting part of you, all the ways that you try to shove that aside.

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You bring that uncomfortable feeling into your conscious awareness. I've got to stop. I've got to take a look at it. I've got to do some work around it, because this is the way I actually feel. I don't want to do something foolish, and this feeling is here for a reason.

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I've got to figure it out. Something doesn't feel right. I'm confused. I'm having a reaction to a situation. I wish I didn't, but I am, and I need to do something about it. Now listen, so often, part of the reason we don't want to stop when we're feeling things we wish we didn't feel is because it's confusing. We don't want to face the very thing that's confusing us. 

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And that leads to mantra number two: “I'm at a crossroads”.

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Crossroads are inherently confusing. There's a bunch of different directions, a bunch of different paths you can take at a crossroads. It's disorienting when you don't know which way to go. It's confusing and it's hard to stop when you already feel activated.

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It's so tempting to put your foot on the gas pedal, close your eyes, and hope that you choose the right path. It's hoping to get lucky. Maybe I'll get lucky. Go for it. It's hard to stop when you're already confused. But that crossroads, oh my gosh, that crossroads is not a bad place to be.

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It's a place to stop. It's a place to put your car and park and get out and look around and invite God into the disorientation. And that's where this whole “I shouldn't feel this way” process starts. It starts when you stop and acknowledge, I do feel this way. I don't know what to do about it yet. I don't know which path to take, but I can stop here at the crossroads.

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I've got to stop. I can set up camp for a minute at the crossroads, and I can learn to pay attention to what's going on inside of me so I'll have a fighting chance of getting back in my car when it's time to drive forward and take the right path.

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You start to learn how to build yourself what I call a place in between. I love these places in between where you learn to stop and set up a little house for yourself, a little place in between where you do the work of looking inside, of reflecting, of tending to your own emotions so that when it's time, you're ready to find the right path. And step three, the very first thing you're going to do when you stop, when you set up camp at the crossroads, is you start to name what's hard. 

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What's hard? What do I feel? What am I seeing that I wish I didn't but I do? I'm frustrated. I'm scared. I feel alone. I'm not entirely ungrateful. Some things are okay. A lot of me is confused. I'm not sure what to do. I don't like feeling this way, but I do feel this way. I do feel scared. I do feel uncomfortable. I do feel unsure. 

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And the first thing that I can do at this crossroads is to stop. It's to stop and name what's hard about what I feel. As we close, I want to give you some examples of these moments from my own life and how I've applied them to situations in my own life. 

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The first one that I noticed was almost exactly a year ago. I turned 50 last February and I had a huge I shouldn't feel this way moment. I hated turning 50. I hated it. I've never had that experience at a milestone birthday. I didn't have it at 30. I didn't have it at 40. 50 was so hard for me and it came out of nowhere. 

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An avalanche of uncomfortable, unpleasant, hard emotions. And I didn't like feeling that way. I thought I should feel empowered. I thought I should feel free. I saw other people posting about how 50 is their best life and how they're feeling all empowered and all great about this next chapter of their life. I didn't feel any of that.

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It came out of nowhere. I didn't feel at the top of my game. I felt a complicated mixture of feelings. And I didn't want to feel that way about aging. I didn't want to feel shame. I didn't want to feel the way I felt about the lines that seemed to pop out of nowhere on my face. I didn't want to feel the way I felt about my body, but I did. I did. And I had to stop and face those feelings in order to understand myself in a more compassionate way. I couldn't beat myself up for feeling those feelings. 

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Now, in hindsight, I understand it a lot better in some ways. There was some catching up to myself that I hadn't done because I'd been so absorbed in the work of helping other people through hard things. I'm at a much better place now; I turned 51 in February and I was aware.

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I was like, okay, I've done the work. I entered into the crossroads. I faced what was hard and I'm finding myself in a better place, but I didn't get there through exiling those emotions, through beating myself up, through pretending like I didn't feel the complicated set of things I actually did feel.

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Another thing I'm feeling right now: I'm feeling a lot of complicated feelings about showing up more on social media. I've been offline for the most part this last year. I show up every once in a while. I post weekly about the podcast, but most of that I do through a third-party server. I'm not on social media very much. 

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I've noticed about myself this last year–I tend to be a pretty private person. I'm a pretty private person with a public platform. And so it's hard for me to navigate the public part of this work that I do, and yet I care about this work and I want to share about it. And that means I have to show up on social media and yet I have complicated feelings about social media. So many of us have complicated feelings about social media. 

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There's another one that comes up for me about my work. I have complicated feelings about traveling to speak. I turn down so many requests for speaking, and I feel bad about that. Part of it is my own values of being a pretty private person and living a simple life. I don't travel a lot for the purpose of my work. 

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I also donate a lot of the work I do to organizations that are serving the underserved, those who don't have access to a lot of tools. That's one of my core values; whatever work I do, speaking or putting on workshops, is to do most of it for organizations that are serving people who don't have access to resources, who are coming out of homelessness, who are dealing with addictions, who don't have the ability to get these resources.

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And because I have that value, it means I can't do as much traveling to speak in other types of venues. And so again, that's complicated for me. I've had to make hard decisions, but I feel like I've made wiser decisions when I honored the reality of the complicated feelings I have inside. I would love to join large gatherings of women. I would love to come to some of your churches. 

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I would love to be able to travel more and meet so many more of you in person. And I also value being really attentive to and close to my family, the people in my day to day life, and I also really value the work that I do for some of these nonprofit organizations. And so it means I have to make hard decisions, but when I name what's hard about those decisions and I sift through the noise of the complicated feelings I have, I'm able to arrive at better decisions.

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And that brings me to you. What are some things you have complicated feelings about? What are some of your “I shouldn't feel this way” moments? You might have complicated feelings about a job that you need but also hate. Maybe there are people at your job that you like, that have given you a chance, that have invested in you, but there are also things about your job that are really hard, that are really sometimes even harmful to you.

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And it's complicated. It's not so simple as “I should leave”. 

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You might have complicated feelings about a spouse, about a romantic partner. Maybe you love your spouse and sometimes your relationship is hard for you. And it's tricky to talk about that because people want to force you into a quick fix solution. Maybe they think you should leave when you're not ready to leave. It's not that simple. 

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Maybe they think you should stay and not complain about it. And it's also not that simple. It's nuanced. You need a way to honor the complexity of all that you feel so that you can find a way through the complicated situation.

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Health is another one. So many people I know, including myself, are dealing with complicated feelings about their health. Sometimes for me, what I will say to my doctor after really thinking hard about a lot of the challenges I face is I'm one of the healthiest, unhealthy people you'll ever meet.

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And that simple statement has come after years of recognizing I am so healthy in so many ways. And yet I also battle some really complicated health conditions and I know so many of you are in that same boat where it's not a simple thing. You're healthy on one hand; you can do a lot of things. And on the other hand, you're dealing with some really complicated health challenges.

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You might have complicated feelings about God. You love God on one hand, you have faith on one end, and sometimes you don't trust God. You are disappointed in God. Maybe you're confused about where to go to church, or about how to pray, or about how to talk to God, or about what it should look like to follow God. And you're conflicted, and that's normal, and that makes sense, but you can't find other people to help you. 

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Honor the reality of that complexity. People around you are telling you, you shouldn't feel that way. You should trust God. You should go to church, pray, worship, and all those feelings will go away, but they don't. You feel confused and you feel lonely. And then on the other side, people are saying to you, yeah, that's why you should leave church altogether. You should ditch your faith. That's what people are saying on the other side. 

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And that's not it either. That's not what you want. You want to fight for your faith. You love God, and neither of those extremes is helpful to you. It's complicated, and that's your cue to stop and pay attention and honor that it's okay to feel the different things that you feel. It's normal. And together we can find a better way through it.

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Here's the thing about “I shouldn't feel this way”. It's saying, yes, this is complicated. These simplistic formulas do not cut it. They will not help you through it. But there is a way to untangle the knots, to honor the complexity and to find a better way through. That's why I wrote this book. I wrote this book to give you a guide, and together we're going to find our way through inner conflict and into braver, healthier, wiser solutions.

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