- Hey, everybody, happy Thursday.
Now, today we're back at the regular wall
from back in the day in the FAQs
because I have a good question.
And I'm gonna read from my phone.
I have a really good question that
I just wanna kinda chat about.
And the question is, Katie,
is there always an explanation for the way we feel?
Is it that some feelings are just random
or part of our personality?
So many of my feelings just don't make sense to me
and that makes me feel guilty about them.
For example, I have always felt lost and lonely,
like I don't really belong anywhere.
I have trust and self-confidence issues which
prevent me from being in a relationship, etc.
But my family and friends have always supported me.
I've never had to deal with anything very hard.
Whenever I meet someone who can really relate to how I feel,
it turns out they've gone through something
pretty dramatic and that really explains things.
It's so weird, so I would love to hear what you think.
And I really just like this because
I think a lot of us wonder about this,
do all of our feelings have a purpose
and a reason or could I just be making them up?
I can't tell you how many times a patient of mine
has been like maybe I'm just making it up.
Maybe I don't really,
first, I just wanna say that there
is always a reason for how we feel.
I know that can be hard to understand or to even accept
'cause the truth is that most of us spend all
of our days not even checking in with ourselves.
Not even noticing how we feel.
I can't tell you, okay, so random funny story.
When I was writing my book,
I had to ask friends and family
to give me their five emotions
that they felt that day.
And I don't even wanna tell you how many,
most of them, had a really hard time coming up with that.
Even my own mom was like, five?
That's a lot, Kati,
I don't even know if I can come up with five.
And she just didn't even know.
I had to help her.
And so know that that's just normal.
I just say all that to say it's normal
to not always check in and know how we feel, okay?
That's the first thing.
The second thing is because we don't take
the time to acknowledge how we feel,
and maybe process it, maybe talk to someone about it,
all the things that we probably should be doing,
we don't do.
And we just kinda stuff them down without realizing it
and move through our day because our lives are busy,
maybe we have young children that demand a lot of our time,
maybe we have a busy job,
maybe we just don't have the tools
to acknowledge the feeling.
So we just stuff them down and keep going.
But that's why we're kind of like ticking time bombs
where small little upsets can send us through the roof
and we can be super upset,
and we can feel all of the feelings
because whether we recognize it or not,
we just stuff them down day after day,
and so we're like a teapot that's just too full,
and we were letting our steam out
and no one's listening until somebody
knocks it off of the stove
and we're like oh my god.
And that can be why we sometimes feel like
we're completely overreacting, lashing out.
And in truth, to that situation,
we might be overreacting, but to our experience
in life and how we've been feeling
and not acknowledging and validating that,
we're not overreacting.
Does that kinda make sense?
I know it's really hard to accept,
and it's really hard to notice
our feelings our feelings all the time.
And I know I am no better than you,
I don't spend every day tracking my moods,
but I do check in with myself
and try to notice if my irritability,
what it's coming from
or if I'm feeling extra tired,
maybe I should nap.
What's happened this week.
I try to track at least a few days at a time
and try to pay attention.
And so I just encourage you to do that
because if we don't,
we can explode and also,
if we're not even acknowledging the feelings
and we feel like we don't have
the right to feel the way we feel,
that can be really invalidating
and make us feel even more shameful
or more embarrassed or just even less confident.
And the next thing I wanna talk about is that
we cannot compare our experience to someone else's.
I know that we all know that.
Intellectually, totally makes sense.
In practice, super, super difficult
because we're primed for that,
and I fell like social media kinda feeds into this
comparing like oh, they're on vacation, and I'm not.
Oh, they have nice things, I don't.
We're just comparing and contrasting all the time
and thinking our life is just kinda
shitty when it's actually not.
And so know that your emotional experience
cannot be compared to anyone else.
We all have different levels of resiliency
and ability to compartmentalize.
We're all different people.
Even siblings.
I can't tell you how many siblings I've seen in my office
who grew up in the same house,
maybe they're only a year apart or two years apart,
and they have completely different responses
to how they grew up and their upbringing.
I've had one sibling be super, super successful, driven,
and they put all their focus on their job
and ability to potentially move out
of the house and kill it in work.
And the other could be a drug addict,
really struggling to get things together.
They grew up in the same house.
Everybody's different, just keep that in mind.
Everyone's resilience and compartmentalization
abilities are very different.
So notice when you're comparing
your experience to someone else's,
and remind yourself your experience
is never like someone else's
because they're not you.
And the next thing I wanna talk about,
and something that's been bothering me, honestly for years,
so I should get better talking to you about these things,
but this has been bothering me forever,
even in my practice, before I was on YouTube.
People who compare their situation to others
and think because theirs isn't, they weren't abused,
therefore they do not have a right to feel x.
The person that asked this question said
whenever they encounter people who have
similar experiences and can relate to them,
and they're like yes, I feel that way too,
they've had these really dramatic
things happen or have been traumatized.
Someone else's experience doesn't meet,
doesn't negate how you feel.
They've had their own thing.
It's great that you can find other people that you can,
not commiserate with, but you can at least relate to,
you can talk about it.
That's really important.
Just because someone else has a shittier experience
or a worse situation, doesn't mean
that ours isn't bad for us.
It's back to that kind of comparison factor where people,
I hate when parents will say things to kids like
well, there are children starving in Africa,
or there are homeless kids who can't get breakfast or lunch,
or parents who are not present or drug addicts.
Shut up, that isn't helpful.
That just because someone has it worse
doesn't mean that we don't have
the right to feel how we feel.
We all have our own life,
we all have our own level of function,
our own level of resiliency.
And we have to honor that.
That's why tracking our feelings,
paying attention to what's going on for us,
being okay with it, validating that,
telling ourselves it's okay to feel how we feel,
that it's warranted simply because we feel it.
It doesn't mean we have to let our feelings run the show
because I do believe that we can actually decide
whether or not we want to feel that feeling
because feelings are like waves,
I like to think of them that way.
That really helps me personally.
I'll think of anger like a wave.
I used to think of it like a fire,
that did not help.
But if I think of it like a wave,
it's coming in, it has a cause,
and something started that.
If I can figure out where that wave came from,
that gives me a little piece of mind.
And then, the great thing about a wave,
is that is passes, it moves on.
I can try to keep that wave,
I can try to hold on to it,
and I will just tumble under the water
and it will throw me up onto the sand.
And that's not very good,
and I probably won't feel very well,
and that's the same experience we have when
we try to hold on to our emotions.
But if we allow ourselves to fell them,
we acknowledge them, hey, I know you, I recognize you,
you're anger.
Interesting.
That's probably because this happened yesterday
and that guy cut me off on the street,
and my mom was really mean to me,
and we can name some of the things that built up to it,
and be like it's okay.
I would feel angry, that makes sense.
We validate it, we acknowledge it,
maybe we do something to get it out,
maybe we punch a punching bag,
we join a sports team, we have some way to express it.
Maybe a journal about it,
maybe I talk it out with my therapist, and then I move on.
I don't have to hold on to that feeling.
I can choose to just kind of ride it out.
And I also wanna mention the fact that emotional
abuse is just as big of a deal as physical or sexual abuse.
People don't talk about it as much
'cause you can't always see it,
but those unseen wounds are still super painful.
So I just want you to know any kind of abuse
that you are sustaining is valid and deserves
to be treated and listened to and cared for.
Don't compare, again, it's just kinda back to that.
So I think my overall message,
so let's wrap this up because I think my overall
message is validate your own experience.
Everybody's different.
Everyone's going to have a different view of a situation,
a different ability to process it in the moment,
a different level of resiliency, a different amount
of supports that they already have in place.
Everybody has a different everything.
So notice when you're comparing
your experience to someone else,
and work to stop that.
Also, start tracking your emotions.
Start paying attention.
I've talked about this a lot,
but you can start by just saying the emotion word,
then try and describe it in sentence not using that word.
For instance, anger.
Instead of saying anger feels like anger,
'cause that's not helpful,
I would say anger can feel like a crashing wave
or a fire or a fire that starts in my belly
and raises into my throat and I just feel really tense.
It helps to describe it.
So we can feel it, we acknowledge it,
helps us acknowledge it, and then validating it.
My experience is mine.
It's not anybody else's and it's okay to feel this way,
but I don't have to let it ruin my entire day
and my entire situation.
I can just ride it out.
And so I would just encourage you
to start doing those things.
Start recognizing, start paying attention.
And remember, no one's experience is yours.
Can't compare it, they're different.
But I'd love to hear your thoughts.
What do you think.
I'm sure a lot of you struggle with this.
I know I used it.
Is thinking that well my childhood was pretty good,
nobody hit me, so I don't have a right
to be mad or sad or need therapy.
There's all these things that we can put
in place when we all have a right to feel how we feel
and to get as much help and support as we need.
You don't have to have xyz in order to do any of those.
So anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Let me know in those comments down below.
And I will see you next time.
Bye.
(light music)