How Can I Handle Painful Emotions?

how can i handle painful emotions what's up you guys today we're going to talk about one single skill that can be really powerful and helping to manage painful emotions and get you through the hard times that come in your life hey guys i'm tyler wandering therapist excited to be here with you today this is a really good question we could probably answer it in a thousand different ways but today we're going to talk about a single skill and the single skill is called riding the wave of your emotion to understand this skill we need to first understand a little bit about what happens with our emotions emotions are constantly changing they're not permanent that's why they're called emotions they move many of us when we feel pain in our lives we feel like it might never go away and the more that that pain increases the worse that it feels and the more we believe it's not going away and right about the time that it crests just like a wave in the ocean and falls just before that top part usually around an eight or a nine on a scale of ten we do things that actually cause that wave to curl over and then it spits us down on the ground like being in the ocean and then you come up with sand in your face and all over your head and you've almost got a concussion and wonder man i don't know how to handle my emotions when the reality is is that that emotion could just pick us up and set us down just like being in the ocean if we knew that that's what it was going to do remember that our emotions do cause us to feel sometimes those feelings are painful but those feelings are real and they're good and they were designed by god to be a part of our lives if we can trust ourselves to understand that the worst thing that an emotion can do is simply make you feel then you can see it in a different light and so this skill of riding the wave is about that i was thinking about this in my own life you guys it's springtime right now in utah and you can see behind me hopefully the mountains behind me where half of the mountains are covered with snow and the other half are starting to melt and there's brownness there and underneath that brownness if you look really close there's some green grass that's also coming up through there if you got up really close to it the seasons are changing emotions are like the seasons they move and change and while we might be in a very dark place in our life at times and sometimes that darkness lasts for a significant amount of time it's simply just a season and as you can see behind me if we were to come back a week from now that brownness on the bottom part of the mountain is going to be higher up on the mountain because it's going to continue to thaw and it's going to melt that snow and then the grasses and the trees are going to start to return and it's going to start to be green and in two or three weeks from now the mountain behind me won't be white and brown it's going to be full of lushness and greenness that's how our emotions are we can wait for our emotions to move and during a painful emotion we can consciously be aware of it we can lean into it we can accept it we can ride that wave and when it sets us back down we can wait for the new wave of emotion and sometimes that will be the next wave will be joy or happiness and then in those moments we can meet it with gratitude and we can enjoy that moment and where i think some people get mixed up sometimes as we think that our emotions are all tied together so if i felt a moment of deep joy that means i'm going to have a moment of terrible pain and that somehow those things are connected when in reality i can have joy and that's an independent moment of whenever the next moment of pain is going to be brene brown talks about this idea she calls it foreboding joy where when we're in a happy moment we almost don't want to allow ourselves to be in a happy moment because we think it's connected to then having to have a terrible moment those things aren't connected we can stop and pause and be in the moment of joy and experience that moment of joy in an exquisite way knowing that another moment might come later that's painful but those two things aren't connected so we might as well enjoy the moment of joy i was driving home with my daughters from a little like daddy daughter date night the other day and as we were driving home we were listening to some music on one of my daughter's phones and the girls were singing at the top of their lungs and we were just driving with the wind coming through the windows and it was just this moment of pure bliss and i found myself noticing that i was experiencing this moment of pure bliss just this joy of being with my family and feeling my daughter's energy and feeling so connected to them and in the back of my head the thought came up tyler don't feel this way you're going to feel a lot worse in just a minute whenever something else bad happens and i consciously had to pause and stop and say to myself the exact same things i just said to you which is experience this moment of joy with your daughters and we drove around for another 10 or 20 minutes listening to music singing at the top of our lungs and we had an awesome time together it doesn't change the fact that then i wake up a couple of days later with some mild grade depression because that's something i struggle with in my life and it also doesn't change the fact that i can't ride through that too and the way that would use the ride the wave skill is this when you're feeling any particular emotion pause and notice what that emotion actually feels like what does it actually feel like to have the emotion of sadness in your body where do you feel it i feel some weight in my head i feel some weight on my neck my shoulders want to slump i feel a pit in my stomach the minute that i start to become curious with what the experience is of that emotion with curiosity i'm now leaning myself into that emotion and allowing myself to experience it for the emotion that it is in the moment and then i can sit with it and observe that emotion realizing that the worst thing it can make me do is feel it doesn't force me to have to do anything i can simply trust myself to know that i can feel the emotion that i'm feeling i can then move into the space of allowing myself to be human in the experience of that feeling because every human being feels every range of emotion emotion from time to time that's part of what it means to be human and then once i'm sitting in that emotion and allowing myself to be human i can meet myself with compassion and understanding knowing that this is just part of the human experience that i'm capable of managing whatever those feelings are so if you're sitting in a dark time in your life right now i know there's a lot of reasons for darkness right now whether that's mental health problems or whether that's relational problems or whether that's addiction problems whatever the problems are in your life those problems are there you can't control totally that they're there whether they're of your own doing or of somebody else's but you are capable of experiencing those things and just like the mountains behind us the snow will thaw the cold will go away and eventually it will be met with a beautiful sunrise and we can trust ourselves to experience not only the darkness but to wait patiently for the sunrise and then to experience the sun rise with exquisite joy and bliss so whatever your challenge is in your life right now know that i'm pulling for you know that i believe that it's just a season in your life and that this too shall pass and that you can trust yourself to live life on its terms you guys have an awesome day thank you so much for being here with me if you found this to be valuable for you please hit the like and subscribe button if you're facing particular struggles that you need help with or roadblocks that you're running into please submit a question i'd be happy to answer it for you [Music] you