Feelings are real, but they aren't reality

If you're one of my clients, you may have heard me mention this last week. Dan Harmon, the creator of Rick and Morty responded to a fan's tweet looking for advice about depression. His answer was fabulous - you can read the whole thing here. What I found most remarkable was this statement: "Feelings are real, but they aren't reality." I've been saying this in therapeutic ways for years, but Harmon put it so simply, I had to share.

So what does it mean? First and foremost, your feelings are valid. You don't need to question whether you should feel a certain way or not. You just feel that way and you really can’t control that, so it's perfectly ok to be gentle with yourself and your emotions. It’s perfectly ok to feel like crap! We can’t be happy all the time.

What you may want to question, though, is whether the thoughts you have around the feeling are based in reality. How do you do that? Take a look at the evidence. 

For instance, the feeling of loneliness can sometimes be accompanied by thoughts like, "I'll always be lonely. I've always been lonely. Everyone hates me." But is that true? Look at the evidence. When was the last time you felt connected to someone? Who in your life would you consider a friend? Does everyone hate you or is there someone who kind of likes you, maybe even loves you? If you take a moment to acknowledge the feeling, but then look at the facts, you'll probably find that the thoughts maybe aren't so realistic. 

But what if this doesn’t work?

When we’re really feeling terrible, it can be hard to find any contradicting evidence. The thoughts about how terrible we are might override anything else. When this happens, you might try the technique of defusion. This means first accepting that those thoughts are there and they’re totally normal! You don’t try to change them, but you can take away their power. 

One of my favorite ways to defuse thoughts is this one from The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris, a book about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy:

Take your thought and whittle it down to what’s really at the core of it. “I’m not good enough” is a common, crappy, unhelpful thought I know I have all the time. Now, say to yourself “I’m having the thought that I’m not good enough” (or whatever your thought is). Say it 3 times. Breathe. Notice what happens. Then, take it even further and say to yourself “I notice that I’m having the thought that I’m not good enough” and say that to yourself 3 times. What happens? Does the thought feel a little further away? A little less painful? 

There are lots of other ways to defuse thoughts. I highly recommend reading The Happiness Trap for more about this technique and others that can help you to get out of your head and move on with your life.

Want help managing your thoughts and feelings so you can create what’s in your heart?

Check out my course Create with Confidence: A seven day journey from stuck to flow.

Why is growth so difficult? How to get through change, even when it's good.

As the year ends, many of us look back with mixed emotions. Regardless of whether you judge your time as "good" or "bad", the fact remains that you changed in some way. Everyone changes from year to year, even if only minutely. The world is constantly in transition and we are all affected by it. If you lost someone or something, you changed; if you gained someone or something, you changed; if someone close to you lost or gained someone, you are affected because they are.

Being that we are constantly in flux, it seems funny that most of us would be afraid of change, even positive adjustments, in some way. But it's a natural fear of the unknown. We're creatures of habit, so when we don't know what's coming next we get excited, and maybe a bit anxious. Adrenalin pops in to say hello and prepare us for whatever dangers might be ahead. This is why transitions, even positive ones, can be hard to handle.

Sometimes growth is really difficult because it involves some type of loss. Ever had to dump a friend, lover, or spouse because they just didn't feel "right" for you anymore? Ever left a job for a new one or moved to a better neighborhood or another state or country for a new opportunity? All sorts of feelings pop up in these instances, and they usually involve excitement, anxiety, and sadness.

Guess what? Every single one of these feelings is PERFECTLY NORMAL. Many of us shit on ourselves about feeling the bad feelings, though. "I SHOULD feel happy. This is a GOOD thing, so WHY do I feel so scared and sad? I SHOULD stop feeling that way." These thoughts are a one-way ticket to feeling worse. The ironic thing is, the more you allow yourself to feel those bad feelings, the easier and faster you will move through them. And I don't mean wallowing in self-pity, staying in your bed all day. I mean giving yourself permission to feel the myriad of emotions that go along with growth and transition.

Here's an awesome excerpt from Melody Beattie's The Language of Letting Go. She uses the metaphor of growing out of things as a child to describe the feelings that go along with personal growth.

Just as when we were children and grew out of our favorite toys and clothes, we sometimes grow out of things as adults - people, jobs, homes. This can be confusing. We may wonder why someone or something that was so special and important to us last year doesn't fit the same way in our life today. We may wonder why our feelings have changed.

When we were children, we may have tried to fit an outgrown article of clothing on to our body. Now, as adults, we may go through a time of trying to force-fit attitudes that we have outgrown. We may need to do this to realize the truth. What worked last year, what was so important and special to us in times past, doesn't work anymore because we've changed. We've grown.

We can accept this as valid and important... We can let ourselves go through experimentation and grief as we struggle to make something fit, trying to figure out if indeed it no longer fits, and why. We can explore our feelings and thoughts around what has happened. Then, we can put last year's toys away and make room for the new.

The key points from this quote are: 1. Growth and change are permanent fixtures in our lives. 2. We can choose to let ourselves be just as we are while we move through the process.

Think of it this way: do you think it's right to tell others how they should feel? No? Does it make you feel any better when someone says "you should be happy!"? Didn't think so. Then why is it alright for you to tell yourself how you should feel? I know we all want to feel happy and great all the time because, well, it feels good! But that's just not how humans are. We experience the whole roller coaster of emotions and unfortunately, some of those feelings are difficult, even scary.

There's a lot of people in media and advertising telling you to "be fearless", usually with some incredible image like someone jumping out of a plane or diving off cliff. I'm willing to bet that the people doing those things are super afraid of doing what they're doing, they're just good at recognizing that fear goes hand-in-hand with excitement. It seems that instead of "be fearless", the mantra should be "don't let fear stop you." Because really, no one is fearless.

So I'm here to tell you: it's alright to feel tentative about any type of change. Everyone feels anxious at some point in their lives. Give yourself a break. Let yourself grow and unfold slowly. You'll find it's easier to move forward when you maneuver through those "bad feeling" obstacles, rather than try to pretend they don't exist.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

As I stated in one of my previous posts, I don't handle change well. What's funny is I get bored pretty easily, so I crave change quite often. But when a big transition creeps up on me, I get uncomfortable and a bit scared. I think a lot of people do this: we swing between periods of excitement and apprehension when we make big decisions, like changing jobs, starting or ending a relationship, moving to a new apartment, house, state, or country, or embarking on a new creative project. I find that I, and many people I know, tend to act as if everything is fine when going through these changes - like we feel that expressions of fear or tentativeness will somehow cause things to fall apart. Sometimes we "fake it" because we know the change is bad for us. Sometimes we "fake it" because we know the new thing is really good for us and we're just afraid to do it. Regardless of the situation, I've come to believe that expressing the nervousness to my partner or to a close friend helps tremendously. I find it offers perspective, usually helping to either ease my mind or encouraging me to contemplate the decision further. Sometimes even just saying "I'm nervous about this" and having someone else say "I know, it'll be ok" can help tremendously.

This practice of recognizing and expressing anxiety is in line with cognitive behavioral therapy, which helps people to change their thoughts and behaviors. Anxiety is one of the most interesting emotions to conquer because it perpetuates itself: we feel anxious and the symptoms of anxiety scare us; we don't want to feel anxious, so we try to ignore it or suppress it, but the symptoms persist and the feeling of fear is heightened, often accompanied by thoughts of "I'm going crazy", "People will think I'm crazy", "I'll never get this done if I can't stop feeling this way", "I'm weak if I can't control this", and so on. Working to alter these thoughts in a way that gives us the understanding that anxiety is common, normal, and "OK to feel" does something amazing: it quells the anxiety. Eventually, we're no longer anxious that we're anxious and feeling alright with our emotions allows them to be easily processed. 

Major change is one of my biggest anxiety triggers, but it is not the only one. No matter what the anxiety causing situation, I've learned to recognize, accept, breathe through it, and discuss it with others when necessary and appropriate. I'm curious, do you have trouble with change, too? How do you handle it and other anxiety inducing situations?