The Key To Dealing With Big Emotions (and the little ones too)

On Saturday I had the time to feel for the first time in a long time. And A LOT came up I wasn't expecting.

If you've been reading my blogs, you know that in the last two months I released my first book, launched my group coaching program Beyond Perfect, and moved to Colorado.

During these past few months, I've tried to give myself the space to journal and feel my emotions as they came up, but, honestly, I didn't really have time.

Every spare moment in September was full of work or packing or social events to say goodbye to friends.

This past Saturday was the first day in MONTHS that I didn't have a single thing on the calendar. Not even a single task that had to get crossed of my to-do list. I was completely free the entire day.

I went to the farmer's market, ate an AMAZING almond croissant from that farmer's market for breakfast, went on a glorious hike, sat on my deck and listened to music, and broke out my art supplies for the first time since before Covid.

It was all wonderful.

Until about 8:00pm.

That's when the emotions started to show up.

I didn't know why. Nothing was wrong. I was a little lonely, but not overly sad or frustrated about anything. I couldn't name a single big emotion or situation that was causing all these feelings.

But the emotions were still there.

I fought tears for about 20 minutes. I didn't really want to deal with them. I didn't really want to feel whatever feelings were coming up.

It didn't take long for the tears to win, though. I went into my bedroom, shut the door, sat down on my bed and cried. Really cried. For probably a half an hour.

EVERYTHING I hadn't had time to feel over the past two months came pouring out of me.

I cried until I felt all the emotions release. My body relaxed. It felt cleansed and calm and pure.

Crying was exactly what I needed.

But crying isn't the key to dealing with big emotions that I talked about in the title of this blog post.

The key to managing big emotions is giving yourself permission to feel them - and the grace and space to do what YOU need to do to release the emotions.

There are a million tactics to process emotions (dancing, writing, and crying are my go-to’s) -- but none of them matter if you don't give yourself permission and space to actually do them.

And let's be honest here - there are A LOT of things to feel emotional about right now. I listed a whole bunch of personal things that were pent up inside of me - and you have your personal things, too.

But there are also a lot of COLLECTIVE things filling your emotional cup - Covid and everything that goes along with it, the election, racism and the murder of innocent people of color and the uprisings that have followed (and if you ARE a person of color, this emotional load is a million times higher than mine as a white woman), and record breaking wildfires burning across our country.

I mean, seriously, could the emotional cup of 2020 get any fuller?!?

Without giving yourself permission to feel and release those emotions, they get stuck inside of you, building up and causing stress and overwhelm and complete and total exhaustion.

So give yourself permission to feel. If you're not in a place at the moment the emotion arises where you can feel safely, save it for later - but be sure to come back to it. I guarantee, the emotion is still there. Feel it. Release it. It may not all disappear immediately and that's okay. Just keep feeling. And releasing. And feeling some more.

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