My goal is to help you clear away the distractions from accessing and experiencing the full range of your feelings so that the decade beginning with 2020 helps you lead a more fully alive and more fully expressed life.
Over the next couple of weeks, I will be challenging you to become aware and identify when you are choosing distractions rather than leaning into difficult thoughts or feelings. Write each question down on your piece of paper, then after careful thought, write down your answer!
Some of your answers may be short, others long, and either is okay! These exercises are to help you, so make sure to be honest and vulnerable with yourself, as you are the only one who will see this.
1. Do you rely on one difficult feeling?
Is there one feeling that you either have difficulty experiencing or use to express all your unpleasant feelings, no matter what they are for you? This might mean that your reaction to most situations comes out one way – like feeling sad, for instance – even though it is quite likely you are experiencing other feelings. For others, all reactions show up as anger, even though there are other feelings present besides just anger. When a person consistently allows only one feeling to be expressed, there is a good chance that he or she is having trouble experiencing and expressing the other difficult feelings especially at the opposite end of the continuum. Do you rely on a default feeling? Which one?
2. Do you only allow feelings to be experienced as anxiety rather than anger, sadness, disappointment, or other unpleasant feelings?
Do you feel anxious? If you are really honest with yourself, you might realize that your anxiety is actually masking other unpleasant feelings. We’ll discuss this further, but, in my experience, I’ve found that it can seem easier to feel anxious than to feel some other unpleasant feeling (like disappointment or anger), especially when that uncomfortable feeling is directed at someone else and needs to be expressed. To be able to experience the genuine feeling that is present at the time you experience it is truly liberating. If you feel anxious a lot, is it possible you may be masking other unpleasant feelings? If so, which ones?
3. Do you question or doubt everything you experience? Do you then get into an endless loop of questioning your questions?
This approach likely leaves you feeling emotionally paralyzed and inhibits you from expressing yourself or from taking action to accomplish goals. Constant questioning and doubt is paralyzing, toxic, and distracts from feeling vulnerable. Make a list of some recent questioning loops in which you were entangled or major doubts that still plague you. Choose one of your doubts, then write the feelings that seem to be driving it.
4. Do you feel confused or indecisive?
Being indecisive or claiming confusion are ways to keep from making a decision, especially if making that decision might lead you to believe you made the wrong one or to feel disappointed or embarrassed that the results of your decision didn’t live up to your expectations. Confusion and indecision are distracters. List any decisions you have been putting off because you feel confused or indecisive.
5. Do you feel stuck?
When you start to think about initiating a project or even if you’ve already begun, do you feel stuck? There can be a tendency to pause when you fear being disappointed about the outcome – and then ultimately feel disappointment because you stopped. Or you might feel stuck because you set expectations extraordinarily high. The way out of stagnation is to take action.
Start something. Commit to it and don’t stop. Just keep going. Creating momentum invites more momentum. What project would you like to complete or what goal would you like to achieve? What actions will you take to create moment this?
Next week, ‘Identifying-Distractions Exercises Part 3’.
This weeks questions:
How can you use your increasing awareness about distractions in this coming week?
I’d love for you to respond on my facebook group if you feel comfortable!!
Join my group on Facebook LOVE MY LIFE and let me know. Feel free to share my series with your friends or colleagues as well!
To A Life You Love,
Dr. Joan Rosenberg
Hello, I’m very happy to be part of this group. I’m in my eighty’s and have slowly be coming to recognize my feelings. They have been suppressed since I’ve was born as the youngest of 12 children. Emotions were not considered “proper” to talk about. Some of my siblings managed to express and use them to some advantage. Most of us remained muffled and silent. I’m grateful for Dr. Rosenberg’s book in encouraging us to feel them – it’s natural and helps us live more happily and productively. I appreciate a moderated format for bringing them to the surface, to discover where the wrong belief happened and practice to use it in a healthy way. Yesterday I took two actions to avoid distraction. Both of them brought anxiety, yet after some time I’ve managed to bring myself to understand the source of these difficult feelings.
Thank you! It’s not easy but I am making it my goal to clearly identify what I’m feeling, determine which of the 8 feelings it is (or isn’t), and not defer to the one form of expression for all negative feelings/reactions. I realize I “hide” out of fear of the consequences of expressing truth. I’m 62 . I’ve been doing it for a very long time (so I’m quite good at “hiding “). Thank you again Dr. Rosenberg.