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.
Before we get down to the nitty gritty this week, I’d like you to find grab your journal or a couple of pieces of paper, a pen or a pencil, and make sure that whatever you write down this week, save that paper for next week too!
Over the next couple of weeks, I will be challenging you with identifying and practicing distraction exercises. Write each question down on your piece of paper, then after careful thought, write down your answer!
Some of your answers will be short, some of them will be 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. Are there activities you use to disconnect from, suppress, distract from, or shut down any one or more of the 8 feelings?
Working, sleeping, and exercise are common distracters. Which ones, if any, do you use?
2. Do you use technology, screens, gaming, or devices to distract yourself?
One can get easily distracted and lost in gaming, surfing the web, and in our devices to distance from feelings and emotional conflict. Do you get lost in any of these?
3. Do you use any type of addictive or compulsive behavior to shut out or disconnect from emotional pain? List what behaviors you tend to use:
Might you engage in: compulsive or emotional eating or overeating; starving yourself; exercising excessively; abusing alcohol, street drugs, or prescription medications or steroids; compulsive shopping; or hoarding.
4. Do you use commonly known defense mechanisms to move away from painful feelings?
It’s common for someone to engage in frequent use of such defenses as denial, humor, intellectualization, and rationalization, or displacement. Do you resort to one or more of these? Which one(s)?
5. Do you transmute feelings?
In this case, you take the feelings that are hardest for you to bear and express them as other feelings. Though it may seem like a generalization, men often struggle with the “softer” feelings of sadness, disappointment, or vulnerability, expressing them instead as anger, frustration, irritability, or rage. Women often struggle with the “harder” feelings of anger or frustration, and express them instead as hurt, disappointment, sadness, or tearfulness.
What feelings, if any, do you transmute?
As we head into the new year and a new decade, 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.
Next week, I’ll show you a few ‘Identifying-Distractions Exercises Part 2’.
This weeks questions:
How could you have used these exercises in the past?
How can you use these exercises 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
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