Blog - Dr. Joan Rosenberg

Book Series 36: Disconnection and Distractions

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Have you developed habitual patterns that keep you disconnected from relating to emotional experiences? Lets start this weeks blog series with an important and relatable example: Leah and Cotter, a professional couple in their early 40s, both work in white collar professions. They have been married for just over 12 years, and they have two…

Book Series 35: Are You A Control Freak?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

You can really think of the effort to control as an effort at preventing or stopping feelings all together. How many people have you heard describe themselves as “control freaks”? Or say that they hate “losing control”? Perhaps you feel this way, too. The word “control” implies that something is being imposed from the outside…

Book Series 34: Identifying and Overcoming Distractions

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

When you make the choice to disconnect or distract from your feelings, you opt for the fleeting relief that comes from distancing yourself from an uncomfortable situation or experience. The ways you keep yourself from being well attuned and connected to yourself – in essence, how you sabotage or undermine your emotional strength – is…

Book Series 33: Why Accurately Labeling Feelings Leads To Self Love

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

You can’t feel capable, nor confident, until you have a sense that you can handle the feelings associated with things not working out the way you wanted. As we approach the end of October, I hope you have been able to experience inner peace and self understanding from my weekly reading series. But before we…

Book Series 32: Why Labeling Feelings Is Important

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

When we put feelings into words, we actually change the brain’s response to the emotions themselves. Last week, we talked about the window of tolerance. Today it’s all about the importance of labeling your feelings, so that you can better understand them, and you can feel more skillful whenever you encounter them. Naming or labeling…

Book Series 31: Emotional Tolerance and How Do You Experience Feelings?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

The window of tolerance concept helps us understand why there are so many individual differences in how we experience feelings. I hope you’ve had a wonderful week, and I’m glad that you are back as we continue this conversation about emotional tolerance, and explore the differences in how we experience our feelings. The window of…

Book Series 30: Do You Know The Scary Movie Factor?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

How do ‘scary movies’ effect our tolerance for emotional body sensations? Today we are moving on to what I call the “Scary Movie Factor”. Here’s the gist of it. Think about whether you like or dislike going to scary movies. People who enjoy scary movies often say they enjoy them in part because of the…

Ever wonder what to do with your feelings when you feel them

Book Series 29: What to do with your feelings when you feel them

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

What to “do” with your feelings when you feel them. Give yourself some credit! You just walked with me through learning about the 8 difficult feelings and I think staying the course on this journey merits a hardy congratulations! As the Aussies would say, “Good on ya!” Now that you have a better idea about…

Book Series 28: The Connection Between Vulnerability and Emotional Weakness Part 3

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

There is a connection that vulnerability has to both emotional strength and weakness. If you haven’t had the opportunity to read Part 1 Blog Post and Part 2 Blog Post of this series, I would invite you to do so. Vulnerability is such an important yet challenging emotion, and I can only hope that what…

Book Series 27: Conscious Vulnerability Part 2

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Do you make the conscience decision to be vulnerable? Conscious vulnerability is a vulnerability we choose to lean into. When we get serious about taking a personal, professional, or social risk, we open ourselves up to being hurt (laughed at, ridiculed, teased, or embarrassed). Think about public speaking, engaging in athletic competition, acting, singing, playing…

Book Series 26: How to Deepen Your Understanding of Vulnerability Part 1

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Is there a dual nature to vulnerability? Our next topic is one that I am excited and deeply passionate about, and because there is so much to vulnerability, I am going to break it down in to a three part discussion over the coming weeks, so that we can truly have the time to go…

Book Series 25: How do we learn to tolerate frustration?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

When you are frustrated, do you react with a fight reaction or flight reaction? Physiologically, frustration is associated with high levels of arousal or activation of the acute stress response or the fight-or-flight system. The fight-or-flight reflex enables us to respond quickly to perceived life-threatening situations by either fighting off the threat or fleeing to…

Book Series 24: When You Feel Disappointed, Here Are A Few Distinctions to Consider

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Disappointment is experienced when we are faced with unmet needs, desires, and expectations. What does disappointment highlight? How do you handle disappointment? We hope, expect, or anticipate something positive yet we are met with an unwanted and unfavorable outcome. Disappointment highlights our helplessness and lack of control over certain situations. Disappointment is often contrasted with…

Book Series 23: Embarrassment: How we all wish we would have done that one thing differently

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

HOW TO GROW AS A PERSON AFTER SUFFERING EMBARRASSMENT This week we get to talk about embarrassment. Trust me, we’ve all had moments of extreme embarrassment, myself included! But as uncomfortable as it is, it’s an important feeling that helps you grow as a person. Embarrassment is an acknowledgment to ourselves and to others that…

Book Series 22: What Are The Two Primary Functions of Anger?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

How is anger a protective response? Welcome back! I hope you found some answers in last weeks topic of “Feeling Helpless”, and I’m glad that you are continuing with our discussions on the Eight Unpleasant Feelings. This week, we are going to talk about anger.Anger is a protective response. You need to have it available…

Book Series 21: How Does Feeling Helpless Motivate Change?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

How can feeling helpless motivate change? Helplessness is frequently tied to feeling small, powerless, and vulnerable and is often occurs when you are unable to have an impact or influence on an individual, event, or situation. It might leave you with a sense of being on edge or waiting for whatever is coming, which may…

Book Series 20: The Difference Between General Shame and Core Shame

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Did you know there are 2 types of shame? Just wanted to give you the heads up, this weeks topic is a bit heavy. However, you may learn something you didn’t know and hopefully it will be helpful to you.Let’s talk about shame. There is a parallel distinction between general shame, which serves a social…

Book Series 19: Sadness. How It Serves You

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Have you ever considered how sadness can serve you? Seems like an odd thing to say or contemplate. Sadness can be especially painful because it often brings up sad memories from the past, which can feel overwhelming. We associate it with situations caused by circumstances or people over whom we believe we have little impact…

Book Series 18: What Are Feelings For Anyway?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Feelings are for a threefold purpose: protection, connection, and creativity. When you feel safe and secure, both alone and with others, your mental, emotional, and physical resources are not required for protection or basic survival needs. At this point, your feelings are available for connection and creativity, often in the form of relationships, risk-taking, and…

How Parents Effect How We Handle Feelings

Book Series 17: How Parents Influence How We Handle Feelings

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

How Our Parents Effect How We Handle Feelings Did you know that challenges in facing difficult feelings generally start in childhood. (To a lesser degree, they can begin with very painful events experienced in adulthood.) There is an extensive body of research on how infants and children bond with parents or caretakers that describes the…

Book Series 16: Lingering Feelings

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

LET’S TALK ABOUT LINGERING FEELINGS I hope you are enjoying my weekly emails, covering ‘90 Seconds To A Life You Love‘. If you’ve finished the book, these weekly reminders can be really helpful! For those of you who have not purchased the book yet, remember the weekly ‘chats’ so to speak are only a small…

Book Series 15: Riding The Wave

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Experience The Wave At the end of last week’s discussion, I suggested that the next time your feelings emerge, pay attention. Take a moment, breathe, and really notice what is taking place inside of you on a physiological level. Experience the wave. Let’s talk about ‘the wave’. Neuroscientist and author Jill Bolte-Taylor describes when an…

How to move through and experience emotions

Book Series 14: How To Experience and Move Through Your Emotions

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

We all love ‘how to’ lists. It feeds our go to need to get things done quick. Working through our emotions to create a better life is a life long ‘How To’. However, knowing that each one of our emotions can be addressed in one or more ‘90 Second’ waves is not just a ‘thing’…

Book Series 13: How Is Vulnerability Your Greatest Emotional Strength

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Choosing vulnerability means you can tolerate the other seven feelings. That is what it takes. I believe that we are at our greatest emotional strength when we make the choice to be vulnerable. When you know that the most likely unwanted outcome of being vulnerable (assuming that the outcome is not success) is that you…

Book Series 12: Are You An Emotional Flatline?

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Do You Address Emotions Like Dr. Spock? Because of the intensity and overwhelming nature of unpleasant feelings, many of my clients have expressed a desire to be a bit more like Star Trek’s Dr. Spock, moving through life in a robotic and unfeeling manner. While this can certainly seem appealing when we think of what…

Book Series 11: Do Your Feelings Come Up or Come Down?

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Heartfelt, Gut Feeling or Gut Instinct … Is it science? Did you know that the terms “heartfelt”, “gut feeling” or your “gut instinct” are grounded in science? Our bodies contain vast amounts of information – far more than most of us realize and the brain and body constantly feed information back and forth from the…

Book Series 10:Your Sixth Sense – Increasing Self-Attunement

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

The first step of the Rosenberg Reset is intended to help you stay aware of and connected to your experience (“knowing what you know”) as opposed to distracting from and avoiding your experience (“trying not to know what you know”). Knowing what you know necessitates self-awareness and self-attunement, which leads to greater emotional strength and…

Book Series 9: The Rosenberg Reset – One Choice

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Let’s talk about the ‘ROSENBERG RESET’ and the first of the 3 steps – One Choice. The Rosenberg Reset is a strategy that enables people to more fully lean into those unpleasant emotions. It is one simple formula. You make the decision to allow yourself to fully feel your feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. It…

Book Series 8: The Rosenberg Reset – Coping with life’s challenges in healthy ways

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Let’s talk about the ‘ROSENBERG RESET’ and learning to cope with life’s challenges in healthy ways. While working at the UCLA student-counseling center 25 years ago, I drew a diagram that became my blueprint for counseling clients. I can look back now and recognize that this drawing marked the beginning of the Rosenberg Reset. Essentially,…

Book Series 7: Asking for Help & Relying On Others

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Let’s talk about ‘asking for help and relying on others’ this week. Being resourceful is the second defining element of emotional strength. Particularly important in being resourceful is having the ability to depend on others. It involves being comfortable with your need for both independence and dependence, as well as your feelings associated with both.…

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