I would like to discuss in the post one of the tools that I have refined (I hesitate to say developed simply because it has been influenced by so many sources, and looks like other things that I do not want to claim originality for it) for my usage in times of stress. Basically this process is helpful for formalizing some steps that can be taken when dealing with intensely stressful situations over which we have control of our person, for people who struggle with their relationship to their emotions.

An important caveat up front. If for whatever reason you are in a state of danger or a state in which you cannot control your person, this particular process may not be of as much value. And it is possible for this to occur more commonly than you might think, such as being trapped in a moving vehicle during a fight with a loved one.

Without further ado, the steps:

1. Remove yourself physically from the emotional situation if possible.
2. Detach from the emotion some, using mindfulness.
3. Partially inhabit the emotion, so you can figure out its nature.
4. Give the emotion shape of some kind.
5. Have a conversation between your higher mind and the emotion.

Remove Yourself

Because this is a guide basically written for other novice emotional navigators, like myself, it is necessary to include this step at least in the beginning because the process can be extremely mentally involved, and any distraction, especially the originating stressor, will detract from your ability to execute on it.

It is important to note, that for some people prone to rapture, this step may be one of the most difficult to cultivate. As you lose yourself in an argument with someone, it becomes harder and harder to realize “I am experiencing and transmuting emotions into something dangerous and damaging, and I need to step back.” The best way to combat this deficiency is to do some daily mindfulness practice for 10-20 minutes.

You know you should remove yourself from a situation when you start to feel uneasy. Maybe there is a tightness in your solar-plexus area, like I typically get, or maybe your breath shortens. Generally there are somatic indicators that you are undergoing stress. For me, as I said, my solar-plexus feels tight, I generally start to hold my breath, sometimes my face gets flush if there is an aspect of shame. If I am mindful, I can feel myself start to experience an emotional response. However, due to my lack of extensive relationships to my emotions, if I continue in an interaction after noticing these things, it will typically suppress the emotions, which creates a prime situation for the emotions to explode.

Alternatively, sometimes the stressor is yourself. A harsh internal critic, or any sort of toxic shame episode can trigger, without anyone else present (sometimes especially if no one else is present), a very powerful emotional response. In this case, you don’t really need to remove yourself, per se, you just need to know it’s happening and move on to the next step.

Mindfulness

There are really two types of egregious reactions to an emotional response to a situation. One is to banish the emotion. This ends up with a pseudo “calm” type of state and statements that look like “oh, no, I’m not mad,” or “no, I am completely rational right now.” While I’m sure many times these statements are spoken in truth, they are beautifully devious ways to pretend like we are successfully not feeling something. But it doesn’t matter what you say, generally your body will not lie, and if you have made it this far in the process, you know if you are someone who banishes their emotions.

The other reaction is to just live your emotion where you become anger, or sadness, or pain, and nothing else exists in the the world. While I personally am prone to the former, I have certainly had my share of the latter, especially if I didn’t remove myself from the situation.

Either way, you are attached to the emotion through internal violence (forced banishment) or you are attached to the emotion through consumption and rapture. The goal at this point is to become detached a little bit so you can “talk to” the emotion rather than ignore or exalt it. You can do this using a simple breathing technique borrowed from Zen practice.

Close your eyes. This will help draw you back inward if external stressors are exacerbating things. Breath with your diaphragm. Focus on your breath. You can do this by listening to the feeling of your stomach as it rises and falls, or picture the air that is being sucked into your lungs and blown back own during inhale and exhale. If this simple visualization is interrupted consistently with overwhelming thoughts, you can add counting to it to help focus you. Counting on the inhale and exhale (1-1, 2-2) is one of the stronger ways to regain focus away from the overwhelming thoughts, but if you want, you can count on just inhale or just exhale.

During this process, the thoughts will continue to arise, but the idea is that you simply notice them and then go back to counting, or visualizing your breath. The longer you do this, the slower and more detached the thoughts will be. It is important to understand your goal here is to focus on something that is not the thought. You admit the thought when it arises, “how could he do this to me.” But then you let it go “1….1….2….2.” At some point your emotional intensity will drop to a more manageable level. Be patient with yourself.

Inhabit the Emotion

Once you have returned to a place that is centered, you can begin feeling the emotion in a more controlled way. This part of the process is important to novices like me because I do not have very good emotional literacy. Sometimes I don’t know if I feel shame, or anger, or sadness. I just know that I feel something and it is very uncomfortable. In order to develop emotional literacy, it is important to exist with what you’re feeling for a bit, and being able to label that yes it is shame, or yes it is anger. The more you practice this, the faster it gets. The important part here is that you have become detached from the emotion. You have remembered that you neither need to fear the emotion (if you banished it) or surrender to the emotion. In this empowered state, you can start to explore it.

This is honestly a fairly qualitative part of the process that I do not have a really good way to express how you go about labeling your own emotions. Something that can help is active listening, which I will write about in an upcoming post. When you are actively listening, you can validate people by watching their face and see what emotions they are feeling and validating them with things like “you seem very angry” or “you seem very sad.” This external labeling allows another person to be like “no, I’m not really sad, I feel ashamed.” This correction can help you learn what emotions feel like internally because in a state of active listening you are capable of empathy, which allows you to actually feel what someone else is feeling. Once you practice empathy, labelling your own internal experiences and emotions becomes a lot easier.

Alternatively, you can work with a therapist/counselor to label what you are feeling if you are someone, like me, who was not really capable of active listening for a very long time. Good counselors can help you label emotions if your emotional literacy is low.

So at this point, we have removed ourselves from the stressor, we have detached from our emotion, and we have explored it to figure out exactly what it is. Next we give it a shape.

Give the Emotion Shape

To me, this is an extraordinarily important step. It is not simply good enough to know what emotion we are feeling. In my case, this creates a sort of abstract relationship between your higher mind and the emotion itself. It’s like a blob. I don’t know about you, but I do not work well with blobs. I certainly can’t feel compassion for blobs. And that is what this step is about. Compassion.

I like to imagine, if I am experiencing shame, a very hurt little boy. That little boy is me. I look into his beautiful tear-streamed face and see his hurt. The observer is the adult version of me. It is the one who is capable of balancing check books and all that other fun adult stuff. At this point, the emotion is still extant, it is still happening, and because of that one of the most powerful reintegration tools there is is self compassion.

Now maybe this doesn’t apply to anyone else, I don’t know, but for a long time I struggled with this concept of talking to myself. I had this misguided notion that if I separated parts of myself in an internal drama that I would somehow become schizophrenic. As if it’s not a disease and it’s a learned behavior. Anyway. This part can be very difficult honestly, if you’re like me, and you have a very deep inhibition to talking to yourself, or segregating the parts of yourself apart and having them relate to one another. The only thing I can really encourage here is practice. You have to practice being ok splitting yourself apart.

It has become my opinion, in fact, that this act of splitting things apart actually isn’t a fission in the personality, as I was so scared of, it is the experiential phenomenon of the activation of multiple areas of the brain at the same time.

So back to our visualization.

Generally when I give the emotion shape, and I can see and relate to the emotion as a person, especially if it is a helpless person, like myself as a child, it empowers me with a compassion for myself that I never knew I had or was capable of. The adult me, the “eyes” of the internal drama, will generally look at the child version of me and smile, or give me a big hug. Generally at this point, outside of my head, I begin to cry (if the emotion is very overwhelming, like shame). The visualization and compassion that happens allows me to process the emotion I am feeling. I cannot stress this point enough. If you deal with pent up or excessive emotions, and you walk around taking them out on everyone else, this step is absolutely crucial to the success of this method.

This sort of admission of imperfection, of vulnerability, of the essential reality of the emotion is the first step in reintegrating the emotion. But there is still one more step.

Converse Between Emotion and Higher Mind

I am taking artistic liberties here when I say converse. I find that once I have embraced the emotion as internal form, I need to have a conversation so that it can be realistically reintegrated. But it can be preverbal, partially verbal, or verbal. I don’t think the actually internal expression of words is necessary, but they will happen if the originating thought forms were verbal, at least in my experience.

This is the point where, because you have owned and loved and shown compassion toward your emotional side, you can listen to the heartfelt pleas.

“Why doesn’t he love me?” “Why does she hurt me?” “I’ll never be good enough for anyone.” “He doesn’t care about me.”

These are a lot of times the thoughts that triggered the emotions in the first place. However, addressing these thoughts after accepting the emotion is much easier than before. Addressing them before is like pretending like just because you stretch out a rubber band, and one finger feels farther away from the other, that it won’t snap back together.

It is my earnest belief that you cannot talk yourself out of irrationality until you have embraced the irrationality, which is to say the emotion.

At this point, your higher mind can start offering counter proposals, “what about this, where he listened to you for hours, and sat with you, just to be present and help you feel better,” and they will be much more well received. And they are much more well received because processing our emotions leaves us vulnerable, and while we are vulnerable, we tend to be receptive.

At this point, having the conversation will probably have that same sort of feeling you get when you say to yourself, “how did I ever believe this.” Which is a good thing. Have the conversation nonetheless.

Finally, when the rational part of the conversation is over, end the conversation with the higher mind thanking the emotion for the service that it provides. This helps to honor all parts of ourselves. We get scared in order to save ourselves from danger. We feel shame because we have a sense of good and bad. We feel sadness at a loss. Every emotion exists for a reason, and every emotion is a part of you. The emotional part of you deserves to feel like it is important, so make it feel important by letting it know how important it is from your higher mind.

Considerations

I realize looking back on this that the formalization of the process that it is a bit long, and possibly overwhelming at first. I’m not sure honestly. I will say that it’s not short. It takes me like 20-30 minutes to go through everything I have laid out here. I am hoping with practice it will go way down. I imagine, like anything, with practice it will go way down. So if you want to try the process, don’t be hard on yourself if it feels like it’s taking forever.

Additionally, it has come to my attention, that there is a second class of people who don’t only disown traditionally “negative” emotions, but instead or in addition, disown “positive” emotions such as happiness. I don’t have a lot of intimate experience with this concept of a “golden shadow,” so I am not sure if the process I have outlined above would be able to apply to it. But emotions are emotions, and I imagine suppressing either a “positive” or “negative” emotion would create the same sort of nagging feeling internally, and giving yourself a chance to experience the emotion, whether happiness or sadness, would allow you to live a more holistic life regardless. So like I said, because I cannot speak with authority on that particular experience, I cannot necessarily recommend what I do for it, but if you experience that, and you want to try it, feel free to let me know how it goes.

I have found that this is a truly profound therapeutic process for me. I hope it can be or inspire a similar therapeutic process in you as well.