heartfood

I feel like I have achieved a lot in pursuing this goal, but I need to open up more before I can achieve it. Negativity and defensiveness sets a limit on how in touch I can be, so I need to work on those barriers. I am giving up on this challenge so that I can focus my energies on being more positive.

I really hate to let go of something that felt so close, but I am glad that I have identified where my limits come from, and I look forward to taking this goal up as a challenge again. In the meanwhile I still find the card technique confronting and rewarding and I am going to stick with it.

Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moeraki-boulder-split_b.jpg

Tonight I tried a very simple and highly effective technique that I would strongly recommend to anyone having difficulty getting in touch with their feelings. It has been the most helpful thing I’ve tried so far.

While I spoke with a partner I tried to pay attention to what I felt. As I identified each new emotion, I wrote it on a small card and placed it on the table between us. I started out only being able to name 1 or 2 feelings, but within 30 minutes had it up 8 at a time. This was a revelation to me! I never knew I felt so much! Or rather, so many different things.

This is a reeeally long post, so summary advice is:

• Ask someone you trust to be your partner in this. You’re going to be discussing vulnerable stuff.
• In so far as possible, use adjectives, not nouns, to complete the sentence “I feel…” (e.g. angry or loving, not anger or love).
• Don’t prep cards. Only write feelings as they come up. This will help you track negativity vs positivity.
• Focus just on naming, not judging, the feelings.
• Swap the cards as your feelings change.
• Review the cards on the table from time to time to see if you are still feeling them all. Remove feelings that have faded. This will help teach you to monitor yourself.
• Explore why you’re feeling, or no longer feeling, something. This will help you pick up on patterns.

One thing about this exercise that really helped me is that it didn’t matter what I felt, whether it was positive or negative, only that I could name it. This was important for me as I tend to judge my feelings as right or wrong a lot, or worry about my self-image or how I look to the other person. I was too taken up with the task of naming to worry about that.

I also found that treating painful feelings like a sore elbow rather than an affliction is an antidote to defensiveness. As a result of not judging so much I was more open to my partner’s obvious concern, sympathy and attempts to show me another perspective on the matter or solution to my perceived problem. Previously, my own defensiveness about feeling things that are “bad” has left me prone to judge others as having a poor view of me, or being unsympathetic, correcting or even controlling.

In addition to being generally more in tune, I also became aware that some feelings take me longer to identify, probably because I am still judging on some level and therefore am not as open to them. In particular, it took me a long time to recognise times when I felt tired, resistant, bored, passive or worthless. This was a very important discovery for me as these are some of the feelings that normally lead me to become argumentative, defensive or withdrawn. Being more aware of them in the moment stopped that from happening. I will pay more attention to these in the future.

Some other things I learned were:

1. Even once I’ve identified negative feelings, my reaction is very passive. I don’t make any attempt to move myself to a more positive place. This is something I DEFinitely want to change.

2. Negative feelings sap my motivation. This might seem obvious, but wait til you watch yourself put down a negative emotion card, and then another, and maybe one more, and then finally take the motivated one away. Maybe I just needed to see it happen in real time.

3. I identified far more negative emotions than positive ones. 23 negatives versus only 10 positives. I’m feeling negative about 66% of the time. Checked my morale-o-meter to verify this – it rarey goes over 5 or 6. That’s terrible! Someone get me some chocolate or ice-cream! This is all linked to the negative thinking I talked about in my last entry. I’m probably focusing on the negative and overlooking the positive.

4. I also noticed I have a smaller vocabulary for positive feelings, tending to use more generic, ballpark words. My negative emotion words were more specific. I will be working to expand this and thereby also get myself to focus on my positive feelings more.

5. I was under-reactive to positive feelings. I might have 3 postive cards and 3 negative cards out, but I would only really talk about the negative ones (this backs up point 3). My conversation partner also noted that my facial expressions tended from negative to neutral, even when I had positive feelings. Perhaps I am not letting myself enjoy them?

6. I have some very distinct emotional patterns. For example, if I’m being passive rather than involved, I start to feel down and worthless. I get bored when things drag on too long. I often approach tasks with rigid, hard, abusive self-talk. If I can discover more of these, I will get better at predicting my reactions to things (which is why I’m doing all this).

In closing:
It felt funny to recognise the same feelings coming round again, like a villain in a Saturday morning cartoon. I also watched them pass away again and again. I learned today that bad feelings won’t last forever – they’re transitory. I don’t need to hide from something that will leave soon…if I’d just let it.

Picture from… http://www.flickr.com/photos/virtualworld360/3535685191/
But if you’re looking for a laugh… http://www.flickr.com/photos/jemjoop/3213388096/

Today I paid a lot of attention to my thinking and I noticed how much time I spend thinking about worries and problems. Even when I deliberately tried dreaming about something pleasant or turning my thoughts toward the positive, I found myself coming out of it thinking about a problem and feeling stressed again.

Many of these worries are just the product of a habit of negativity, but not all are phantoms. Either way, fretting doesn’t help me and I can’t just go about ignoring the real problems either.

There is no doubt that I’m a negative thinker and that this frame of mind keeps me in a bad emotional space. I often feel paralysed and helpless, seeing only walls around me and no way out. I also tend to interpret things that people say as critical or their intentions as hostile, becoming withdrawn, defensive or even aggressive in order to protect myself from an imagined attack. This is just making me and everybody else unhappy.

I want to learn to let the phantoms go and deal more positively and, therefore, more effectively with the rest. I spent some time consciously trying this out tonight. In the beginning it took effort, but as time went on, it became easier and easier to just ride the emotional wave and let them go. This freed me up to think about what I was actually going to do instead of uselessly chewing gum and left me in a better mood.

Knowing I have a strong bias toward the negative is very helpful in terms of my ultimate goal – I now know where my thoughts like to hang out, so finding them in a given moment should be easier from now on. I also know that I should keep an extra good lookout for them in heated moments. When I find them, I will actively let them go, freeing myself up to deal with the matter at hand, as I did tonight.

In the long run, the best thing for me to do would be to develop a habit of positive thinking. This would hopefully prevent me from getting into these situations in the first place. I am going to make an effort to look for the positive and to appreciate the present moment for what it is right now instead of always trying to control it. I’ve added thinking positively as a goal on 43things! :)

Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveham/1038856281/