podcast

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the podcast today. Thanks for joining me. We're gonna talk today about what to do when people you love or people around you are experiencing negative emotions. This can be really hard for a couple of reasons. First of all, because emotions are contagious. When someone is feeling sad or anxious around us, it makes it hard for us not to feel that way. It's easy to get kind of sucked in to their emotion. But the other reason why it can be hard is because when we really care about them and we want them to be feeling better and feeling happy and feeling different, but you know, what do you do? How do you handle the fact that they're feeling bad?

So I am gonna talk you through actually a, a client that I coached regarding a certain member of her family who was having some negative emotions that were really affecting her, and how learning how to differentiate her emotions from the emotions of her family member was actually the way to help them the most and also help herself. So we're gonna talk about three keys in regards to this. The first is to stay in your zone. The second is to shift your story. And the third is to nurture your peace.

So this client, who I'll call Allison, was having a lot of trouble with a particular family member who was feeling depressed who was really down and was being really grumpy and was actually also dealing with a lot of anger about their own life. And she came to me to try and know how to best deal with this. It was giving her a lot of anxiety first of all, that being around them was so difficult. It was such a bummer to be around them because they're so grumpy and so, so depressed and so angry. But on the other hand, she really cared about this family member. She really wanted them to feel differently. She wanted them to feel happy. She didn't feel like she could feel happy unless they were feeling better, but she didn't know how to deal with this situation. So we started talking about the things that Allison has control over and the things that she doesn't have control over, and how anxiety comes mostly because we are focusing on things that we don't have control over. Well, one thing we don't have control over is other people's emotions. We've talked on this podcast a lot about how emotions are organized by stories that our brains tell about the situations that we're in, about how they're going to affect us, how they're going to develop. And if you want to review in more depth how this happens, the science behind it, I'll put a link in the show notes to an episode where I explain in more detail how this emotion generation process works . But suffice it to say, our emotions are organized by stories in our brain about the situation that we're in. And so you can't go into someone's brain and change the story that they're telling about their situation. And so you won't be able to directly manipulate their emotions. So we talked about how in Allison's case, the first thing she needed to do was to stop trying to make this other family member feel different or to feel better because she wasn't going to be able to control that. But there were some things that Allison could have control over. We can't directly change someone else's emotions, but we can indirectly influence them. We talked at the beginning about how emotions are contagious. That's why it can be hard when someone is having a lot of negative emotion around us. It can be hard for us not to also start to feel negative, but by the same token positive emotions can be contagious. And so we talked about how if she generated some different emotions and offered those in response to this family member, that she could indirectly influence him by the same principle of contagion. So we needed to focus on her own emotion.

So we're zooming in on how she feels. And we, we talked about how the first step, always when we're going to work on emotion regulation, is to be aware of how you are feeling. So we went through this exercise that we've talked about before in the podcast, this exercise where we go through every part of your body one by one. And I had her give a name to how that part of her body was feeling. How is the crown of your head feeling? How is your forehead feeling? How is your jaw feeling? Focus on your neck? How does it feel? How do your shoulders feel? How does your spine feel? How does your stomach feel? We went through every part of her body and tried to identify how it was that it was physically feeling. And then we went through those same body parts again, and we tried to associate an emotion with how that body part was feeling. So her forehead was feeling tense physically, and also the emotion that she associated with that tension was worry. I know this can sound a little weird if you're a little confused about um, about this process, about this exercise go back to that episode called Messy Feelings are a Superpower, I'll put a link in the show notes, and it can help you to understand this exercise step by step. But anyway, the emotions that she was able to identify in her body at that time included anxiety and frustration at this family member for feeling the way they were feeling, impatience with them, for feeling this way. Fear about, you know, how long is this gonna last? Is this gonna be the way that they're gonna feel for years? Feeling upset, feeling a little bit mad at the, the family member, feeling a little disgusted at their inability to snap out of it. All of these different emotions were present in her. So this, this was a really helpful first step because you can't change how you feel until you know how you feel. And especially if you can know the complex mixture of feelings that you're experiencing that can really help you to get that distance that you need to start to be able to manipulate how you're feeling. So that's how I helped her to stay in her zone, stay in her zone of control. She couldn't directly control the emotion of the family member, but she could work on her own emotion. And we first worked on it by identifying exactly what her emotions were. Once we knew what her emotions were, then we started talking about how she could change her emotions.

How do you change your emotions? We've talked about this in innumerable ways on the podcast, but what it comes down to is that when you can shift the story that your brain is telling in your head, then you will shift your emotion. So if she doesn't wanna be sucked into the depression and anger of this family member, she wants instead to offer different emotions, I asked her to think about what emotions she would like to offer in this situation. And she thought about it and she realized that she wanted to, in exchange for the depression and the anger and the sadness that this family member was feeling. She wanted to o to offer a source of hope, a sense of peace, a sense of happiness and love. That these were the emotions that she wanted to generate so that she could influence her family members' environment. So we had already discovered that this was not what she was feeling. She was feeling anxiety, frustration, worry, impatience, a little bit of, a little bit angry even. So how is it she's going to move toward hope and peace and love and happiness? Well, she needs, she's going to do that by shifting her story, by identifying what story her brain is telling about the situation. Learning to shift it in some way. And a couple of episodes ago we talked about how our brains are always ask, asking and answering three different questions when they're evaluating the situations that we're in. So they're asking, how good or bad is this? Whose fault is it? And how will it evolve? And so once we discover how our brains are answering those questions, then we tweak the answer to those questions and that will change our emotions. So the first question, how good or bad is this? Allison discovered that her brain was answering that this was very bad. This was a really big problem because she was answering the question about how will it evolve in a way that saw this phase that her family member was going through as something that would be long lasting, something that was projected into the future, that was gonna complicate their relationship, that was gonna make everything break apart. They were not going to be able to have the kind of love and unity that she wanted in her family. So this was her appraisal. This was her story that she was telling. So we started to work on some different questions that might help her to change a little bit the way that she is answering those questions. We focused specifically on the first question, how good or bad is this? And the last question, how is it going to evolve? And trying to find a way that she could come up with new answers to those questions. So I asked her a question that we have talked about on this podcast. Think about this family member that you love. Let's imagine that they are going to die in a year. Today they get a terminal diag diagnosis and you know that they only have one more year to live. How would you view this time, this day right now? Well, that was a tough question, but she thought about it and she realized that if she knew that this family member was only going to live for one more year, she would be grateful for this day right now that she had with them. Even though it was uncomfortable, even though it wasn't ideal or amazing, even though they were in a bad mood, she would be grateful for getting to share this moment with them, even though it was a painful moment, because suddenly it became precious when she thought about it being limited. She also realized that if this person only had one more year to live, she would want to spend this time feeling compassion for them and recognizing that they were doing their best, that they're learning at their own pace, that they haven't learned all the things that she has learned about how to regulate their emotions, but that this, this person was right on track, right where they should be. She would want to allow him to see things the way that he sees them and just realize that he's human. He's dealing with painful emotions. She knows what that's like. She's dealt with a lot of painful emotions. He's dealing with loss. He's dealing with fear. He's dealing with feeling vulnerable. He's scared of things. . So this reframe helped her to just feel the different ways in which she would want to exercise a view of compassion on him for the difficult thing he was going through, and how she could understand that it was hard. So suddenly it starts to answer that first question, how good or bad is this in a little bit different way because it doesn't seem quite so threatening. It's not so much of a problem. It's a precious moment in time in which she can show love to him for what he's going through, for the difficulty that he's going through.

Another way that we worked on trying to shift her story was we talked about something that we've talked about on the podcast here where we all have emotions and thoughts, but we also have another part of our brain which can think about those emotions and think about those thoughts that can observe them. And so we compared it to the sky and the clouds. That the sky is like that part of us that can think about our thoughts and emotions. You can call it your consciousness, you can call it your wise self, you can call it your soul, whatever you want to call it. But it's that part of you that can reflect on your thoughts and feelings. And so that's the sky. And then the emotions are like clouds that pass through the sky. We had worked before on her being able to observe her emotions as something temporary and passing just like clouds in the sky. But here we worked on observing the, the emotions in her family member as some, as a type of weather that was passing through his sky. It was going to pass, it was gonna go at some point in the future. It wouldn't be permanently gray. And we talked about how it was okay for her to hold this family member in his anger and his discontent because blue skies were gonna come again at some point. The weather's always changing. And it was okay for her to let life be rich and varied in emotional experience, in herself and in other people. So this reframe kind of helped her to answer that third question differently, how will it evolve? Because instead of seeing it as something, as a prediction of things are gonna be terrible from here on out, she started to see it as just something passing, something temporary that was gonna go through and it would be gone, and it was just a moment in time. It was part of the emotional ever changing weather experience. So these are a couple of different ways that we worked on her being able to shift her own story so that she could start to generate some different emotions. And as she shifted her story about this person and started to be grateful for the time that she was having with them, even though it was unpleasant, to start to feel more compassion for the difficult emotions that they were dealing with, to start to see it as something that was temporary and going to pass that she, she started to feel more hope and more peace and more love for this person. So she started to be able to generate these emotions to be able to offer that to this family member in exchange for their difficult emotions.

But we talked about one more important element in being able to maintain her story the way that it was. Because she found that there were days when it was easier for her to do this and other days when it was harder. And we talked about how just like when we're dealing with any kind of contagious disease, whether it's a virus or a bacteria or whatever, if you're gonna have to be around somebody who's sick with a contagious disease, you need to be really careful about taking care of your own health so that your own immune system is strong enough to block out that sickness so that you can continue to take care of them. The same thing was gonna apply to her emotional health. If she wanted to be able to stay in this independent spot, to differentiate from his emotions and be able to offer a different way of seeing things, and different emotions to him, she was going to need to take care of her emotional health, take care of her emotional immune system so that she could maintain her differentiation. And so we talked about how this means taking care of your body because it's a lot harder to generate positive emotions if you are exhausted, if you are short on sleep, if you're not eating well, if you're not exercising, if you're not spending time outside, all of these different strategies that we've talked about on so many of our different podcasts that make it a whole lot easier for you to stay out of anxiety and fa and fear and negative emotion. So she would need to take care of her body as part of this nurturing her peace. But she would also, since there were days when she felt stronger and days when she felt more susceptible to his anger and blame and depression, that, you know, on days when she felt strong, it was fine for her to spend more time with him because her emotional immune system was intact. But on days when she felt more vulnerable, that she would need to be more careful about having a little bit more time apart from him, time alone by herself, when she could meditate, when she could self-coach. We talked about how it's really important to be able to talk to yourself in the third person, to use your own name and to talk to yourself with the word you and she had developed a habit that I had encouraged her to develop, which was to coach herself every day in the third person with a notebook, write to herself so that she could get this feeling of distance and different perspective on what she was going through. So she needed to always make sure that she was allowing time for these self-coaching sessions, time alone, taking care of her body, et cetera, so that she could nurture her own peace. That would help her to be able to maintain those differentiated emotions that were going to be what she had to offer in this situation. That was really the only way that she could help her family member to have different emotions, was to nurture different emotions in herself.

So just to summarize, the three takeaways were to stay in your zone, meaning stay in your zone of control. You can't directly change their feelings, but you can indirectly influence them by working on your own feelings. And you work on your own emotions by shifting your story. So stay in your zone, shift your story, so that you have the emotions that you want to offer, and then nurture your peace so that you're protecting your view of things and the emotional environment that you're creating so that you're not too susceptible to the contagion of the negative emotions that you're around, and you're able to continually offer those alternative emotions to those that you love.

So those are my suggestions for you. We're gonna have our kindness narrative now. Stay tuned. It's short, it's painless, and it's a beautiful story. And don't forget to share your own kindness narrative because it will really help you with your anxiety levels today. Thanks and see you next time.

When I had four young children under the age of eight, I found out I was pregnant with triplets. I felt overwhelmed and that I would never be able to manage everything I would have to do after the babies came. Then after I was 24 weeks along, I had to be hospitalized for premature labor. I was worried about my four children at home. My husband was able to take a lot of time off to take care of them, but also our neighbors helped with the children, and once the babies were born, my neighbors all came to my house on a rotating schedule to help me with them, even in the middle of the night for a little while until we could hire a night nanny to help. I normally like to be very self-sufficient, but in this experience where I absolutely could not do it on my own, I was overwhelmed and amazed at the kindness of other people who were willing to step in and take some of the load.