Relaxing or Avoiding?

Ever been in a situation where you needed to take your own advice? That happened to me recently and I wanted to share.

See, I had something come about that I really wanted to ignore. It brought up all sorts of emotions that I didn’t want to feel. Fear, Sadness, Shame, Guilt, Anxiety - they all came knocking at my door and I preferred to keep them locked out. And a few years back I would have.

Now everyone has their own way of circumventing their feelings and the tricky part is that some of them even look positive, productive or relaxing. Exercise? Working extra hours to achieve a goal? Watching television or scrolling social media to wind down after a busy day? On the surface these appear to be good coping mechanisms, and in many situations they are. However, all too frequently what we’re doing is sneakily avoiding feeling our feelings.

So how the heck do you know when you’re relaxing vs when you’re avoiding? The key is to identify why you’re doing the behavior. Is it intentional or are you trying to sidestep a feeling? After you’ve engaged in the behavior do you feel relaxed, refreshed or satisfied? With intentional relaxing you’ve planned ahead of time what you’re going to do. It’s a choice you’ve made vs something that just sort of happened.

I’ll give an example: All week long you’ve looked forward to relaxing over the weekend by watching the new season of your favorite show. You set aside the time, you’re excited to do it and you feel happy afterwards. This is a different situation than coming home from a bad day, losing track of time and staying up half the night watching Netflix. The result of which leaves you tired and agitated the next day. The activity is the same, but the outcome is very different.

Getting back to my recent event. In years past I would have completely shoved my feelings down (which we learned in this blog is a terrible idea) and replaced them with action. My go to avoidance is usually busyness so to anyone not paying close attention it looks like I’ve accomplished a heck of a lot of stuff. And in fact I would have, but I would have also been left with tight muscles, fatigue and anxiousness.

Instead, I took my own advice and decided to actually feel my feelings. In doing so I gained clarity as to what was going on and why I was feeling that way. This insight would have been missed if I was off food shopping or organizing the shoe closet.

Feeling our feelings can be hard. But anyone who tells you that you can be happy all of the time is selling you a fairy tale.

Speaking of which, in honor of National Tell a Fairy Tale Day I made this mini-movie about the importance of feeling our feelings. Please enjoy.

If you need help identifying your feelings, so that you can feel them, call me. I can help.