How Your Negative Emotions Help You with Yvonne Caputo

Are you tired of feeling like your negative emotions are the enemy? Society often tells us to suppress or "fix" them, but what if these feelings could actually be our greatest allies on the path to personal growth and deeper connections?

In this episode, I sit down with Yvonne Caputo, a seasoned psychotherapist and author, to explore the hidden power of negative emotions. Yvonne challenges conventional wisdom and invites us to embrace these emotions as internal stop signs, guiding us towards greater self-awareness and ultimately, a more balanced life.

In this insightful conversation, Yvonne highlights the profound connection between our emotions and our bodies and how negative emotions can serve as internal stop signs. We delve into the societal pressure to suppress negative emotions and its detrimental impact on our well-being and the importance of creating a safe space to express and explore our feelings.  This episode is brimming with valuable takeaways to help you reframe your relationship with negative emotions, develop a deeper understanding of your emotional triggers and responses and learn practical tools for navigating difficult emotions and creating a more balanced life.

In this Episode:

• What is the profound connection between our emotions and our bodies, emphasizing the importance of recognizing and naming our feelings.
• How negative emotions can serve as internal stop signs, prompting us to pause, reflect, and make choices aligned with our values
• Understanding the concept of "multigenerational trauma" and how past experiences can shape our present emotional responses
• What are the practical techniques for processing and healing from difficult emotions, including inner child work and visualization.

Connect with Yvonne: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yvonne-caputo-1449137/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/xcskiyvonne

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Check out the podcast website

Transcript

Katie Rossler: Welcome back to the podcast! Do you know that your negative emotions can actually help you? There are telltale signs to things you need to be paying attention to. Often, we think negative emotions are things we need to fix or remove. Yvonne Caputo has agreed to talk to us about how we can use our negative emotions to help us.

Welcome to the Balance Code Podcast, a place for high achievers to step outside the hamster wheel of day-to-day life and start learning tools for more balance.

I'm your host, Katie Russler, and I will be guiding you on this journey of discovering your balance code.

Yvonne, thank you so much for talking with us. I'm really looking forward to the stories you have to share and the ideas you have because I think in today's world we're taught to fix negative emotions. We're told not to feel them, to eat them away, or drink them away, whatever it might be. You're really coming at it from a new angle, saying that you actually need these emotions. Don't make them go away, you need them!

First, share with us a little bit about yourself, and then let's dive into this topic.

Yvonne Caputo: Okay, I am what I call deliciously semi-retired. I still practice psychotherapy on a very small scale. I'm a former teacher, a therapist, and I was a business consultant. I've done a lot of different things, and now I can say I'm the author of two books.

Katie Rossler: Congratulations!

Yvonne Caputo:  Thank you, that's exciting!

Katie Rossler: Multi-passionate woman, right? Like I'm gonna be here, I'm gonna do a little this, I'm gonna do a little that. I love that.

Yvonne Caputo:Well, my path has always been... I've been led somewhere, and that was a new career, and then I was led somewhere else, and that was a new career. When I married the man of my life, I moved to southeastern Pennsylvania and couldn't find a teaching position. So, thank God I had a second master's degree in clinical site. I ended up doing employee assistance work as both a counselor and a trainer. Then, a CEO of one of the organizations I worked with said, "Yvonne, would you come and run our human resource department in a retirement community?"

So, I've had this, I think, lucky path of having careers that I really love.

Katie Rossler: That's so cool, and it's cool how it all just sort of appeared from whomever or whatever, right? It was always the next step, the next stepping stone. That's really cool.

Well, let's get into the topic for today. So, how’s your viewpoint about negative emotions.

Yvonne Caputo:  When I do training on stress, I ask people to close their eyes, think of a very stressful situation, and raise their hand when they're there so I know. Then, I have them scan their body. Where do they feel it? The answers will be: in my chest, in my head, my jaw is tight, my stomach. That reminds me to say things like, "I can't stomach this," "It's too much to shoulder," or "My heart isn't in it."

One of the things I believe about emotions is that they reside in our body. The more attuned we are with our body, the more likely we are to recognize what that emotion is. The next step in this process is to name the emotion: anger, frustration, anxiety, joy. When it comes to negative emotions, I've told people and my clients as well that those are internal stop signs.

So, Katie, play along with meYou are in your car and you're driving. What do you do when you get to a stop sign?

Katie Rossler: I stop.

Yvonne Caputo: And what's the reason you do that?

Katie Rossler:  What's the reason I do that? Because, one, it's the law. Two, I want to make sure I don't get hit, so I'm like checking around, making sure it's safe for me to go.

Yvonne Caputo: All right. So, internal stop signs are meant for you to do the very same thing. The most important thing is, once you name that negative emotion (and, by the way, when you do that you're connecting with the prefrontal cortex in your brain, which is the thinking and reasoning part), then say, "Okay, to proceed safely, what am I angry about, and what do I do with that anger so that I can live according to my values?"

My take on negative emotions is that they are our best friends. They are there to guide us through the world, but they can't guide us if we don't recognize and name them. That's how I see it. So, if I'm angry, what am I angry about? Is it something that's a big deal, is it illegal, is it something to die on, or is it something that's a little niggly and it and it just doesn't... it doesn't mean that I need to do anything with it except recognize it, right? So, that's kind of the way that I view it and the way I teach it.

Katie Rossler : I like that you... I mean, you give us an analogy we can picture, right? Like it's the stop sign, and you're looking around. Our emotions are always speaking to us, and if we don't have the awareness then that's when they get the best of us. But when we have the awareness and when we name it, then we start to get to the 'what is the trigger.' Is this real, like you said? Is this it, like the line I'm putting in the sand, or am I just annoyed?

I value the fact that you're saying, 'Hey, typically, especially anger, has so many other emotions attached to it.' Then, you stop to pay attention to what those are

Yvonne Caputo: Right? When you were talking in the beginning, if we bury them, if we don't recognize them, if we avoid them, we're likely to go through that stop sign, get hit, and wonder what in the world went wrong. What went wrong is that when we got to the stop sign, we didn't look both ways, we just went right straight through.

So, here is this internal mechanism that I believe we were given as human beings to keep us safe.

Katie Rossler: Definitely. 

Yvonne Caputo: If I think about this, if I'm out on my street and I noticed that an 18-wheeler is careening down the road, I'm going to get triggered. And that's a good thing. That trigger is, 'What am I going to do to avoid what could happen?' All right, so the triggers which produce fight, flight, freeze, or play dead have been given to humans for all of the centuries and eons that we have been walking this earth to give us a way to be safe.

But I don't know what it was like for you, but growing up as a female I wasn't allowed to be angry. If I cried, and I was ultra-sensitive, I was told to go to my room until I could get myself together. There was no, 'What's going on, Yvonne? What's happening? What are you feeling and why are you feeling it? And let's talk through how you can handle it.' There was none of that. I just knew it.

Katie Rossler: But I think that's a generational issue that many parents are trying to break for their kids now, whether... and, you know, whatever gender your child is. Because you're exactly right, generations before us were not comfortable with negative emotions. You know, and sometimes not even comfortable with happy emotions. Let's be honest. There are some who are like, 'I need you to tone down your joy, it's too much. You're celebrating too much.'

So, it is a generational issue that you're saying, like, 'Hey, no, we have to shift this.' So what if somebody's listening grew up in a home where emotions weren't safe, stable, allowed? How do you help them to go, 'Okay, no, actually your emotions are safe. Maybe other people's weren't growing up, but your emotions are safe.' How do you help them get reconnected?

Yvonne Caputo: Well, first of all, always ask, 'Name it.' And sometimes my clients can't name it, so I have a chart with a list of all the emotions. So I'll ask them to go down and pick out the one or pick out the ones that would be the ones that they're feeling, and to say them out loud. And then we do what we just did, all right? So, 'What's the reason you're feeling that?' 'Okay, what's it telling you?' 'What's it telling you to do?'

Katie Rossler:  But giving a voice to it

Yvonne Caputo: ... just giving a voice to it. The interesting part, because I'm so interested in neurobiology, is that there are studies which show us that the minute that we voice the negative emotion - anger, frustration, hopelessness, grief - a neurotransmitter is released in the brain that is anti-pain and anti-negative feeling. So we are literally... we are literally giving ourselves a shot of what I call a good neurotransmitter.

Yes, ...a good brain chemical. Um, and this is something that has recently been discovered. The story behind, at least the research I've read, is they had interns in MRI machines, and they asked the interns to think about a very, very stressful day. And then they said to the interns while they're in the tube, "Don't tell us what the experience was, name the feelings that were associated with it." When they did, they watched the brain light up in certain areas that let them know that these neurotransmitters were being produced.

So, the... the real... the sheer naming of it is a good brain thing to do.

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Yvonne Caputo:  And, going back to something you said originally, I lost a brother in 1978. He was 26 years old. Perhaps 20 years later, the rest of the family was on a great big houseboat in the middle of this gorgeous lake. And we would pull up to the shore, tie off, and there were woods all around. Mom and I were walking in the woods, and she's looking at the leaves, and there's the crunch under her feet and the blue sky, and she teared up and said, "Mark, my brother, would have loved this."

Out of her mouth next came, "Oh, shut up, Teddy. Teddy, you should be over this by now."

Oh, my mother was Greatest Generation, all right. The generation that didn't do those kinds of things. And I said to her, I said, "No, Mom, you don't ever lose a child and get over it. And it's wrong. It's a myth for us to think that that's what we're supposed to do." But that's what she had been taught.

Katie Rossler: Yeah, and that... giving her permission in that moment to continue to feel it, even if it just planted a seed, I think it's quite powerful. And it's exactly what we have to do for ourselves, for those of us who really struggled to be comfortable with negative emotion. Like, no, you get to feel this. And I think grief is a great example. The listeners who are regular listeners know that my book is on grief, my work is in grief, often. And that's it exactly, is that grief has such a negative connotation and a time limit to it, right? Like, "Oh, you're grieving, and this... you should be over it by now." And none of those are true.

But it's exactly that... is to name it. I... 

Yvonne Caputo: I was very close to this brother. And recently I was doing something, listening to relaxing music while I was doing stretching after my exercise, and a particular song came on that was very tied to my brother, and I... and I just started to weep. Now, what I knew was that my tears were normal. What I knew was that I was having a reaction to the music. What I knew was there was nothing wrong with me.

Another example of this is that I interviewed my father for my first book. It's called "Flying with Dad." And we got to the part where he started to tell me what his nightmare was when he came home from the war. And his B-24 was going down, he couldn't get up, there was a passageway he was having to pull himself through, and it was lined with stainless steel, and he couldn't get purchase, he couldn't pull himself through. That nightmare lasted three years. He'd own channels in the mattress. It went away finally. But when Dad told me about it, I said, "You know, your nightmares are normal."

He said, "What do you mean?"

And I... I explained it to him how the brain latches on to the horrific things that he witnessed during World War II, and that what his brain was trying to do was to try to work through that trauma via the nightmare. But what he didn't know was it was normal. He came home and he walked around town and he saw all of these other men who had been soldiers. They seem to be okay. Though he said, "There's something wrong with me."

So we talked about grief, we talked about trauma. And one of the most beautiful things in my life was listening to my dad and listening to his shoulders drop, to find out 60 years after the fact that what he was processing was a normal part of what any of us would have experienced had we witnessed the same thing. Again, Greatest Generation, they didn't have that vocabulary, they didn't have that understanding. And so they carried... they carried this, 'There's something wrong with me,' their whole lives when they were feeling and experiencing a normal part of what any of us would have experienced had we witnessed the same thing.

Katie Rossler: Right. You know, living in Germany, um, and in Munich in particular, it's interesting to watch the generational issues with emotions here. And, you know, perspective-taking, right? There's always... well, the mindset of like, "Well, nobody died, so I should be able to deal with this or suck this up," because there is that mentality of the losses that have happened here. And you don't... like, "Why can't you deal with this? This is nothing compared to what I've gone through." Like there's always sort of this like... "Tough it up, tough it up, tough it up." And there's this calloused exterior to many here because of that... like, trauma response that's like generationally passed on. We got the epigenetics going on. I'm just like... "Hold it in, hold it in, hold it in."

But there's a generation that's like, "No, we gotta let it out," because burnout happens... it's like all these things are affecting us.

And I do think the pandemic was a time of people having to sit with feelings and thoughts and these negative emotions and not knowing they are normal, they're okay, and they can be safe. Name it, like what you're teaching us now is exactly what I wish more people had been listening to back then, right, just a few years ago, to go, "Ah, I just need to name what this is. I'm scared, I'm anxious, I'm angry," right? Like, whatever it might be.

And then, like you said, the next thing is like, "About what? And what is it... what is it telling you to do?" And, like, walking through those steps I think is so powerful. So I love that you kind of gave the, like, "Okay, what's next? What's next? What's next?" But if you're listening, you know, recognize the generational piece to this that has... has kind of made negative emotions not normal, not... not good. "There must be something wrong with you if you're a very angry person."

I worked with a client today, and we were talking about her... her anxiety and then her son's anxiety. And I said, "We know anxiety is a genetic trait." Well, I think it's something else, like she really wanted to remove it from that. And I said it can be both, right? Nature and nurture, it can be both.

But it's just this piece of, like, understanding that we will never be able to solely fathom that some of the negative emotions that... and how we respond is generationally passed down to us. It's just so there that it's become normal, like... we all... we just don't talk about it. Secrets, things like this, right?

So, "Just swallow up your emotions, implode rather than explode." It really becomes, in its own way, the biggest detriment of families to not be able to have a space to show those emotions.

And even relationships. So, go ahead.

Yvonne Caputo:  That generational thing, too. I'm a stepmother. We were all gathered in the living room, and we were looking through one of my husband's photo albums. And it was of his mother's wedding day. And we're flipping through the pictures and having a great time. And Caitlin, who was probably eight at the time, was standing at the top of the stairs. The tears were streaming down her face. And I went up and I said, "What's the matter?" Took her into her bedroom, sat down, put my arms around her, said, "What's the matter?"She said, "My grandmother died before I was born. I'll never get to know her." And I said, "You're really sad, aren't you?" And she said, "Yes."

I said, "It's okay to be sad. This is something that you missed. You aren't going to get to... to know this woman that you call your grandmother. And that's a sad thing." So you're right about... it can even go down to our young ones in terms of... here's a grandmother she never knew. Yep, generational. Here she is, as a little eight-year-old. So it can go in that way as well. Her just thinking about... "My grandmother... she was never going to see me or touch me or hold me," right? Right. And she was sad about it. 

Katie Rossler: And how beautiful that you saw her crying there, because had nobody seen her crying there, it would be this, like, "I'll just hold this in, this is mine, I'm not gonna show this, I'm not gonna let them see that I'm crying," kind of thing, right? Like, it's sort of... if nobody sees it in that younger generation, sometimes they don't say it, they don't talk about it, because I think it's... you know... "Oh, like I shouldn't cry about this, I never met her, I don't know... I don't know her," kind of thing.

But it's like, no, you... you normalized it for her. So I think that's beautiful. And I'm sure listeners are thinking about their own stories like that, where it's like, "Wow, I was emotional and wasn't supported," or maybe were supported, right? And you're seeing the value in it. So it's almost like us having to parent ourselves, right? And go, "Feel this."

Yvonne Caputo: And when you bring up... one of the things that I've done with clients is, if they're talking about something that's really, really stressful, really, really deep, um, and a memory from childhood, whatever... whatever the feeling that's associated with it, I'll have them close their eyes and I'll ask them to go back in time and to see if they can recall and picture when that feeling originated. How old were they? What were they doing? And when they're in, now, and they're ready, I'll ask them to tell me about it. And they will, you know, they can remember an exact experience where they took on what you and I would call an unhealthy way of dealing with one of the things that happened to them.

So then I'll ask them to close their eyes and to go back. And when they can really visualize, to hold up their hands or nod that they're there. I will say, "Now, what I want you to do is keep the little girl in your vision, and you, the person that you are, your age, I want you to be there with her. And when you can see those two people together, I want the big you to tell the little you what the little you needed to hear."

And so many times, uh, folks will then respond and tell me that they said exactly the right thing, you know, that they... that they bent over and they scooped up this little one of them and just held them, you know.

So, giving... giving people the idea that even... even though you may not have gotten it in childhood, you, as the person now, can take care of that little child by doing what you just did.

Katie Rossler: Definitely. That's the power of visualization that I think is underused. But when we visualize, our brain doesn't always know the difference between the reality and that... the vision can create the healing. So I love that you shared that technique. I use that one too, and I love it, because it just really is quite powerful and... and emotional... emotional as the one watching it, because you can see it start to shift, and you're like, "Whoa, it's quite powerful to witness." And for the person doing it. And so I... I, um... yeah, I stand by that tool as well. I think that's a really powerful one. Um...

Yvonne, you've shared some amazing insights, some really great tools, some good questions for us to ask ourselves. And I really hope that the listeners will go back and listen to the beginning and write those down because they really were quite powerful.

If someone wants to connect with you after this episode and ask you more questions, where can they find you?

Yvonne Caputo: They can find me via email, and it's fairly simple. It's: YvonneAuthor4 (all lowercase), the number 4@gmail.com. Um, they can also find me on LinkedIn, um, if they want to connect that way. Um, if they Google "Yvonne Caputo" and "Ingenium Books," they will find the website where my books are listed. But probably the easiest way to connect with me is the email: YvonneAuthor4@gmail.com.

Katie Rossler: All right, I will make sure all of those links and the email are in the show notes, because I have a feeling you're gonna have some questions after this episode, go, "Okay, well how do we deal with this? Or what about this?" And... and use her as a resource and a tool in going deeper as you explore how your negative emotions really can help you, how they can be those stop signs to support you in being safer with the emotions and reactions that you have.

So, Yvonne, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here and and just sharing with us. It really has meant a lot.

Yvonne Caputo:  Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity.

Katie Rossler: And, dear listener, here's to finding our balance code.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Take a moment to leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast platform. That helps other listeners just like you to find this podcast, too. Want to connect and learn how we can work together? Check out the links in the show notes below. Discovering your balance code doesn't have to be a one-person journey. You can have a team, and I'd love to support you. So here's to finding our balance code.