Knowing Better Isn’t the Same as Feeling Better

Hey y’all! 

In this episode, we’re piggy backing off of last week's topic. I talk about the frustrating gap between knowing better and feeling better. 

After learning emotional fact-checking in therapy, I thought I had my anxiety figured out, until recent stressful situations completely activated my nervous system, even though I logically knew I was safe. I realized I was using my new tools to invalidate myself instead of supporting myself. 

I share what I've learned about the missing piece: your body doesn't update as fast as your mind, and emotions need validation, not just logic. 

If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right but still spiraling, this one's for you. 

Thanks for being here! 

Xx, 

Shy ♡

Transcript

0:00

Manifesting a beautiful and perfectly recorded episode. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Shy Space, where we talk about all things pertaining to mental health and manifestation. My name is Shy and I'm the host of this podcast and I am so excited to be back here with you guys today. It has been a bit of a journey to get to this episode, but having some technical difficulties sort of. I recorded this episode last week and somehow only recorded the audio of it. Even though I did everything the same way that I always do. So that was kind of a bummer because I need the video aspect of it for socials and things like that. So I just immediately deleted it. But then I thought, you know what? Maybe I would've gotten into the editing process of it and just absolutely hated it. So maybe it was a blessing in disguise.'cause that's never a good feeling when you put your energy into recording an episode and then you go back and watch it and you're like. Or you listen to it or whatever, and you're like, that was not my best work. And then you hate it and you're like, well, do I put it out still because not everything can be perfect? Or do I rerecord it because what the actual fuck is this? So yeah, who knows what was gonna happen, but we're here now. I did have to kick out my co-star London from this afternoon's recording session because another technical somewhat challenge that I've been having is just this new mic that I've been using this season or this past two seasons is very sensitive in comparison to like my old setup. And so it picks up on a lot of background noise if I'm not super careful. And London was in here when I was trying to film and I kept doing retakes and like starting over and she kept doing more things that was triggering me into an oblivion, so. I asked her to leave respectfully. She's not too far. She's just on the other side of that door in her little lair. But, uh, yeah, I'm gonna be moving soon, so hopefully when I move I'll have a more concrete set up like I did in my loss apartment where the mic is just more settled. But I appreciate you guys listening in regardless,'cause I know that sometimes the quality can be a little bit inconsistent. And it annoys me, so I know it annoys you guys. Anyways, if you are a new listener, thank you so much for being here. If you're a returning listener, thank you even more for being here. Last week we talked about something called the check the Facts Method or the art of emotional fact checking, which is something that I've been learning about and practicing in therapy during my weekly sessions to help with the anxiety that I struggle with and some of like the patterns of rumination and spiraling and all that fun stuff. That is what we talked about last week. You can go watch that episode if you're interested. It's like a six step process of checking the facts. It's a theoretical practice within therapy that is rooted in the dialectical behavioral therapy modality within therapy or DBT therapy, very commonly used across a widespread of mental health conditions and circumstances, and can also be applied in, cross-functional therapy as well, or cross modality therapy. So anyways, with that being said, I did preface my last episode by reminding y'all that I'm not a mental health professional. I do have mental health education in terms of like going to being professional, but I'm not a licensed mental health professional. This is just information that I've gathered and shared from my mental health professional who helps me every single day. I mean, every single week, I should say, but every single day by helping me every single week in our sessions. So it's just the way that I want to give back because I know that mental health care is not accessible for everyone, especially therapy. You know, a lot of therapists don't take insurance and things like that, and it can be quite expensive. So this is something that I'm just really grateful that I learned about. And with that being said, I wanted to dive deeper into that whole idea and modality and process in this week's episode because since that episode was recorded, I've had several things happen to me that have been quite stressful and have triggered me and have shed light into new layers of things that happen as I continue to grow and evolve and find myself and really just figure out how to get through things as they come up on a daily basis,'cause I think for me that's like the biggest challenge is just not really, I didn't really have a strong foundation, um, for a long time on managing my emotions and. Therefore I was in a place to constantly be, um, not a victim of my emotional reactions, but like letting them control me. So maybe in some ways that's a victim standpoint or like victim mindset, but either way, I felt that the power was never in my hands. And obviously that's just not the case. And so I've learned slowly over the years how to work through that and. I could talk about this all day long, but I think that there are layers to healing and layers to growth and therapy and things, especially when it comes to things like DBT and checking the facts. Like there's more to it. And so that's what I wanna talk about this week. And you can see the title is: knowing better isn't the same as feeling better, which is such an interesting concept because I don't know, at least for me, like I'll talk about this of course in more detail and share my own personal experiences and reflections on these things, but I just felt like once I got to a place of like healing or whatever you wanna call it, like enlightenment or like, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to reach, like that certain point of growth, I think we tend to have this expectation that it's going to feel really peaceful and that you wake up on a regular basis with a really regulated nervous system and things just aren't hard and stressful. But I just don't think that that's the case. I think that you just get better at learning how to work through it more easily and more quickly, which is a rude awakening, but we're all in it together. Let's talk about me getting tested when it comes to my skillset and my ability to check the facts emotionally.'cause like I said, I went through a lot of shit the past couple weeks that made me think about this part of it and how I feel like no one really talks about it regularly because just because you know something to be true in your mind doesn't necessarily mean that your body or your mind truly believes it. But emphasis on the body because emotions and trauma is stored in the body, especially like in the hips and areas like that. So a lot of the time you'll have a conscious response and then a somatic response, and they're not the same. Basically the root of what I'm talking about today is that I feel like that's where I'm at, is that I'm having these conscious responses that are completely different from my somatic responses. And that made me feel like the checking the facts process was failing me. But really that's not the case. I just, I've been given like a harder test. And also now it's just a different test because. Like I said, there's layers. So lately I've just been feeling like I've noticed a super large gap in between what I know logically and what I'm feeling emotionally. And obviously emotions are mental, but they're mostly physical too, right? Like if you learn how to tap into your somatic senses, you start to identify emotions as feelings and places in the body, and it helps you pass them through and, you know, work through them and kind of just not desensitize yourself to them, but like remove the association with them so heavily. But the reason that I felt like there was this gap is because lately I've just not been feeling proud of myself for when I do have that like logical response or that logical ability to catch myself in the spiral, I will just instead feel really frustrated and just kinda like shame myself. Which isn't obviously what I wanna be doing. Like that's the complete opposite of what I wanna be doing. And I was just saying to myself in these situations, like, why am I still reacting this way if I very much know better? And it's like, okay, because you do know about better, but you're having to now unlearn things from an unconscious bodily response level. So there's just so much more to it, and that's why I wanna talk about this today. I touched on this already, but I feel like there is this expectation that healing should feel very calm. I think a lot of us, me in particular, secretly believe that once we're self-aware, things should just stop hurting or being so hard. Like I said, that you will just wake up naturally feeling peaceful and that knowing these tools means that we will automatically feel regulated all the time. But that is literally so far from the truth.'Cause it is such a constant journey. And lately, like I said, I've just been realizing that growth often feels really just the complete opposite a lot of the time. Most of the time I would say it feels like really uncomfortable. Really awkward, really disorienting, chaotic, and just weird in general because not only are you shedding layers and like processing things on a really intense level, but you're also shedding people, places, opportunities, different versions of yourself, and it's just can be like a completely disorienting experience because it's so raw, like you're totally exposed. It's like you're just stripped down, literally naked in front of everybody or something, and you're completely exposed because now you're like flipping yourself upside down and having this new awakening or like stepping into this new life or new version of yourself and it's like. Oh shit. Now I'm like bad at something because you're starting over, essentially. But that's a good thing. So, I don't know. I feel like it's such an oxymoron in terms of like how we can think about it and view it, um, within our, our own journeys. But I think the big thing to take away from that is that. It is not just your mindset that's changing. Like I said, it's your whole life. When you have a mindset shift, Abraham Hicks says this all the time. It is so common that you will literally start to shed like everything in your life and your life will actually feel like it's just completely falling apart, and that the complete opposite of what you want is happening. But really it's preparing you in your life. To have these things come in to make the space for these things, to come in these opportunities, these people, these places, you know, you have to lose something for another thing. One door closes, the other opens type of thing, and it's literally so disorienting.'cause it's just like, what the fuck? Like why? Why did I lose my job? Why did I lose my boyfriend? Like,'cause they suck. You know? Like you deserve better and you're not gonna know that until the better comes along. But you just have to trust the process anyways. It's just a very hard cycle. Because again, you're starting anew, you're starting fresh, and you're very much in a vulnerable state in that regard. So I think the next phase of emotional fact checking in my opinion, is using the information and then turning inward to identify feelings in the body and have a deeper understanding of where they come up for you, why they come up for you, and how you can work through them. For me personally, I've noticed super quickly how easy it is to turn my emotional intelligence into self-criticism. I know I already mentioned this, but I wanna drill into it more because now I am doing the opposite by using the emotional fact checking to gaslight myself almost by saying things like, this isn't a big deal. Other people have it so much worse. I've already processed this. I need to get over this. Why am I reacting this way? X, Y, z. Continue. And I started to think about it and I'm like, okay, so I'm having these experiences happen. I'm checking the facts, and then I'm just feeling like absolute shit because I checked the facts and then I'm being like, well, you're fucking stupid for feeling this way. Like, this is ridiculous. And then I realized, okay, now I'm using logic to shut myself down and not allow myself to feel things instead of just like supporting myself in what I'm feeling, which is what I need. Period point blank. It's so funny how, if you're like new to an emotional intelligence journey or therapy, it's crazy how just the acknowledgement of an emotion or a struggle of some sort can literally, it like provides so much relief within the body and the mind because you've just put your attention on it and you're just acknowledging it and you're, you're just giving it the space to be. And a lot of the times, that's all it needs, which is crazy. So that's why I'm saying that, or the reason that I'm saying that is because if you're doing the emotional fact checking and you get to the point where you're like, well, I just checked myself into sanity, great. But now I've also checked myself into invalidated and suppressed emotion, and that's not what we wanna do. The emotional fact checking is meant to bring you clarity, not invalidate your experience. So you know, you're only using it to be able to see the truth of what a situation is. And you're not using it to set the standard for how you should respond and what type of emotional response you should be expecting or having.'cause there is no right or wrong there, and there's just a very important difference and fine line that you have to walk between grounding yourself and gaslighting yourself. And I think that ability is something that's almost like a muscle or a skill that you have to learn over time. And the more that you practice it, the better that you get and the easier it becomes. Speaking from experience. So I'm still working on it clearly, but if you're struggling, just know that the more repetition, the better. It's just like working out. Training something. Repetition is what, what's gonna get you there. Let's talk about knowing the facts, but feeling the feelings anyways. I know I've been teasing it up a little bit, but recently I went through a few stressful situations that on paper were not catastrophic by any means. Nothing was technically wrong from the perspective of like my life being at risk, like I had information, I had perspective, I had proof that I was safe. There was stress coming from the situation, but like I knew that I was gonna be okay again, like my life wasn't in danger and I still had the craziest, just like most, I mean, I don't wanna say irrational'cause I don't wanna invalidate myself, but I just had the craziest response to it. So much so to the point that my body just completely went into fight or flight mode. My parasympathetic nervous system was completely activated, overly activated, and I just had a crazy reaction. So much so that I literally made myself sick, like I was sick from it. And it's just crazy'cause like when your body goes into fight or flight, digestion is something that it impacts. Like it basically empties the stomach in preparation for like going to fucking battle. And I was having this response over something that is, you know, I felt like I was going to battle mentally, but like it wasn't that serious, so that was really tough for me because the whole reaction was just so blown out of proportion. And it was really hard for me to accept that I had that kind of reaction and even just understand why,'cause what the fuck? Um, and obviously I talked to my therapist about it and I have answers and I have understanding, and if you have those types of responses, it's gonna be different for everyone. I, yeah, it's just a frustrating experience to have because there's such a disconnect and it makes me personally feel so ashamed because like I'm saying, I knew better, but I didn't feel better and I had a really hard time getting myself to feel better because when I was trying to do like the check the facts thing, I just ended up doing what I'm talking about right now and telling you not to do, which is invalidating myself, gaslighting myself, making myself feel worse, and making myself sick, like shit. I really stress myself out and it's just so disappointing'cause I, I really feel like I, I just know better. And like, I, it's been a few weeks now and I'm still like, ugh, why did I let myself get that worked up? You know? Like, I need to take better care of myself. Like I need to have a better. I don't know, like a better emergency system when things happen. I'm not really sure, but it was just frustrating for me to have that experience, feel the feelings and the impact from it, talk to people about it and you know, feel that shame. But the reason that I knew better and didn't feel better is because your body doesn't update as fast as your mind. So that's exactly what was happening in my case, is my body was not caught up to what my mind had been able to process on a faster basis. And once I realized this and I talked to my therapist about it, it really clicked for me that the emotional fact checking works for the mind. But again, the emotions live and stay stored in the body. And the body doesn't respond to logic on command. So when you get triggered into a situation that activates your parasympathetic nervous system potentially, and you go into fight or flight like myself, or maybe you have a different response, you know, there's the freeze response. I think there's even another one called like fawn or something. But anyways, there's lots of different ways that people respond to stressors and traumatic experiences and or triggers in life. So this can take many shapes and sizes, but it's always going to take the same or have the same foundation in terms of emotions being stored in the body and being able to actually have misalignment between what the mind knows and the body knows. So in my case. My nervous system was responding to past memories, past experiences, past stress, past outcomes, or you know, feared outcomes. All sorts of things, old patterns, familiar fear that I've carried throughout my life. Everything but the present moment. I was mentally in the present moment. I was physically not, and obviously I was spiraling. Obviously I was ruminating and like as much as I thought I was in the present moment, I wasn't. And there's a reason that my body was having that response. Obviously there is a possibility that I could have recalibrated and gotten myself back down to a regulated state more quickly if I had had this awareness that I do now about, just the approach that I was taking to get myself out of the spiral because I was literally doing the exact opposite of what somebody would need in that situation. Like I said, invalidating, just making the whole situation worse. But I do wanna say something that is important if you have been through something like this before or you're going through it now, this does not mean regression by any means. It means processing and integrating, and we don't talk enough either, in my opinion, about integration, not between technical systems, but between mind and body and allowing your body to catch up to the mind and process things that you go through, things that you learn, and just really slowing down and allowing space for that to happen. That is something that I found to be very important as I live through and process trauma as well as learn things in therapy because it's a lot to learn things in therapy and to process emotions and to unpack things on a weekly basis. It takes a lot of energy out of me. It takes a lot of thought and analytical responses and all of those sorts of things that can be very draining. And I always find that if I don't slow down and give myself time to just like rest and process life and hold space for whatever needs to, to come up and not just like have a schedule that is filled to the brim. So I can't have a second to feel anything or think anything. That's when I do the best because when I do have a schedule that's filled with the brim and I don't have time to think anything or feel anything, then all the things that I'm not thinking or feeling start to bubble up because I'm not thinking or feeling them and they really wanna be thinked and felt, and then they start to like create this really uncomfortable feeling in my body that ends up becoming a problem. And that's how people get sick too. Now, I think the missing step here that no one talks about really is, first of all, like I said, the fact that emotional fact checking is only step one and only works on the mind and is really only half of the equation if we're being realistic here. Because the part that we don't talk about enough is the validation piece. So obviously we understand that when we're checking the facts, we're looking for clarity, we're gonna get that clarity. It doesn't mean that we're gonna be aligned with the clarity. It doesn't mean that we're gonna feel good as a result of the clarity, and it certainly doesn't mean that the clarity is not gonna make us feel invalidated as fuck. That is very possible, especially if you're having a spiral where you're fully convinced that something is true and then you do the emotional fact checking process and you realize it's not true, and then you just beat yourself down. For even thinking that way, and I can't think of a worse way to try to help yourself. So when I say validation, what I really mean is just letting the feeling exist without arguing with it. That's what I meant when I said earlier, how powerful it is to just acknowledge an emotion or a feeling or a response of any sort when they come up, even if they're. Uncomfortable, unwanted, or extremely adverse. You still want to let it exist and acknowledge it and give it space. In yoga the past couple weeks, my, one of my favorite teachers, her name is Taylor. She has been reading a poem called The Guest House. It's a poem by Rumi, and this just came to mind, so I'm gonna read it for you guys because it's really, really cool. And it applies exactly to what I'm talking about right now. So it says this, being human is a guest house every morning, a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness. Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all, even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house, empty of its furniture, still treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame. The malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whatever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. I truly, truly resonate with that so much, and I think that is such a powerful little poem that reminds you to not identify with your emotions and just let them pass through. They are here to educate you, teach you, help you evolve, shape you. And they're not meant to be your identity or your sense of self-worth or anything of the like. They are simply guests. Treat them as such and ask the ones that are not so pleasant to leave sooner. Respectfully. So I think the other thing too would be not rushing it out the door'cause like I just said, you might wanna ask the tough feelings to rush out quicker. I think it's okay to not allow yourself to ruminate, but it's also not okay to rush it out the door, because you can't regulate something that you're still holding judgment towards. And you also can't calm a nervous system that doesn't feel heard. So the validation piece is really important because it doesn't mean that you're necessarily agreeing with the fear or whatever the unwanted emotion is. It just means that you're acknowledging that there's something inside of you that's asking for safety and asking for acknowledgement and attention for some reason. And you're gonna consciously decide to honor that and honor yourself in whatever it is that it needs, so that you can process it and move through it. Knowing better also can feel a lot worse at first. I think that in my experience personally, knowing better can really just make things a lot harder. Self-awareness can be really challenging. It can be really difficult to have relationships with people that you once did when you kind of change in terms of your mindset. Because now you're super aware. You can notice patterns in people. You can notice patterns in yourself, when you're interacting with certain people. And then you can also start to see, yourself, get pulled back into old versions of yourself when you're tempted or triggered by past experiences or whatever it may be. And then you'll start to have a really, true awareness of your own urges, your desire to react, and more likely than not, it will be really easy not to react, but you'll still have that awareness of being like, I want to have this response and that kind of goes back to the checking the facts things too, where it can be really easy to invalidate yourself in that moment and feel like, oh, I'm not growing'cause I still wanna do it. Why do I still wanna do it? But that's not the case. That restraint can feel really uncomfortable because growth no longer becomes dramatic. It's just very subtle and very quiet. And then it just starts to become internal. Because I feel like really, when you get to that point where you stop choosing patterns, behaviors, people, reactions, whatever that don't serve you, you're constantly choosing to not abandon yourself even when it would be easier to abandon yourself. And this is something that I've been really proud of myself lately. Again, same thing, like I've been having the urge to fall back into old unhealthy patterns with a certain part of my life it's been really hard. It's very tempting and I have felt such strong urges to do that, and I just literally have been like, nope. And very consciously, I'm aware of it and I'm like, Nope, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna abandon myself. Like I'm not gonna, you know, I'm just not going to. But it's so much easier said than done, and I wish that wasn't the case. But again, the awareness is what we need and what we're looking for. So I'll take it. Now I do wanna say that feelings are not instructions, and I think that this is a call out for myself specifically, but hopefully it'll help one of y'all too, because one of the biggest shifts for me recently has been realizing that just because you have a feeling doesn't mean it needs to turn into an action. Just like that feeling of having the desire to be pulled back into an old habitual state that you don't want to be in. You can feel it, you can process it, and it doesn't need to be motion forward. Also remembering that just because something comes up and it feels super urgent, doesn't mean that it is. That's a big one too for me. And also just because an emotion is loud doesn't mean it's right, like your anxiety lies to you all the time, so you do need to be checking the facts and then validating and reassessing and doing all those things. For me personally, emotional fact checking has really helped me decide what I should put my energy into in terms of like, is this something I need to worry about? Is this something I should be spending my time on? Those types of things. But then the emotional validation piece helps me process and feel confident moving forward and making decisions and all of those things. So I've learned that I don't always have to do something just because I feel something, which has again been very difficult. Now what I'm practicing instead is naming the emotion or whatever it is without debating it, asking myself what the feeling is trying to protect me from, and then also moving my body before I make meaning of anything or like really even make a decision on anything. Because that anxiety, again, for me gets stored in the body. And I find that like if I just move and go for like a 20 minute walk or something, a lot of the time I can process. And just like give myself time to think about responding or what I wanna, like, how I want to handle a situation and just allow myself to regulate, not suppress, but just regulate. Like, take a minute because I'm very hotheaded. So for me, again, this is what I need, but not everybody's the same. It's just like I don't need to act on everything so aggressively. And then also I feel like this allows you to let discomfort pass without assigning a story. So again, just like. Letting it move through so that it doesn't bog down your day and take up more space in your mind than it should. Last thing I wanna say is that growth looks like a response, not absence. Healing is not about the absence of anxiety, anger, or grief. It's the absence of self abandonment. It's responding instead of reacting, and it's trusting that you can feel something without letting it run your life. Knowing better does not mean feeling better right away. It means that you don't let the feeling make the choice for you. So if you're in a phase where you're, you feel like you're doing all the right things and you're trying so hard, and you're still feeling so uncomfortable, just know this. You're not on the wrong path. You are exactly where you're meant to be. You're integrating, you're processing. Your body is catching up to your growth, and that takes time. So don't forget. Here's the reminder that I'm holding onto that I'll leave y'all with: I can know the truth and still honor my feelings. Both can exist without canceling each other out. That is not a weakness. That is emotional maturity. And let's be real. That's what true unfiltered healing looks like, that wasn't posted on TikTok. That's all I have for y'all today. I love you guys so much. I hope that this episode was helpful. Let me know if there's anything else you wanna see in the future specifically. But other than that, I hope you guys enjoy this. Have a great rest of your day, night, whatever it is, and I hope to see you in my next episode. Bye.