Ep. 243: Emotional Clutter: You're not feeling it- You're carrying it.

I want to start with a question that might sound simple, but I promise you it isn't.

Do you know what you're feeling right now?

Not what you're thinking. Not what's on your to-do list or what you're worried about or what needs to happen before the end of the day. What you're actually feeling. In your body. Underneath the noise.

Take a second with that.

Because for a lot of women…especially women in this season of life, the honest answer is some version of: I don't know. Or: tired. Or: fine, I guess. Or: I don't really have time to think about that.

And here's what I want you to notice about those answers.

They're not feelings.

Tired is a physical state. Fine is a non-answer. I don't know and I don't have time are deflections. Not because you're being dishonest, but because somewhere along the way, you lost the habit of actually checking in with yourself. Of actually asking the question and waiting for the real answer.

And that loss…that disconnection from your own emotional experience is exactly what we're talking about today.

Because there is a difference between feeling an emotion and carrying one.

And most midlife women are doing a lot more carrying than feeling.

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Transcript

Okay, so we're three episodes into this emotional clutter series now. This is episode three, and I want to take a quick second to remind you of all of the ground that we've covered because today's conversation builds directly on all of that. So in the first episode in this series, we defined emotional clutter. It's the accumulation of unfelt, unprocessed, unacknowledged emotions that get set aside over years of life in a season that didn't leave room for these emotions.

We named the four categories of this emotional clutter. They are suppressed emotions, borrowed emotions, unexpressed emotions, and accumulated emotional labor. This was episode 239. If you missed that one, go back and start there.

And then in episode two in our emotional clutter series, we talked about how emotional clutter shows up in your body, in your behavior, in your emotional reactions, in your relationships. We talked about the dish that was left on the counter and the disproportionate reaction that was never really about the dish. We talked about the numbing and the over-functioning, the exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. That was episode 241.

So if you missed that one, go check that one out as well. And today, we're gonna be going one layer deeper still. Because here's the question that naturally follows from everything that we've covered thus far. If emotions don't disappear when you ignore them, if they accumulate, if they show up sideways, if they live in your body and in your behavior, then what does it actually mean to feel them? What does...

processing an emotion look like and what's the difference between a woman who feels her emotions and a woman who just carries them? And that's what today is all about. And I think by the end of our conversation here today, something is going to shift in how you understand your own emotional life. So I've talked here before about a season in my life when I poured a glass of wine at the end of every single night. And I want to come back to that story a bit today.

but from a different angle than I've told it before. Because when I tell that story, I want to be really clear about something. This is not a story about sobriety. And I'm not here to tell you that wine is a problem, or that giving it up is the answer, or that what I did is what you need to do. That is not the point. The point is what I finally understood, what I was actually doing when I reached for that glass of wine every night. And what I was doing, what I

had to finally get honest about was this. I was not actually relaxing because of that glass of wine. I was avoiding. And there's a difference there. And for a very long time, I couldn't see it. So relaxing is when you have felt the stress of the day, actually felt it, moved through it, let it pass, and now you're unwinding. The pressure has released.

The exhale that you feel is real. And what I was doing was skipping the feeling part entirely and going straight to the chemical relief. I wasn't processing the stress. I wasn't sitting with the loneliness or the frustration or the quiet disappointment that had accumulated throughout the course of the day. I was covering it. I was softening it. I was making it just manageable enough that I didn't have to actually look at it or feel it.

And here's the thing about that. It worked in the short term. It absolutely worked. The edges did soften. The noise did quiet a little bit. The feelings did become more manageable. But here's the thing that I couldn't see for so long. Those feelings didn't go anywhere. They were still there the next morning, still there the next evening when I reached for the glass of wine again, and still there, accumulating layer by layer because I never

actually felt them. I had only ever managed them. I was carrying the emotions, not feeling them. And I want to tell you about the moment that I understood the difference because I think it's the clearest illustration I have of what we're talking about today. So there was a night long after I'd made the decision to stop reaching for the glass as a default when I sat down at the end of the day and just let the day be there.

all of it, the stress, the loneliness, the low-grade frustration, the tiredness that went deeper than just a physical feeling. And I didn't try to fix it or analyze it or make it mean something. I literally just let myself feel it. And it was uncomfortable, really uncomfortable in a way that I understood immediately why then I had been avoiding it.

The first thing that I was really feeling was resistance. It was this almost frantic pull towards doing something, checking my phone, getting up and folding laundry, finding literally anything to occupy my hands and my mind and my attention. As I sat there in those uncomfortable emotions, the stillness felt threatening in a way that I hadn't anticipated, like sitting in a quiet room and suddenly being able to hear a sound that you've been drowning out for months.

And then underneath that resistance, there was something else. There was sadness mostly, some loneliness, a kind of low, quiet grief that I couldn't fully name. Not for any one specific thing, but for the accumulation of small things that had never gotten their due. Conversations that hadn't gone the way that I had hoped. Versions of my days that never quite matched what I had envisioned. A tiredness.

that had been there for so long that I'd started to think it was just my personality. But I sat with it. I didn't try to fix it or understand it or make it mean something productive. I just let it be there. And then, and this is the part that surprised me the most, it started to shift. Not all at once, not in some big dramatic way, but the pressure that had been sitting in my chest started to ease.

My shoulders dropped a little, my breathing slowed, and at some point I realized that the thing I had been so afraid to feel had moved. It hadn't consumed me. It hadn't broken me. It had just been there. And then it started to pass like a cold front does with the weather. That's the thing that nobody tells you about emotions when you actually feel them.

When you let them be present, instead of managing them into the background, they actually move, they shift, they change. They don't last forever the way that you're afraid they will. They peak and they pass and on kind of on that borrowed kind of time that comes from, you're just borrowing time when you are reaching for a glass or a scroll or a bag of chips.

But the kind of relief that comes from your nervous system genuinely releasing something it was holding, that's real relief. The other kind of relief, again, I didn't know the difference, but experiencing real relief helped me see that that was just artificial and temporary relief. The night that I figured all of that out and I really experienced that real relief and that real release,

That night was one of the most clarifying experiences of my life. Again, not because it was this big dramatic thing. It was quiet and uncomfortable and private and totally unglamorous. But it was real. And I cried tears like I hadn't cried in a long time. And at first, I didn't understand that. It felt like relief, yes. And sometimes when we experience relief and we experience this relief, it does kind of come out as tears sometimes.

But what I actually realized is that the tears were because I had actually seen myself, truly saw, and understood myself for the first time in a long time. And the next morning, I felt something that I hadn't felt in a very long time. Lighter. Not because anything in my life had changed, because something inside me had changed. That's the difference between feeling

emotions and carrying them. And that's really the difference that I want to give you today. So let me define the distinction of feeling versus carrying here clearly because I think it's one of the most practically important things in this entire series. So carrying an emotion means that the emotion is present in your system, in your body, in your nervous system, in your

behavior, but it's not being consciously experienced or processed. It's being managed. It's being contained. It's being controlled. It's being worked around, suppressed, numbed, avoided. The emotion is there. You just aren't there with it. Now, feeling an emotion means that you are consciously present with what is happening inside you. You are aware of it.

You are allowing it to be there. You are not trying to fix it or change it or make it go away before it's ready. You are letting it move through you the way it was designed to in the timing that it needs. And here is the key distinction, the one I really want you to understand. Carried emotions accumulate. They accumulate. Felt emotions move.

That's it. That is the biggest piece that I can give you. When you feel an emotion, really feel it with presence and without resistance. It does what emotions were designed to do. It delivers information. It peaks. It passes. It completes its cycle. And then it's done, at least for the time being. Sometimes these feelings resurface, and then you just process them again.

But when they move through this cycle, it is true relief and release. And again, it could creep up again, but then you just feel it again. And this time it will be a little bit easier, a little bit faster, a little bit more familiar. But when you carry an emotion, when you manage it, suppress it, numb it, avoid it, it doesn't complete its cycle. It gets stuck and it adds to this backlog.

The backlog that I know we talked about a lot last week. And it keeps generating the same signal, getting louder over time until your body or your behavior or your relationships find their own way to release it. There's that disproportionate reaction. And we talked about it in the form of a dish last week. That was a backlog of carried emotions finally finding their exit. The exhaustion that the sleep doesn't fix.

That's your system working overtime to contain what hasn't been felt. It's trying to contain it and keep it all together. What about the numbness? That's what happens when caring becomes the permanent setting. Now, I want to address something directly because I know what some of you are probably thinking. You're thinking, I don't have time to feel my emotions. I have a life to run. I have kids and a husband and a job and responsibilities. And if I start feeling things,

I'm not sure I'll be able to stop. And I want to say two things to that thought. First, the fear that if you start feeling, you won't be able to stop. That fear is one of the most common things that I hear from women in this season of life especially. And I understand it completely. When you've been carrying around this backlog for years, the idea of opening the door feels terrifying.

Like if you let any of it out, it's all gonna come pouring out and you'll fall apart in a way that you can't come back from. But here's what I've learned, both from my own experience and from walking alongside women through this. That isn't how it works.

Emotions don't come flooding out like a dam that has broken. They work more like a slow drain. You don't feel everything all at once. I wish I had a more concrete way of describing it, but it's like you feel what's ready to move, and you give it permission to move, and the process is uncomfortable, yes, but it is manageable. You can manage it. And on the other side of it, you have actually more capacity. You've got room.

Not less, you have more space. You have more access to yourself, not less. And the fear of being overwhelmed by your feelings is actually the feeling itself talking. It's the backlog saying, I've been waiting a long time and your nervous system has been interpreting that waiting as danger. But here's the thing, it isn't danger. It's just an overdue tab.

Second, I want to challenge the idea that you don't have time to feel your emotions because here's the truth. You already spend enormous amounts of time and energy managing and avoiding and coping with emotions that you haven't felt. The whine, the scrolling, the busyness, the over-functioning, the tension that you carry in your shoulders, the sleep that doesn't restore you, the reactions you spend energy apologizing for, all of that.

is the cost of not feeling. Feeling your emotions is not an addition to your life. It's a replacement for the enormous, exhausting, never quite working project of avoiding them. So let's talk about what it actually looks like because I don't want to have this conversation stay all theory. Feeling an emotion is not the same as talking about it endlessly.

It's not journaling for hours or calling your best friend every time something comes up or processing every feeling out loud with your husband. It's much simpler than that, and it's much quieter. It starts with noticing, just pausing for a minute, sometimes less, and asking, what is actually happening inside me right now? Not what do I think about this situation, what do I feel about it? Ask.

Where is it in my body? Is it in my heart? Is it in my head? Is it in my shoulders? Is it in my jaw? Is it in my fists? What does it actually feel like? Does it feel sharp? Does it feel throbbing? Does it feel dull? What does it feel like? And this is where I really want to slow down for a second, because this body piece, it actually matters more than people realize. Emotions are not abstract.

They are physical. They live. They are taking residence in your body somewhere. The tightness across your chest when you're anxious, the heaviness behind your eyes when you're sad, the heat that rises in your neck when you're angry, the hollow feeling in your stomach when something has disappointed you. We are so trained to live from the neck up, to think about what we're feeling, instead of actually feeling it.

that most of us have lost the ability to locate an emotion in the body. We get the signal and we translate it immediately into a thought and we go from there, which is still just a redirect. It's just a more sophisticated one. So when I say pause and notice, I mean notice it in your body, not just label it in your head. Actually drop down into the physical experience of it and let yourself just be there for a moment.

That's the noticing. And then it moves to allowing, not trying to change it or fix it or make it make sense, just letting it be there, saying, even if only internally, this is here. I can feel this. I don't have to make it go away right now. And I want to say something about the allowing because this is where most women stall. Allowing feels passive. And.

We're not passive women. We are fixers. We are solvers. We are doers. And so the idea of sitting with something uncomfortable without doing anything about it, it goes against every instinct we have. It feels like weakness. It feels like wallowing. It feels like a waste of time when there's 17 other things that need our attention. But allowing isn't actually passive. It's one of the most active things that you can do, because it requires you to override the redirect, which is the most

automatic response your nervous system has. Sitting with something uncomfortable without flinching, without reaching for relief, without making it smaller or louder than it actually is, that takes real effort. That takes practice. And over time, it becomes the skill that can change everything. Because here's what happens when you allow the emotion and it moves on its own. It doesn't always move quickly, but it moves and you can feel it.

It's not always a clean process, but it moves. Because that is what emotions do when they're given permission to just exist, to just be. And then there's this third part. Then there's the release. And it is the part I want you to recognize when it happens, because it doesn't look the way that you think it will. Release doesn't always look like crying, though sometimes it does. It doesn't always feel like this dramatic shift or some sort of huge breakthrough.

Sometimes it's simply the moment when you notice that your shoulders have loosened some, when your jaw has unclenched. That pressure in your chest is just a little bit less than it was 10 minutes ago. And you can take a full breath when before there was just this tightness and you felt like you couldn't ever catch your breath. That is the release. That is the emotion completing its cycle. It is quiet and physical and easy to miss if you're not paying attention, which is exactly why

So many women never register that it actually happened. They sit with the discomfort and they push through it. They wait for this dramatic resolution and when it doesn't come, they just kind of conclude that this feeling your feelings thing doesn't actually work when actually it already did. They just didn't recognize it because it was so much smaller and quietly than we expect. The release is often not gonna be a flood. It can be just a quiet sigh.

It's a softening. It's the almost imperceptible easing of something that has been held onto tightly for so long. But notice when it counts. Notice when it comes out. Let it count. The whole processing, the whole process of noticing and allowing and releasing, it can take five minutes, sometimes less. It does not require a therapist or a retreat or a complete restructuring of your life. It requires a small

private regular practice of turning towards yourself instead of away. Sometimes it can take a series of days. There's no rule book. But now you know the difference between feeling and carrying and that practice of this that you will do. It is small and it's unglamorous. But if you do this consistently, this is how that backlog of these emotions and that disproportionate reaction can stop

happening. So here's the reframe that I want to offer to you. Feeling your emotions is not weakness. It is not self-indulgence either. It is not being too much or making everything about you. It is maintenance. Think about it this way. You maintain your car. You maintain your house. You maintain your body in a way where you eat and you sleep and you go to the doctor when something's wrong. You do these things not because you are weak or needy, but you do these because maintenance is what keeps

functioning things functioning. Your emotional system, it is no different. It requires regular maintenance, honest, not particularly glamorous maintenance. And when it doesn't get that maintenance, when you skip it for months or years because there isn't time or it's not convenient or you've learned to function without that, things start to break down slowly at first. But then it just piles and accumulates in backlogs. What we've been calling emotional clutter

is just deferred maintenance. And the good news about deferred maintenance is that it's never too late to start catching up. Here's what I want you to really sit with though. The cost of not doing this maintenance is not abstract. It is not a vague risk of someday feeling bad. It is showing up in your life right now, today, in concrete and specific ways. It's showing up as the exhaustion that follows you even after a full night of sleep.

as the irritability that flares over small things and leaves you ashamed of your own reactions, as the flatness, the inability to access genuine joy, genuine peace, genuine presence, even in moments that should feel amazing to you, as the distance you feel from the people you love most, not because you don't care, but because you are so occupied with managing what's underneath that there's nothing real left to bring to connection.

That is what caring costs in your body, in your relationships, in your experience of your own life. And I want you to be, I want to be honest with you about something that you have probably, I want to be honest with you about this. You have probably been paying the cost of carrying that backlog of emotions for a long time. I'm gonna guess that you've been paying it quietly and privately without anyone around you fully seeing it.

And you've probably told yourself that this is just what life looks like. This is just what this season looks like, that everyone feels like this, that you'll feel better when things slow down or things change in life. Things don't slow down. And feeling better isn't going to happen on its own. It happens when you start doing the maintenance that has been deferred this whole time. And here's the other thing that I really want you to hear. Feeling your emotions does not make you less capable. It actually makes you more capable.

The women that I have worked with who have done this work, who have moved from caring to feeling, from managing to processing, they don't become less functional. They become more present, more grounded, more able to respond instead of react, more able to show up for their people from a place of genuine capacity instead of white-knuckled endurance. Feeling is not the opposite of strength. It is what makes sustainable strength

possible. You are not built to carry all of this stuff indefinitely. Nobody is. And the fact that you've been doing it for as long as you have is not evidence that you should keep going. It's evidence of how much you have been holding and how ready you are to finally start setting some of it down. So here are three things to take with you today. Number one, there is a difference between feeling an emotion and carrying one. Carried emotions accumulate. Felt emotions can move.

That distinction, it's not small. It is the entire mechanism behind why emotional clutter builds and what it takes to clear it. Number two, the fear that you won't be able to stop if you start feeling is the backlog talking. Emotions don't flood when you let them in. They move slowly, sometimes uncomfortably, but they move. And on the other side is more capacity and more space, more access to yourself.

Not less. And number three, feeling your emotions is maintenance. It's not weakness. It is the regular, unglamorous, entirely necessary practice of turning yourself, turning towards yourself instead of looking away. You don't have to do it all perfectly. You don't have to do it all at once. You just have to start doing it. And I want to leave you with something practical this week. Just once, once between now and the next time you come back for our next conversation.

I want you to pause when something comes up that escalates in you somewhere. And actually ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? Not what am I thinking, not what do I need to do about this, what am I feeling? And just let the answer be there for a minute. Don't analyze it. Don't reach for something to make it softer or quieter or more manageable. Just feel it. That's it. That's the whole assignment.

I know it sounds too simple and I know some of you are waiting for the harder thing, the more structured thing, the thing that feels proportionate to how much you've been carrying and I understand that. When the backlog is large, a 60 second pause feels almost insulting as a solution. But here's what I want you to remember. You're not trying to clear the whole backlog this week. You are trying to stop adding to it. You are practicing the pause. You are building that muscle of turning toward.

instead of turning away. And that muscle practiced once and then again and again and again is what makes everything else in this series that we're talking about today or in the last few weeks possible.

You don't have to do any of this perfectly. You don't have to feel the right things or the right way or have a meaningful insight every time. You just have to pause. You have to ask the question. Let the answer exist. And just sit there with it for a moment before you move on. That's enough. For right now, that can be genuinely enough. It sounds small, and it is small. But it is also the beginning of everything we're going to talk about next week.

Because episode four in this series is where we put it all together. It's where we talk about what it actually looks like to begin clearing the backlog. Not perfectly, not dramatically, but in a real, sustainable, here is how you actually do this sort of way. That's next week, and I don't want you to miss it. So make sure that you have subscribed, make sure that you are following along here, and then share this episode with another woman who you know needs to hear it today.

And make sure to grab the free guide down in the show notes. It's called This Is Why Midlife Feels So Heavy, if you haven't grabbed it already. So make sure that you have grabbed that as well. And then make sure you come back for our conversation next week because we're gonna bring this all together. And so we'll talk then, friend. Have a great day.