Ep #74: What Grief Taught Me About Feeling My Feelings - Dedicated to Archie ❤️

In this episode, I'm sharing something a little different and a lot more personal. Last week, my family received the heartbreaking news that one of our beloved dogs, Archie, was very unwell and that we would need to make the impossible decision to let him go. As I navigate the grief of losing him, I've found myself reflecting deeply on what it means to truly feel our feelings rather than avoid them, suppress them, or try to think our way out of them.

This conversation isn't just about grief. It's about the emotions we all experience but often struggle to make space for. The anxiety, sadness, disappointment, fear, rejection, and heartbreak that we so often push aside because they're uncomfortable. Through my own experience over the past week, I'm sharing why feeling our emotions is one of the most important skills we can develop, and a simple process you can use to start doing exactly that.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The profound lesson grief has reminded me about emotional processing and healing
• Why suppressing emotions doesn't make them disappear and what actually happens when we avoid them
• The powerful river and waterfall analogy that's helped me navigate difficult feelings
• A simple step-by-step process for identifying, feeling, and releasing emotions in a healthy way
• Why allowing yourself to feel is often the fastest path back to feeling grounded, calm, and present

🎧 Tune in now! And if this episode resonates, send me a DM on Instagram — I’d love to hear your biggest takeaway.

MIMI SOCIAL MEDIA: Come say hi 👋 (or DM me your biggest takeaway) on Instagram HERE!

Transcript

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You are listening to the Secure Love Club podcast. I'm your host, Mimi Watt Hey friends, welcome back to the club. I want to just preface in advance that my energy today is quite low, and as you can probably tell from the title of this episode, I'm moving through some heavy emotion right now. And to be honest, the last thing I felt like doing today was sitting down to record a podcast. However, since I started this podcast, I made a pact with myself that if I was gonna do this, I was gonna do it properly, and I wasn't gonna miss a single week, because I want this to be a space that you can rely on and depend on, and know that every Tuesday when you open up the podcast app, you'll see a podcast from me there. And whether you choose to tune into every episode or just the ones that feel applicable to you, I wanna say thank you for tuning in and for being a part of this community. And I do take my role in this relationship seriously, and I, I thought, you know, sometimes the best thing to do when we are navigating something difficult is to pay forward our experience and what we're learning from it, because you never know who it might help. So even if you're in a place in your life right now where you're not going through grief Maybe you'll still take something from this, or maybe you won't and you don't wanna listen to this right now, and that's absolutely fine. You can just tune into another episode or switch podcasts for today. But I guess know that this episode is here if you ever feel like you wanna come back to it at a different time in your life. I don't know how much I have to give to this episode today, so I'm just gonna keep talking and I'm gonna give what I can, and we're gonna roll with it. For context, last week we as a family experienced, or received, I should say, some pretty difficult news, and that is that one of our dogs, we had two beautiful dogs, Ottie and Archie. You've probably seen Ottie on my Instagram social media quite a lot. He and I have a really special bond. But Archie is the other dog that maybe you haven't seen me post so much. Archie was the more quiet one. He was my mom's little shadow, was just stuck to her hip all the time. And poor Archie got sick. He had something called Cushing's disease, which apparently can be quite common in dogs, and it affects their cortisol levels and their hunger levels and things like that. And we diagnosed him with that a few months ago, and we were giving him medication to treat it. But then last week on Monday, so a week ago from when I'm recording this, I noticed that he was looking worse and he just really wasn't himself. And he was lying around a lot, looking really flat and sad, and he was vomiting, and he even collapsed when he was trying to walk up the front steps. And so my mom took him to the vet, and they told us that he had pancreatitis and that he was also diabetic. Unfortunately, the treatment route to treat the diabetes is really, really extensive and it would've put Archie through a lot. And it's also difficult to manage on its own, let alone when a dog has Cushing's disease. And so we had to make the impossible decision to euthanize him and to let him go, and to not prolong his suffering any longer than it needed to be. We spent a few days knowing that that was coming up on Friday. And there's something so so difficult about knowing when that person in your life or that animal in your life is going to leave you down to the day and the time when it's gonna happen. And it had this effect on me of, as I think grief does, snapping me out of autopilot and all of the things that, we do in day-to-day life, and things that we worry about, and that seem like a big deal, and it snapped me right out of worrying about anything that suddenly just didn't seem that important. And thinking about Archie and all that he has given to us as a family and all that he's given to me, and knowing that he was about to go made me just want to be so present in every single moment and to give all of my love and attention to him as much as I possibly could. I think it was the same for my whole family and I. And we were with him right until the very end, and we took him to the vet on Friday, and we all stood around him heartbroken saying our goodbyes and letting him know how much we love him and that we're right here with him. And then just like that he slipped away And it was a really weird experience because I've never, I've never experienced that where someone or something you love so, so, so much, you literally see the life disappear from their eyes, and in a second they're gone. And their body remains, but Their soul and what really made them who they were is gone And it's had me thinking and questioning and wondering where does the soul go when it leaves the body? And can you feel it around you? And maybe you've experienced something like this yourself as you're listening to this. Maybe you've lost a loved one, and you can feel their presence or you can't. But I did s- hear this really beautiful quote the other day. I can't remember if I'm gonna say it exactly, but it was something like, "Life and death are two rooms in the same house. So even if they're not there in the room with you, they're right next door." And I found that to be really comforting, and I'm choosing to believe that Archie is still here in the house, and his soul and his spirit are still with us. I'm choosing to believe that But what I've really noticed and come to learn perhaps more potently than before over the last week Is the importance and the necessity of feeling our feelings. Grief is arguably one of the most difficult emotions that we experience as humans, and what I find to be so profound about grief is the way that it demands your attention. It is not an emotion that you can buffer away with social media or food or Netflix. It's not something you can push down and tell yourself you're fine. It's not something you can intellectualize and just get on with your day. It is all-consuming, and it is large, and it demands your attention and your presence. And there just isn't any option, at least in the initial stages of grief, but to surrender to it and to succumb to it. And the way that I've been thinking about it is when a really difficult emotion comes up, for most of us, our first instinct is to want to ignore it or avoid it or just not feel it. We want to resist it. And the image I had in my mind was picturing myself in a fast-flowing river. And you know when the water is gushing down in one direction, it's almost as if it's headed toward a big waterfall. And I was picturing myself being in the river and holding on to a rock in the river, just latching onto it with all my might, holding, holding, holding, not wanting to feel the entirety of the stream. But then in a very quiet moment, I just said, "Let go. Just let go." And what I picture and what I experienced Was just going with the stream and just letting it take you, and just being in that river and being in that experience. And then eventually you get taken over and down the waterfall, and then you land in the body of water at the bottom, and it's calm. It's still. It's not so scary down there. And you realize that, "Oh, I survived, and I'm actually okay." You can catch your breath once you're in that body of water. And this is the same way that my ex- my grief has felt this past few days. It's felt like all of a sudden there's this intense gushing and need to go into the grief and to feel it in my chest. And f- it feels like my heart is literally being cracked open, or it feels like someone has got their hand around my heart and they are just squeezing it so strongly. And for that short period of time, all there is to do is to experience and endure it. But what I've found is by allowing myself to go into it each time and just truly be in it, it doesn't take long before I come out of it And it's like I can come up for air again and I can breathe and I'm okay And this is reminding me and re-teaching me about the importance of feeling our feelings. As I said, grief is one of those emotion that demands our attention and presence because of its potency. But what about the other emotions we feel in a day-to-day basis, like anxiety or fear, sadness or disappointment, rejection? All of the emotions that we might label as bad that we don't like experiencing and feeling because they're uncomfortable, but maybe they're not as urgent or as demanding, and they vary in their intensity. And so because of that, they're easier to ignore. It's easier to suppress your anxiety or discomfort by just opening up Instagram or TikTok and scrolling mindlessly. It's easy to suppress your emotions by binge eating and watching Netflix until you pass out and fall asleep, and you tell yourself, "It'll be fine. I'll be fine tomorrow." But the thing is, is that emotions don't magically disappear when you suppress them. They stay stored in your body and in your nervous system. And so every time we take these seemingly small emotions and we shove it down and we suppress it and we suppress it, it's like stuffing more garbage into the bin, into the trash can. We're just adding layers and layers and layers of these quote-unquote, "bad emotions". And I guess I say bad not in the sense that... I, I don't think any emotion is bad. I think they all serve a really important purpose. However, I do believe that there are some emotions that will cause us to dip into a very low vibration and a low frequency. And when we suppress these emotions enough, we become the product of those suppressed emotions, so our vibration lowers, our frequency lowers, our belief in ourselves and what's possible in the world lowers. We go from optimism to pessimism. Instead of feeling energetic, we feel lethargic because we are literally weighed down by these stuck emotions And so when did we learn that it's okay to experience grief in all its dark glory, but that all these other emotions weren't valid to feel, and that we shouldn't feel them? Maybe because we were taught that we just shouldn't show our emotions, and we should just keep them to ourselves, and we were never taught how to properly process them or be with them or have validation that it was okay to just fucking feel them Our life in this day and age, it has become so easy to buffer away any shred of discomfort. We are living in a comfort economy. And me personally, I think it's quite fucked up because of what I know it does to us. And I'm, I am not s- standing here on a pedestal saying that I feel all of my feelings 100% of the time, because I don't. However, I think it's really important that we continue to have these conversations and remind each other that it's okay to feel what you feel, and it's healthy to be in that emotion, to acknowledge it, to sit with it, not just intellectualize it and create a story around why it's there or understand why it's there, but to feel it. They're called feelings for a reason. And the sooner you allow yourself to go through that emotion, the sooner you go over the waterfall and down into that calm body of water on the other side I'm gonna give you a little process to take yourself through in just a moment for how to feel your feelings. And maybe this is a new concept for you. However, if you're a regular listener of my podcast, I'm gonna guess that it's not an entirely new concept for you. However, as I said, I do believe that we can all use a friendly reminder sometimes of what this actually looks like and how do we do it. So here's a few steps that you can follow. Step number one is to try and catch yourself and notice when you're feeling off. Okay? So this could just be you're going about your day and you just notice all of a sudden that you're feeling stressed out or lethargic or there's anxiety in your chest or whatever it is, right? You're just, you're not feeling good. And so you pause. And then I want you to ask yourself, "What am I feeling right now?" What... And specifically, "What emotion am I feeling right now?" And if you notice that your mind will usually just offer up the same five emotions, like I'm feeling sad, angry, frustrated, disappointed, confused, or anxious, that's okay. However, I would love to encourage you to look up the feelings wheel. You may have heard of this, you may have not. Just Google feelings wheel and go to images and you'll see so many come up. And this is just a tool to help you increase your emotional vocabulary and have a greater understanding of putting an emotion or putting a name to what's going on in your body, right? It helps to provide context. It's just the same as when you say, "Oh, I wanna put a face to the name." You wanna be able to associate what that looks like, what that is when you hear that person's name, and the same can be said for our emotions. So let's say that you think you're feeling sad, but then you look at the feelings wheel and you realize you're feeling vulnerable or you're feeling isolated or ashamed or you're feeling abandoned or despair. Or maybe you think you're just angry, but then you realize, "Oh, I'm actually feeling disrespected, feeling betrayed, dismissed." So when you can more poignantly put an emotion to what you're feeling, it helps you to feel more connected to your body and the signals it's sending you. You feel better about being able to articulate the exact thing that you're feeling to yourself, as opposed to sitting in confusion saying, "I don't know what I'm feeling." So if you haven't tried that out, I highly recommend it. Use the feelings wheel and identify what emotion am I feeling right now. Even if it's a guess, give it your best guess. Once you've identified the feeling, then locate where it's sitting in your body. Ask yourself, where Let's say the emotion is, uh, despair. Where am I feeling despair in my body? Where is it physically? You might notice, "Ugh, it's in my upper chest and, like, sort of up into my throat." The next step is describe what that feels like. Physically describe it. So maybe you wanna close your eyes and you imagine that emotion sitting there, and you might say, "It feels hot, and it feels heavy, and it feels like there's a constriction in my throat, and it makes me wanna cry." And just feel the physical sensations. Another thing I find helpful to do is to say, "This is despair." As I've got my eyes closed, I'm still paying attention to feeling the feeling. I'll say, "This is despair. This is despair." I find that really helpful to keep my focus on the experience of feeling the emotion. I've done this so many times with different emotions, like, "This is rejection," and really noticing where I feel that in my body, and paying attention to what it feels like. Or, "This is embarrassment," or, "This is fear." Whatever it is, say it to yourself, and describe it, and watch it in your body. You don't need to always pinpoint exactly why it's there, because that's when we dip into intellectualizing our feelings, and we, we come out of our body, which is where the emotion is being, uh, where it is living, and we go into the head. And we can't out-think an emotion. We have to process and feel it. So if you notice yourself trying to decode why it's there, how it got there, and what you need to do to make it go away, you've gone up into your head. So come back down, tune back into your body, watch the emotion, keep describing how it feels in your body, and keep saying to yourself, "This is..." and then insert the emotion that you're feeling. As you're sitting with the emotion, if it wants to express itself, let it. Maybe you wanna ask yourself, "If this emotion wanted to express itself, how would it want to do that?" And it might be that you wanna cry. It might be that you want to scream into a pillow. It might be that you want to get physical and punch your pillow, slam your fist down onto the bed. It might be that it wants you to jump up and down and shake your entire body, and shake your hands, and shake your arms. However it wants to be released, allow yourself to do that, because an emotion is energy in motion, which is why we express emotions, because it's our way of releasing them from the body and processing them through. So ask yourself, "Does this emotion want to be expressed, and how does it want to be expressed in me?" And it's okay if the answer doesn't always feel like there's something physical that you want to do. Sometimes it could just be I It just wants me to sit here with it. It just wants me to be with it and give it my acknowledgement, and my presence, and my attention, and that's it. And that's okay, too. And you want to try and sit with the emotion until you feel it start to soften and dissipate in your body, where you start to naturally feel that sense of ease and relief in your body. And so maybe that feels like that tightness in your chest, or your throat, or your stomach starts to ease. You notice that you can deepen your breath. Your shoulders drop and relax. You feel more calm, and centered, and grounded in your body. That is how you will know that you have actually allowed yourself to feel your feelings and process it through, is if you feel more grounded, and calm, and present with yourself on the other side. You'll know that you're suppressing it and intellectualizing it if you sa- if you say to yourself, "Okay, yep, I know why I'm feeling anxious. It's because of this. Okay. All right. I'm all good." But then you continue trying to go about your day, and you can still feel that hum of anxiety or that emotion present in your body. You haven't actually given it your attention the way it needs it. You've just intellectualized it. So go back to the feeling, give it your attention, describe it, watch it, feel it until you feel the softening. I invite you to practice this process. Maybe just practice it a couple of times over the next week. You don't have to do it every day, and you don't have to do it for every single emotion all the time, but this is a practice that you can start to implement. And it is amazing what you will notice when you start to give your emotions the presence and validation that they deserve and that they really need to move through you in a healthy way. It got me thinking about this because grief, whilst so painful, is also such a beautiful emotion, and I actually do believe it is a gift. Because when we are grieving something or someone so intensely, it also allows us to recognize how much we loved that person or that animal, that pet, that place, how much they meant to us, how much meaning they added to our lives, how much life they added into our years. And we can appreciate that, and what a gift, what a gift to have loved and been loved by something or someone so much. I also think it's beautiful because it allows us to stop and reflect on our life and to take stock of the things that matter and the things that don't. I think it gives us an opportunity to reevaluate things, and I think it brings us closer to the people around us. Because when you're going through grief, the most important thing above all else is having community around you and having the right people around you who you can lean on, who can support you through it, and who understand what you're going through. Or even if they don't understand it, who can sympathize and be there as your s- you know, your emotional support. Grief gives us many gifts, and it is part of the duality of life. We need to have opposites to things in order for things to make sense. We need to have light in order to understand dark. We need to know what is up in order to understand what is down. And we need death in order to appreciate life So if you're going through grief right now, I am sending you so much love, and if you need someone to listen, to give you support, my DMs are always open. It's a safe space with me. And the last thing I'll say is that I wanna dedicate this episode to Archie Boy, who brought so much love and light into my life and our family's life over the last eight years, and you were taken way too soon. But it was short and so, so, so sweet Thank you for being a part of my life, Archie. And to everyone listening, thank you for your support. If you were someone who messaged me over the last few days or commented on the post I shared about Archie or liked or even just didn't engage but you were lovingly there witnessing, I wanna thank you because your support and love really is felt and appreciated. I'm so grateful for this community that we've built together, that we can lean on each other and support each other as we experience very human things. All right, my friends, I hope you have a beautiful week, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye. If you enjoyed today's episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share this episode with your friends and come find me on social so we can hang out between episodes. All the links are below in the show notes