Ep. 12 - The Emotions You're Afraid to Feel

We spend so much time trying to control, avoid, or hide our emotions that we never actually let ourselves feel them. In this episode, we're talking about why processing your emotions matters, how to stop carrying what no longer serves you, and why feeling deeply might be the key to moving forward.

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Transcript

0:00

Hi, and welcome to It's Not That Serious, Even When It Is. I am your host, Mary McDonald. I am a coach and use human design as a tool to see my clients deeply and guide them to a more joy-led and embodied life. On this podcast, we will have deep conversations and some giggles because life can't be so serious all the time. Hi, and welcome to this week's podcast episode. I just wanna take a beat here. I've been at this for, I don't know, eight weeks maybe. I don't know. Guys, I should know that number, but I don't. Um, a- I just wanted to say thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for being here. This has been a lot of fun for me. It's been really cathartic, obviously, if you've listened to some of the more emotional episodes. And I also just wanna say thank you for the messages about these episodes, and how they have helped you or how you have related to them. Um, that's what it's all about is human connection and, um, just growing and being open to what life has to throw at us. And I just, I'm so grateful for you guys, and I'm so grateful to get to chat with you every time you guys send me a message or note just saying, you know, what that episode meant to you. So I just wanted to start with that. I'm all in my feels, okay? And speaking of feels This episode per usual, as if I'm like not always on some kinda like weird train of thought, but I'm just gonna let this episode take me where the wind wants to blow me. Oh. Wow. Um, where the wind wants to take me, whatever. It doesn't- You get the gist. Today I wanna talk about emotions. I know, we're gonna talk about our feelings. It's scary. It's so scare. Um, as we say in my household, we like say this about the dogs when they're hungry or just in general, we like, "She has hunger in her heart." So I think sometimes when we talk about emotions, you guys have scared in your heart. And that's, that's fair 'cause sometimes I also have scared in my heart when I talk about emotions. So, um, this kinda came up for me. Um, I was thinking the other day about how, you know, I think a lot of us can be all over the place with our emotions. We like don't even know what to do with them. Like, sometimes I think adults are just toddlers who never were taught how to process emotions, who were never given a safe space to, um, express y- your emotions, and now we're all in our 30s and 40s or I guess 50s or 20s or whatever. We're all adults. I should have just call out all of, all of the decades, that your 60s or your 70s, 80s or 90s, a- and we're all just adults who didn't quite ever learn how to express ourselves on the deepest level. And I, I say that with like... I say that carefully because I don't know that there's like this, there's one right way to s- speak our emotions out loud. That's not what I'm saying here. I just think that like we don't always know how to process and say what we mean, and sometimes I think that that is super debilitating, and I think that we're not always the best communicators. I know, right? It's weird 'cause like sometimes I, I feel like Yeah, you just open the socials and it's like nobody knows how to communicate but everybody has a controversial opinion, which is kinda weird. Um, anyway, my whole point to this is that I think that- I guess I'll say this. In my coaching spaces, it is a safe space to have all of your emotions. It's a safe playground, if you will, to have your emotions, and this is something that I actually just experienced myself with, with my own mentor. Um, something that I have a difficult time with is expressing anger, because it's really uncomfortable for me, and part of this is being a manifestor. So like in human design, in each of, each of the types, uh, each of the energetic types, you have a signature theme and a not self theme, and my signature theme is peace, so when things are... feel at peace, then, like, I... It- it's good, right? And when I'm not that, I ha- it's like anger, frustration. And for a long time... Well, let me just also explain this about manifestors. We happen to have, and this is I'm gonna double down on what's going on with me personally, and then I'll get to you guys. But we have a really big projectio- projection f- field, where you know when we've walked into a room, and as much as we can uplift a, a space, we can also bring it down just as fast. And I also am a 5/1 in human design, which means that I also have a really big projection field, so people also project onto me quite a bit. Whether they mean to or not, I don't... It- it's just something that happens. I try not to judge it, and I try to, like, watch out for myself when I'm going, "Wow, that person's, like, really... Yikes." And then I'm like, "Oh, right, they're projecting because they're insecure about whatever. It's not actually me, has nothing to do with me, has to do with, you know, their own personal experience." However, I wanna say this about my personal struggle with Conveying, expressing anger because I, it, to me, it feels, one, it feels like bad in my body, which would make sense 'cause it's my not-self theme. But also, it's, it's an indicator of like, ooh, something's going on, gotta really deal with that. And I'll, I'll give you an example here, w- back to one of my other episodes about not inviting Judith to your dinner table, which was about not inviting like your work or whatever to the dinner table, things that upset you. And, uh, the, here is how I knew that that was something that was still affecting me and something that I had not emotionally released, was I was actually talking about, let's just call this person Judith, a few years ago, and I got physically angry. I got physically angry, and I was like, "Whoa, I didn't know that was still in there. Whoopsie daisy, I'd like to fix that." So I consciously was like, "Okay, wow, I'm going to journal. I'm gonna release that. That is not how I wanna feel." However, with the impact that manifestors have on people, it's like, when I've had really big anger outbursts in the past, I have not always had a safe space to do that because everybody is just really affected by me. And to me, that's so unfair because it's not-- I'm not typically... I'm typically just ex- expressing my own anger about a situation. It's not always about a person or to a person. Um, and I, I like I realized that literally like hours ago, um, that I have not always had that kind of a safe space where like I can express like big, big feelings like that and just let them go. Because to be honest with you, when I express anger about something, and I get really upset and frustrated and the whole thing, and I just like let it run its course, I get it out of my body. Like I just... I went on a run this, um, this weekend, and I just like, you know, let her rip. I-- It was not about stats. It was not about how fast I could go. I was just like, "I am blaring some music. I'm gonna move this out of my body. Wow." And I think that, um, I think that even though this is my experience as a manifestor, as a 5/1, whatever, I think that it rings true for a lot of people, where you don't necessarily have the space to process your feelings in real time. And to be honest with you, I think that COVID was such a gift in this way. I mean, obviously a bunch of shitty stuff happened with COVID, clearly, but it was such a gift in this way for, for corporate America because every day in the office it's like I was rainbows and sunshine, happy to help. If you pinged me on Teams, and then emailed me, and then came up to my desk about something that you believed was urgent that I knew wasn't actually urgent, I would just put on a smile and be like, "I'm gonna get to you. Yeah. Thank you so much. I saw that. Wow. Great. I- I'm on it." And I- I'm in my house three days out of the week where I can be like, "I will get to that," but I don't actually have to be like Mary Sunshine about it anymore. So like if somebody pissed me off, I could, like in COVID times and now, I could just literally process my emotions immediately. I could be like, "I'm really pissed about this," and then I would just be really pissed about it instead of being like, "I wish you have the best day. I bid you adieu. I'll get to your request shortly." You know? Um, but I think this rings true again for like a lot of people. I think that a lot of people don't actually You guys don't actually understand that the importance of processing your emotions as they come up, and sometimes I get it. We need to, we need to be to just go, "Okay. What's actually going on here? Why am I so upset?" You know? Like, ugh. And I, I would say, I would say the biggest thing here is to let yourself feel. And I get it, th- as a person who wants to be happy, and I do wanna be sunshine and rainbows. I like it. You know? Like I, I do like to be silver lining girl. I just It's who I am at my core. I believe in magic, okay? But the whole thing is there's such an important, um, lesson here, is that we should be processing our emotions the minute that they hit us, right? And I'm not saying that- you know, if you feel upset in a public place that you should just, like, cry. You'll probably feel very uncomfortable with that. But I am saying same day, get it out. Let yourself just get it out. And just a little tidbit here, I guess this is how I work because in the past two weeks this has happened to me. Um, I watched movies that I didn't know I was gonna be so affected by, however. Um, again, like I do... I am processing grief kind of in waves, right? And I watched Project Hail Mary, sobbed. I mean, maybe some of you guys don't- didn't think it was great. Sobbed. No, absolutely, like, that relationship between that alien and Ryan Gosling sounds ridiculous. It, it, uh, it moved me so much, I just cried, and I cried, and I cried, and I cried. Then I watched Letters... or no, Voicemails to Isabelle, great rom-com if you are into that, and I just sobbed during that, too. And I just, like, I wouldn't have done either of these things in a movie theater, but it was, like, almost, because I knew I had to... I had kind of, like, some grief that needed to be processed I let myself watch something to induce an emotional release. Or like sometimes I will purposely, not because I wanna be sad, but because I want to move like that through my body, and I want my soul and my subconscious to know that it's safe to have a full spectrum of emotions as a human, and I just feel it, right? I don't try to fix. I don't try to say, "You should be better than this." I, I don't try to say, you know, "You should have shame for having all these feelings. How dare you? There are other people out there with worse problems than you." No. That's a bunch of bullshit. This is your one precious life. It is meant to be f- felt on a full spectrum of feelings. So I want to encourage you to create a safe space literally just for yourself. It can be in your home. It can be in your car. It can be, you know, wherever, but I just want to encourage you to create a safe space within your own body, knowing that it's okay to express and feel your emotions deeply. Emotions are ever-changing. They are ever-changing, and if you are an emotional, um, if you are an emotional... Oh, gosh, why am I blanking on this? Um, emotional authority in human design, baby, you gotta ride that wave. You gotta ride the emotional wave. So I, and I am an emotional authority, and what that means is that any given day, at any time of day, I am just kinda like on this little emotional rollercoaster, and it's not good. It's not bad. I don't judge it. It's just, it's something that I experience. And so maybe I am the perfect person to be talking about how to deal with your emotions. But, um, I would say that like it's so important to allow yourself, your, your mind, your body, your soul, your subconscious, like every bit of you, to give yourself permission to feel every feeling, the good ones, the bad ones, all of it, because it's like When we sit with ourselves and we allow ourselves that space, we start to transmute those feelings. We start to let them out of our bodies. And I've said this so many times before, but, like, our bodies, our physical bodies, hold on to emotions. They do. And so that's why we have, you know, somatic practitioners, people that talk about how to release, um, emotions out of your body. I am not an expert on that, but I will tell you that, like, there are some s- like, shaking exercises where you, like, shake each one of your limbs for, you know, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Like, shake your arm, shake your, shake your right arm, left arm, r- right leg, left leg, shake your body. Like, and move that energy out. Um, so that is, like, again, the first thing is that I would say just, like, let yourself feel your emotions deeply with, like, kinda this reckless abandoned, okay? Because, um... I didn't mean to say abandoned Reckless abandon. And the joy just as much as the pain, because sometimes I don't think, like, joy is risky. Joy and happiness are risky, 'cause half of us are waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's like, "Why would I let myself feel this moment of pure, absolute bliss? Because something's coming around the corner, and life's not perfect, and if it's not perfect, then I shouldn't feel joy, and I should, you know, feel shame, and I should feel, you know, crazy 'cause I'm not where I wanna be in my life, and I don't deserve to have joy." It's like, uh, no, bitch. Like, you deserve to have joy. You have, deserve to have joy. So when you feel that joy, dive deep into that emotion and feel it with your whole body. Feel it with your s- whole soul. And the same thing for anger, frustration, resentment. Let your body feel it, let yourself experience it, and then release it. You know, journal on it if you want to. Uh, that is a... I mean, I will say this until the end of time, because journaling is my... It's kinda like... Oh, how do I say this in non-woo-woo terms? But journaling for me is kinda like my... Mm, I don't know how to say this in non-woo-woo terms, but it's like my channeling to Source, if you will. So, like, I feel very connected to God when I am journaling. So I allow myself to just write and write and write and write and write, and I actually never know what I'm gonna write. It's just that, like, I gotta get this out, all out on the page, and it helps me move that from my body. And Part of why you are probably stuck or why you feel bad sometimes is because there's something in your body that hasn't been released. There's something in your emotions that hasn't been released. And the thing is that I know a lot of us like to take our emotions and we like to put them in a box. Yeah, how's that working for you? I put that in a box and put it on a shelf for like some other time down the road. How is that working for you? I bet not very well. I bet it's actually terrible. Um, I bet it's terrible. And the whole thing is, is that, you know what? You may be angry about a situation right now, and you may do this practice where you allow yourself to feel and you allow yourself to release and, and you do as much as you can with it, and then this same situation circles back again. And you might go, "Son of a bitch, it's circling back again. I thought we dealt with this." No, man. You're gonna deal with it on a deeper level this time. So don't be scared of that either. Right? If you deal with an emotion, if you deal with a situation and it comes back again, it just means that you're now ready, your soul is actually now ready to deal with this difficult thing on a deeper level than you did before. It's nothing to be scared of. It's going to happen. And I promise it's gonna happen over and over again because I don't know if you know this, but I am human, and this has happened to me over and over again. So yeah, I... don't be scared of that. It's gonna happen again. You can't put your emotions in a box. You can't control all of the things that happen to you. It is not part of the life game. Life is going-- Life, the universe, God, is going to bring you this situation over and over and over until you learn how to deal with it, how to embrace it, how to release it, because there is a lesson in there. There always is. And as h- as hard as that is to hear if you're in a season where, you know, you're having a difficult time, there is always a lesson in it. You just might not know the lesson for another five years, and you gotta just, like, let that part go, too. Right? Um, so anyway, that's kind of mostly my episode for the, for this week is just start being very aware of your emotions. And I wanna say this, too. I'm gonna be careful with what I'm about to say because I think that sometimes, sometimes maybe for you, I know this is true for me sometimes, is that we mold our emotions to the people around us to make everybody feel comfortable. I know I've done that. I've I did it for years. And when you do that, you're doing yourself, one, a great, great disservice. This should be actually a ping for you to go, "I gotta get better at communicating my emotions and my wants and my needs without worrying about whether or not I'm gonna hurt someone else's feelings." Because at the end of the day, when you don't honor yourself first, you're gonna be bitching about it, you know, a week from now when you decided to just honor everybody else's feelings, and you're gonna be mad at yourself about it. So learn how to communicate what you want, and yeah, like, stop worrying so much about other people's reactions to your emotions. You know? Like I'm laughing because I do Again, the projections be strong in my field. So I'm laughing because, like, you know, I say things, and sometimes people care, and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they're rude, and sometimes they think I'm harsh, and sometimes I am a little harsh. Like, I am. It's just true. But at the end of the day, I'm gonna tell it to you straight, and I'm gonna give you a clear, clear answer and my clear thoughts because I'm not doing myself I'm doing myself a disservice if I'm lying to you about my emotions, not actually letting you in on them, and I'm doing the other person a disservice because they think that I'm one person with one set of boundaries, and I'm actually not that person. I'm just, like, trying to appease them, and, uh, it's never gonna work. It's never gonna work. I'm so sorry, unless, I, I will give you this caveat: if you know that this is not a safe space to necessarily share your emotions. However, also another caveat, 'cause I just like, this is what I just got from that, is like- I think a lot of us are really caught up in being really, really nice and polite, and I am nice and polite, right? Like, I'm not a big bitch out there. But it's also okay to set boundaries with people. I was listening to... Someone was telling me that they live across the street from someone that they don't necessarily like, but their kids are around the same age. But she's like, "I really don't, you know, I really don't want to... I don't want th- our kids to, like, play together, and they keep on asking, and I keep on making up an excuse." And my first thought was, it's literally okay to say, "You know what? I will let you know when we can have a play date." Or you can say, "I..." Maybe not this. But like, you know, like, uh, there are ways to put up boundaries without, you know, absolutely, like, tearing someone to shreds, right? You're not gonna be like, "I don't wanna hang out with you 'cause I think you're stupid." Right? There are ways to say it, but you've set a boundary even with people you, like you don't know very well. So I encourage that, too, is stop thinking that setting hard lines and setting boundaries is, like, gotta be some emotional event, right? It's... You're, you're only making it an emotional event because you've never done it before. You've never been good at it. And also, maybe you were talking to somebody who has a bunch of emotional outbursts. Well, guess what? When you are so grounded in yourself and you are so confident in yourself and you know exactly what you want and who you are and what your intentions are, you're gonna be rock solid setting a boundary. You're gonna be rock solid in your emotions. And you're not gonna care how the other person feels that much because whatever their emotions and their projections are, are just that. They're theirs. They're not yours. So that's another thing that I think that we're kind of really actually terrible at, is, like, setting boundaries and telling people what we want and telling people what we'll put up with and what we won't put up with and doing it in a way that's effective and not this, like, this dramatic thing. I think we're making this all too dramatic. It doesn't have to be dramatic. You're making it dramatic, again, because you're horrible at it. You're terrible. You've had zero you've had zero success in this area because you, like, blew up a pers- a, to a person about your boundaries, or you just never set them at all, so you just are constantly walked over. So you're having an emotional, you know, meltdown because you've never done it before and you're really horrible at it. But guess what? Practice makes pers- perfect. And when you understand yourself so deeply, you start to become so detached from a boundary conversation, emotionally detached, because all you're doing is communicating what you want. And if they can't handle it, that is actually not your problem. You have set up the boundary, right? You've set up the boundary. So anyway, I knew I'd go on a little bit of a tangent at the end of this. Anyway, I think that All in all, um, you know, this is something that a lot of people struggle with is processing emotions, letting them go, learning, um, what you actually want and what's, what's actually holding you back. And to be honest with you, your emotions are just a guidepost. They're just a guidepost really. Like your emotions, and I talked about this with triggers too, they're like a guidepost on like, "Oh, I don't like that. Great. What am I gonna do about it? Oh, I really like that. Great. How do I get more of that?" You know, "Oh, I'm really uncomfortable with that. Why is that? Interesting. I'm gonna put that in my pocket. I'm gonna think about- think on that, and then I'm gonna change the way I do something." But I think we're making it just like pretty dramatic out there in the world, and I think we're all just bleeding our emotions everywhere 'cause w- we also don't know how to communicate worth of shit. Because all we think about, all we think about is being right and correct and all of that, and that could be a whole other podcast episode. But what I'm saying is, again, once you're like more in touch with yourself, I think once you understand your human design on a different level, a level of like just even just your energetic type of like how that works, signature themes, not self themes, you start to clock where you are not processing. And I bet you that this comes up in the form of like physical ailments too. Like I told you in the last episode I had about grief is like I physically was feeling it in my heart. And so when I now, because I experience this, I process, I'm processing this so quickly I swear to you, um, even though it sounds like maybe every episode I'm like, "I'm processing grief again. Ha ha." Um, but, but like I know in my heart space, like physically when I have that feeling that like, "Oh, that's something I got to deal with even if I don't really want to deal with it." I just am gonna be open to I'm gonna be open to it. I would say one other thing, practices that also help with this are journaling to your higher self, and your higher self is like this version of you that is like know all, see all, be all kinda. And your higher self is like, yeah, this greatest version of you that you could ever imagine And I journal to my higher self and I'm like, "Hey, I got this thing going on. What advice would you give me now? What advice should I have right now? What do you wanna tell me?" And then I just let myself journal it all out. Like I said, I feel like journaling is my little, like, conduit of that, of where I can connect with my higher self and be like- Mm "Okay, yeah, I know you've got stuff to say. Say it." And I'll just journal it out and I'll be like, "Ooh, here's a revelation. Here's a revelation. Here's a revelation." So if you haven't tried that practice, highly recommend, especially when it comes to, like, dealing with your emotions and learning what you should and shouldn't do with them, and how to process them. I think that that's, like, a- another great first step. But yeah, I, I highly encourage you this week to just clock your emotions. Where are you holding back? Where are you holding back in your anger? Where are you holding, where are you holding back in your grief? Where are you going, "Ugh, I don't wanna deal with that again"? Well, buckle up, buttercup, you're about to deal with it whether you want to or not. That is life. Um, and your joy. Where are you not letting your joy just absolutely take over? Absolutely take over in the best way. Where are you holding back on your joy? Because when you're holding back on one thing, you're holding back on another. So if you're holding back on your anger, you're holding back on your joy, too, 'cause you've taught yourself, again, you've taught yourself that it's not safe to feel big emotions. So you have to start getting comfortable being uncomfortable in your emotions. So I dare you this week, when you feel joy, when something lights you up, I dare you to feel it to the depths of your soul, to your fingertips, to your toes, all of it. Um, yeah. That's your assignment for the week. As if this was just a coaching session. Anyway, that's your assignment for the week. I hope you guys have a really good week. Um, I don't know if I mentioned this in the last episode, but I just launched new coaching packages. They are in the link in my show notes, so if you wanna check those out, you can. I am always here to help you, and I'm here to help you embody this version of yourself that feels so good and so grounded and so authentic, um, that you never second-guess yourself again. And, uh, yeah. Have a really good week. I am rooting for you. Talk to you later. Thank you for joining me on today's episode. If something resonated with you, then we are probably best friends. And friends rate, review, and share episodes. If you wanna stay connected, you can find me on Instagram at Mary Kate McDonald. That's Mary C-A-T-E McDonald. If you want more information on coaching or wanna keep connected in my weekly newsletter, you can find that in the show notes. Thanks again for joining me on today's episode. I'm looking forward to catching you in the next one, and just a reminder that it's not that serious, even when it is