Speaker 1: 0:12

Welcome to Roots of the Rise with me, sarah Hokey. Emotions are an essential part of being alive, but are you comfortable with them? Do you allow yourself to feel? Not at all, way too much. Today will be the first of likely many episodes dealing with this most fundamental part of our human experience, so let's lay some groundwork. No one goes through life without feeling something. We may hope that it is joy, peace, hope, itself, other pleasant emotions, but no life exists without sorrow, fear, anger. The crazy thing is that while we all experience a range of positive to negative emotions, the majority of us are never taught what to do with those sometimes really intense feelings. Our emotions have tremendous pull. They can hijack us when we're least expecting it. Sometimes we aren't even aware of the emotion we're feeling, let alone what triggered it. But many of us don't have that basic understanding. According to Brene Brown's research in Atlas of the Heart, most adults can only name three emotions happy, sad, angry. Yet she went on to identify and map out 87 distinct emotions. This highlights one of the main ways emotions can become problematic a lack of awareness. If we can't even name what we're feeling, how can we begin to process it? Emotions can also become a problem when we over-identify with them or when we block their natural flow. These three challenges lack of awareness, over-identification and emotional suppression are each worth exploring more deeply, but that's a conversation for another day. For now, consider this how do you tend to handle difficult emotions? How many emotions can you name? Does 87 sound absolutely ridiculous? It does, even to me, who thinks about and talks about emotions and emotional regulation all the time.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Much of who we are and how we relate to the world is shaped by our early childhood. Of course, we all know this. So a really powerful question to start with is what kind of emotional education did you get? We begin forming our relationship with emotions almost from the very start. As soon as we begin to recognize ourselves as separate from others, especially from our mothers, with whom our identity is fused, until around six months, we start to develop preferences and desires. We reach for a toy we like, we push away strawberries and grab for more blueberries. Before we even have language, emotions become our primary form of communication and, let's be honest, most infants and toddlers and even young kids aren't exactly subtle. They express themselves with everything they've got. Emotions show up big If our caregivers aren't equipped to hold space for those big feelings if we're shamed, ignored or dismissed. When we emote, it starts to shape our internal world in ways that can create some major challenges later on. As our sense of self grows, we naturally want to go after what we desire, but at the same time we're deeply wired to maintain connection and preserve the love and approval of our caregivers, the people we depend on. That tension between authenticity and attachment can shape how we learn to deal with emotions for the rest of our lives.

Speaker 1: 3:35

I grew up in a household with mixed messages. On one hand, my mother was an emotional roller coaster that went from the depths of deep depression to manic highs of childlike glee, to intense rages that would shake the walls. I witnessed firsthand the vast array of emotions. One might feel how intense, how volatile, how changeable they can be. On the other hand, if I expressed anything other than effusive joy over every aspect of my life, there was hell to pay. Either the rage would become directed at me or I would be reminded once again that I was the root of all evil.

Speaker 1: 4:25

The first way that I tried to cope with it was to become hypervigilant, to be able to read the room really quickly so that I knew the quote unquote right way to act, whether it was to say nothing at all, to avoid notice, or put on a big smile and happy face, or just be as quiet and polite as possible. Unfortunately, that didn't work, because what she wanted would change at the drop of a hat. A smile could be read as fake she wasn't wrong there, it usually was the politeness could be read as condescending, the avoidance could be read as disregard, instead of what it was, which was just a child trying to fly under the radar to avoid pain. There was no right answer, and so my best bet and what eventually I did was to just become numb and shut down entirely. If I had no emotion at all, I couldn't have the wrong one right. That didn't work either, but I found that I preferred to be hated for something I wasn't than to be hated for something I was. Not that I understood that that's what I was doing at the time, but looking back and lots of therapy later, it's so clear that I chose to never let the truth of what I was feeling slip out, because I knew it could be used against me Later in life.

Speaker 1: 5:32

I found it next to impossible to even recognize my own emotions because I had stuffed them so deeply inside of me. It was like learning a whole new language and I had no example of how to deal with it, how to deal with the depths of what I felt. Allowing joy was next to impossible because of my certainty that it would be ripped away from me, that it couldn't be trusted. Always on the other side of a good day with my mom was a day of hell, and retribution for some imagined slight. Allowing sadness was definitely not going to happen. That was a black pit I was certain I could never climb out of. I was already in a depression 99% of the time.

Speaker 1: 6:10

I say all of this to just give one example of how a parent's emotional intelligence, or lack thereof, can have long lasting consequences for a child. We need to remember, especially when we're overwhelmed by intense emotions, that emotions are simply energy in motion. The word itself comes from the Latin I don't know if I'm going to pronounce this right, even though I took Latin for years and years but it's emovere e, meaning out, and movere we'll say it that way meaning to move. So when we emote, we literally are moving energy out out of the unconscious, through the body and into conscious awareness. Now think about a pre-verbal child. They may babble or make sounds, but they're not yet forming words or having conversations. Emotion is their first language. It's how they communicate with their caregivers, how they express hunger, discomfort, joy, fear.

Speaker 1: 7:04

When those emotional expressions are properly mirrored by present and attuned adults, through tone, touch, facial expressions and, eventually, language, the child begins to form a healthy emotional identity. A parent might say you don't look happy, what's wrong? Or I see you're excited. Or are you feeling angry? Even if the child doesn't yet understand the words, this mirroring helps form an essential neural connection my feelings have a name. I am not my feelings, but here's the catch. What we need as we begin to navigate our emotional world is love, understanding and support, and too often what we receive instead is ridicule, anger or the demand to get over it, long before we're cognitively or developmentally capable of doing so on our own.

Speaker 1: 7:56

If a child's emotional outbursts are seen as something to be punished instead of understood as a call for connection, a subtle but powerful message takes root Emotion leads to abandonment, rejection or conflict. We begin to fear our own emotions. We may even begin to doubt our inner experience. We certainly don't learn that all emotions, even the uncomfortable ones, like fear, anger or sadness, are natural, necessary and purposeful. Emotions are complex, instinctual responses to pleasure and pain. There are no bad emotions, but because some are painful, we learn to label them as wrong or undesirable. In reality, that pain is a message. It's part of an intelligent feedback system designed to bring us back into balance, back into alignment with ourselves and our lives. But sadly, most of us were never taught how to truly feel, process or move through these signals. So we turn to unconscious coping strategies suppression, distraction, numbing, escape. But avoidance doesn't make the emotion disappear. It only intensifies it over time, and so it can create bad responses where we inflect pain on others or on ourselves. And so the cycle continues. When we run from emotion, we're actually running from essential inner guidance.

Speaker 1: 9:24

Blocking emotion blocks movement in our bodies, our relationships, our growth. And repression isn't passive. It takes tremendous energy. Just because a feeling isn't't expressed doesn't mean it vanishes. It gets stored in the body. You can feel it when you are stopping yourself from expressing how angry you are. Your jaw tightens, the neck stiffens, your shoulders tense up, the breath becomes shallow, we contract. But when we allow emotion to move, when we make space for it, when we accept it, tension releases too. Sometimes the path to emotional release begins with a physical release. That's why people often cry in yoga. Yoga helps open the energetic channels of the body and as energy begins to flow, long-held emotions can surface and, while it may feel sudden, what's really happening is a beautiful, long overdue return to wholeness.

Speaker 1: 10:20

Now I just want to point out once again with feeling that if emotions are difficult for you, especially if you suffer from extremes like deep depression or rage, I highly encourage you to work with a professional to help you figure it out. We are not meant to do deep inner healing work by ourselves. I mean, look, the reality is that whether or not you have professional support, you're still doing it by yourself. No one can heal your stuff for you. You have to do it. All you're doing when you have a mentor or counselor or therapist is having someone there to teach you the best tools to help you heal yourself better and faster. And we want this because if you don't, if you don't heal your connection with your emotions, it can cause a lot of problems in your personal life.

Speaker 1: 11:09

You may tend to feel overwhelmed or numb, maybe you have an inability to feel joy or have a hard time calming down or getting over the smallest of slights or setbacks. Lack of awareness might mean that you don't even understand why you're feeling what you're feeling and therefore acting the way you are. Obviously, that can then cause relationship problems. We can have poor communication. It's hard to communicate what you want and need. If you aren't able to articulate what you're feeling, go back and listen to Nonviolent Communications. I'll link it below. It's necessary to know what you're feeling, needing and wanting. You also might have a hard time with empathy, not understanding or picking up on the other person's feelings or needs. Often people who struggle with emotional intelligence have a hard time with conflict and trust. It's hard to connect with someone who seems like a robot and of course, these issues can spill over into professional problems and can create mental and physical health issues Like there can be this cascade effect of lack of emotional intelligence, creating turmoil on every plane of life, creating stress, anxiety, burnout, fatigue, headaches, not to mention all the coping mechanisms that can be harmful, like addiction.

Speaker 1: 12:25

But sometimes we can learn to channel our emotions into something positive. How many people do you know who will say oh, when I get like really upset, I just have to clean, I just have to clean. I just have to clean, and part of that is taking the energy and pushing it into a positive place. Part of it is asserting control, which we talked about last week, and that's great too. You know, we just want to be able to channel the emotions into something that feels healthy and supportive for us. Maybe you translate grief into writing, longing into creative activities, anger into cleaning. Now, look, you can take anything too far, of course, but in moderation. Some of this can be very healthy and very helpful.

Speaker 1: 13:09

So, speaking of helpful, I wanted to give you some questions today to help you at least begin investigating your relationship with emotions. So here we go. How many emotions can you identify? Do you control your emotions or do your emotions control you? Do you struggle with any particular emotion? It could be something quote unquote negative, like fear or anxiety, but it could also be joy. What would it mean for your life if you were able to experience difficult emotions without difficulty? Examples experiencing anger without lashing out, shame without spiraling into self hatred. Profound joy without foreboding. What is your baseline emotion as in, what do you feel throughout most of your day? That's all for today.

Speaker 1: 14:04

Obviously, this is barely touching the surface of what there is to know and understand about emotions, but you gotta start somewhere If you want to dig deeper. Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown is excellent. I will link it below. Tomorrow we're talking about guilt Always a fun topic. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to click the message me button if you're listening on Spotify, or email me at rootsoftherise at gmailcom. I love hearing from you. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and remember, know who you are, love who you've been and be willing to do the work to become who you want to be.