Episode 63: Transcript

You are listening to episode 63 of the Path to Motherhood podcast.

Welcome to the Path to Motherhood podcast.

I'm your host and fertility life coach, Sarah Brandell.

Join us each week as we walk through navigating your trying to conceive journey.

My mission is to share the skills of managing your mind, processing emotions, and living a full life to create a more authentic path to motherhood.

Hello, hello, and welcome to another week of the Path to Motherhood podcast.

I am your host Sarah Brindel, a life coach for women navigating infertility and pregnancy loss.

I am so happy to have you here.

I am sending you all so much love and just know that I'm thinking about you, because this time of year I know can be a tough one regardless of when you're listening to this.

You know, we've got a lot that we're navigating.

This is absolutely emotional roller coaster, and I just want to send you all a big hug.

So this week I wanted to kind of do like a 2.

0 version.

One of the first episodes I ever launched on the podcast was talking about negative emotions, And it's honestly one of the most listened to episodes, obviously, because it's early on in the podcast.

People sometimes start from the beginning, but also I think just because of the topic.

And I wanted to do it justice.

I wanted to kind of go back over that topic and really just review some really important concepts about it because it is one that I talk about with clients on a weekly basis.

It is one that when I am a guest on other people's podcasts, it's something that I'm often talking about and that's kind of what triggered me to think about wanting to discuss it today is I was on a podcast.

I was a guest on a podcast this morning.

I'm not really sure when it's gonna go live.

I think it won't go live till next year and she made some comments about kind of the difficulty of managing your emotions and feeling your emotions that I had to kind of push back on and correct her on because I think there's a lot of miscommunication and and misunderstanding about them and so that prompted me to want to talk more about that with you guys.

So that's what we're going to talk about today but I believe when this episode goes live you all if you're in the US will be coming out of Thanksgiving time and getting back into the normal routine that is the hustle and bustle of December.

So welcome.

I hope you all enjoyed the holiday.

I I hope you're able to get through and hopefully we can dive into helping you navigate some trickier parts of the next few weeks too.

So as I said, I want to talk about the fun topic of negative emotions or uncomfortable emotions, however you want to call it.

And the first thing I want to say about that is I have podcast episodes about life being 50/50 and I will include those in the the show notes, but that's true.

Life is 50/50.

And what do I mean by that.

I mean that we cannot expect to have this life where we have only positive, comfortable, or even positive and neutral emotions all the time and we never experience negativity.

That is just not a human experience.

That's not life as we know it for a lot of reasons.

And so that podcast, I actually go into why that is.

And I can just summarize that here as saying, number one, you need contrast.

You wouldn't know joy if you didn't have pain.

Number two, we are human.

We experience the full gamut of emotions.

That's what makes us human.

And I truly believe the more we are willing to feel pain, the more open we are to experience pain, the more we are able to experience joy.

and I have seen that come true in my life in so many different ways and in my clients' lives.

And then lastly is that just because we don't want to experience a certain pain, doesn't mean that other pains will not exist.

So what's an example totally unrelated to infertility to kind of put this into perspective.

I always think about people who are wanting to lose weight.

There is this thought that like, I'm gonna, you know, I'm miserable now.

I don't like my body.

I'm unhappy.

I want to lose weight And when I get there when I get to the goal of the weight loss that I want to lose Then life will be better then I won't be in pain But we see so many examples of that not being true if we think about the biggest loser so many of those people struggle with mental health issues and Problems once they've lost the weight.

They don't magically feel better What they actually discover is they have pain just like they did before.

And I think that's really important to acknowledge that even if we had the answer to our infertility problem, even if we could erase pregnancy loss from our experience, there would be other things in our life that we would have to experience pain through.

It doesn't erase pain to erase infertility.

And so this is just unfortunately the pain that we've been dealt.

and yes one can argue this isn't the pain that I want, I want something else, this is worse than something else, etc.

and I'm not here to argue with you about that.

I agree I would absolutely not pick the infertility journey if I didn't have to, but it's what we were dealt.

And fighting with reality is not always that helpful.

I allow myself times for that, right.

I allow myself what I call that pity party to just be bummed that I got dealt these cards.

And that happens from time to time and that's totally fine.

But other times I remind myself that fighting with reality, fighting with the fact that I was dealt an infertility journey is not going to change anything.

It's not going to make me feel better.

It's not going to erase it.

It's not going to make it easier.

So rather than fighting with it all the time, at times I encourage myself to let it be, to let it be there, to acknowledge that this is part of my journey and how can I make the best of my journey, how can I make the best experience of my life even in spite of having an infertility diagnosis, even in spite of having gone through pregnancy loss.

And that's not to erase the pain.

You will see that today.

I'm very strongly against trying to resist or erase the pain.

That is to acknowledge the pain, let it be there and still find joy.

And I find that so important.

It is the cornerstone of what I teach my clients.

It's the cornerstone of what I try to teach you guys on here.

And I've done that in a handful of different episodes along the way.

But we're going to dive back into that today because I just think it is so important and it's so misunderstood because we're taught a different way of living.

To To get started, I want you to kind of reflect back and just think about how you have approached emotions in your life, even like thinking about how you approached emotions as a child and when you were sad, when you were upset, when you were angry, what happened.

And often what I find is that when people do reflect on this, they realize that they developed different coping mechanisms to try to avoid feeling pain.

So what are some examples of that.

Perhaps your parents distracted you with TV or food or activities or would give you gifts to avoid feeling pain, send you to grandma to have fun with grandma to avoid feeling pain.

Perhaps you developed your own coping mechanisms as you got a little bit older of like I tune out and go into a new world of reading a book or listening to music or distracting myself to not have to think about the pain that I'm in.

These are all coping mechanisms to try to avoid or distract ourselves from painful emotional experiences and is not to say that we should never go through coping mechanisms.

They are appropriate.

We need them.

Right.

I just talked to a client last week.

She was working in her office job and she needed to really be focused on this project she was working on 'cause she had a deadline due and she needed to complete this project, but she had a lot of negative emotions that came up, triggered by something that one of her co-workers said, and it caused a lot of pain to come up.

And in that moment to stop and just feel her pain and not work on her project and not get it done and not submit it, that really was not the option that she wanted to choose.

And so we talked about, it was totally appropriate for her to come up with a coping mechanism to say like, "Hey, I see that I'm in pain here.

I totally acknowledge that.

I will address this, but at the moment, while I'm at work, I'm going to pause on that.

I'm going to do what I can to cope through this so that I can focus on my work.

And then when I have the right mindset, time, availability, when I get home, when I have support around me, I can then go back and re-deal with those emotions.

And that's totally appropriate to do.

So it's not that we can never distract or we can never avoid.

The problem becomes when we only distract and we only avoid.

And I've talked about before, I truly see this as people who are doing that are literally, figuratively becoming full of unprocessed emotions.

And I know, like every time I say that, I kind of struggle with saying that because my type A analytical scientific brain just did not accept that as an explanation six years ago.

I would have told you that makes absolutely no sense.

And now I've just seen it to be true time and time again that I can't argue with it.

So if you're hearing that, you know, getting full of unprocessed emotions and that just makes no sense to you, just know that I get it.

I totally understand that.

Just, just consider it.

Consider what if that were true.

what if that were possible that we could get full of our unprocessed emotions.

What I see happen is women often are feeling burnout, overwhelm, unable to keep moving forward in their journey when they're at the height of just so much unprocessed pain, so much unprocessed negativity in their journey that they literally feel on the brink of collapse.

because they just have not been allowing the emotions to come up authentically and be managed as they come up.

And so that is what I find so important is we don't want that.

We don't want this unprocessed extra heavy weight.

I literally think of it as all the unprocessed emotions are a heavy book bag that we have to carry through our day to day that we can't put down that's lagging us behind, that's slowing us down, it's keeping us from being productive, it's keeping us from focusing on other things.

And the ironic thing is that so often, us avoiding pain, us avoiding negative emotion, us distracting ourselves from negative emotion is in an attempt to not experience it, to avoid experiencing it.

But ironically, what happens is it makes the pain worse, makes the pain heavier, makes the pain more prevalent, and something that we really can't escape.

The number one example I see of this is when I'm working with women that are going through really difficult two week waits.

So they have really been struggling with high, high, high end anxiety, depression, worry, doubt, fear, hopelessness during their two week waits, and they have been following the classic advice that everyone gives that you just needed to distract yourselves.

what they're finding is they can't distract themselves enough to stop thinking about those uncomfortable emotions.

They keep happening, they keep existing, they keep being there, they can't escape them.

And what we work on together is what if for this one two week wait, we try something different.

What if instead of distraction instead of avoidance, we let the pain be there.

We open up to the doubt.

We open up to the fear.

We open up to the anxiety and we can do that in a controlled fashion.

We can give ourselves set times, you know, and I'm not talking about like crazy amount of times.

It literally could be two minutes in the morning throughout your two week wait, whatever that is for you.

This is the plan that I create with my clients as we kind of plan out their next two week wait.

And time and time and time and time again, like I cannot emphasize this enough, women come back to me sit and say, "Holy cannoli, I actually felt less pain.

I actually felt less anxious.

I actually felt less worried.

I actually felt some hope for the first time in years.

I I actually was able to enjoy time with friends during my two week wait and not feel completely distracted by all the drama in my head.

And they're always flabbergasted because they have been trying so hard to make that happen.

They've been trying so hard to avoid and it's been backfiring on them.

And now they're doing the opposite.

They're opening up.

They're letting those emotions in.

they're sitting with them and they're becoming less intense.

They're becoming more manageable.

They're becoming safe emotions to experience and it allows them to experience that full gamut that I talked about of not just negativity but also positivity.

And so that is possible when we are willing to open up.

And what I find most women think is they think, "Oh no, I can't do that.

I can't open up.

I can't allow these emotions to kind of be there and experience them because that is like opening up Pandora's box.

" That's asking for bad news.

Something bad is going to happen.

I'm going to become consumed by these negative emotions and I'm never going to be able to put them back.

That is really what our brain tells us.

I remember if I like reflect back to myself when I was going through my first miscarriage very early on in my journey, I mean it was took us a year to get pregnant but that first miscarriage I would have never, never, never believed you that I would have gone through the next five years of my life after that.

I, I wouldn't have had the capacity to believe that was possible because at the time even Even though I didn't say these words to myself or out loud or anywhere, I believe my brain truly believed to have to experience another pregnancy loss would have killed me.

To have to go through the pain and grief and loss and desperation of another pregnancy loss would have killed me.

I really believe that that's what my brain was telling itself.

And so if that's what you're thinking, then of course your response is to avoid to run, to hide, to not be with the negativity.

Doesn't feel safe to do.

And so what we have to do is we actually have to train our brain.

We actually have to teach our brain.

It's safe to feel your emotions.

It's safe to open up to pain.

It's safe to be with your negative emotions.

And this skill is a skill that I wish I could gift to every single person in this world because the ability to experience and feel your emotions and know that it's safe to do so transforms your life.

And I know that sounds like a little dramatic and a little bit pie in the sky, but I really truly mean that.

It transforms your life.

You are able to navigate things to take risks, to put yourself out there in a way that you would have never thought possible when you learn it's safe to feel any emotion.

And so that is my goal is to teach you to do just that, is to open up to any emotion that comes up to allow it to be there and prove to yourself that you are capable of doing that.

And the first thing I get response to this, the first kickback I get is, but I don't want to.

I don't want to have to feel grief.

I don't want to have to feel pain.

I don't want to have to feel desperation.

And of course, right, we've been taught it's painful, it's an uncomfortable emotion, we don't want to experience it.

So of course you don't want to.

But I'm willing to bet that you also don't want to feel nonchalant as if it's no big deal, uncaring of the pain that you've been through.

You want to feel true emotions of the losses you've had, of the time that's been stolen from you, from infertility, of the The unfortunateness that it is that you have been dealt these cards.

Right.

None of us just want to feel laissez-faire, happy, positive, happy, go lucky about those things.

We have true authentic raw emotions about those experiences and nothing can be more human and authentic than letting those true emotions live.

Be there.

present with them, even though they're uncomfortable emotions.

I always say my goal, you know, one is to feel safe with these emotions.

Another way to describe that is for you to become comfortable, feeling the uncomfortable.

Teach yourself, teach your brain, it is okay to be in pain.

It is safe to be in pain.

It is reasonable to be in pain and nothing has gone wrong if I'm in pain.

Life produces positive and negative experiences.

There's no way around it.

And so we will have painful experiences.

Even on the other side of infertility, even those around you who do not have infertility have painful experiences that they need to experience, they need to process, and this is the skill of doing that.

So hopefully that sells you on the fact that we should be opening up to our uncomfortable emotions, that it is beneficial to us to open up to our uncomfortable emotions.

That's always really where I have to start because if we're not willing to open up to them, then it doesn't matter what else we do.

But then once I get buy in that, yes, we should be doing this.

We have to talk about how do I go about doing that.

How do I even fathom like practicing this skill.

And what I find is it's just that it's a practice.

You're not going to go from complete distraction of all of your negative emotions, of overworking, overeating, overdrinking, over social mediaing to avoid all of your emotions and just not have to experience them and then building up and being this heavy burden on your back to all of a sudden being queen of feeling all of your emotions and just doing it perfectly overnight.

It's just not going to happen.

These are patterns and habits that have been with you since childhood.

Your coping mechanisms of how you avoid feeling negative emotions have been with you for a long time.

And so it's going to be very natural for your brain to go back to those habits, those patterns of avoidance, of distraction, and that's totally reasonable, totally normal that that's happening.

And what we have to do is we have to slowly retrain our brain one to consider another option and two, remind it that it's safe to do that.

And so I always say it's helpful to do this in small doses to start out because this gives you the ability to kind of open up to it, ease into it, and not scare yourself that you can't put the lid back on Pandora's Box, so to say.

So this can look different for everyone.

For some people this is talking.

For some people this is getting on a call with me on a weekly basis to talk through things.

For some people this is talking with their partner.

For some people this is writing things out in a journal or taking a walk or going to a yoga class.

But at the end of the day it is getting familiar with your body, getting more connected to your body.

And so what I mean by that is we first have to get better at knowing how to identify our emotions.

I can't tell you how many people begin working with me and the only emotions they know is sad, angry, happy, mad.

Like it's very minimal.

Well there's way more emotions out there.

And so we actually have to just practice identifying what emotion am I experiencing.

There are so many feeling wheels out there on the internet, just Google feeling wheel, and there's so many lists out there.

And I really think it's helpful in the beginning to like have that printed out and look at it and ask yourself, what am I feeling today.

What emotion am I experiencing and identify a specific emotion.

And then from there, we want to get familiar with that emotion.

We want to kind of figure out what it is, what it means, what is it doing to us, how is it interacting with us in our day to day lives.

And so this is where the walk, the journal, the talk, the meditation, the yoga can be so helpful is that we identify whatever emotion we're feeling.

So for example, let's say we're experiencing grief, then we would identify, okay, but what What does grief feel like to me.

As in if I had to explain grief to my dog, how would I explain it to them.

How would I describe it.

What would I tell them that it feels like.

What would I tell them that it's doing to me in my body.

And here's the really interesting thing is these emotions show up differently for all of us.

So it's actually really fascinating to do this process because while there's some similarities, we can all relate to that scared anxious feeling that we get when a cop turns its lights on and we kind of get that kind of drop in our stomach butterfly feeling, maybe getting hot anxious.

There's some things that are kind of consistent, but we all have different patternings of how we experience emotions.

And for those of you like me on the science-minded side of things, let's talk about that for moment.

What's actually happening.

What's actually happening in our brain is we're having a thought.

We're having some type of thought that is triggering an emotion.

So I told you guys the feeling was grief.

Let's say for example I am, I just experienced a pregnancy loss and I am thinking about all that that could have been, all that I'm losing with this pregnancy loss and what could have been.

And so those thoughts about what could have been trigger the emotion of grief to turn on in my body.

And that sends a cascade of hormones, of neurochemicals, of catecholamines throughout the body.

And these hormones and all of these other components, they cause a cascade of an emotion to be experienced throughout our body.

And those create sensations in our body.

So for example, like I said, feeling warm, having a heaviness in your chest, feeling nauseous, having a shaking, moving sensation in your body, having uncontrollable, like, feeling like a heavy presence over your body.

These are all different examples of sensations that emotions can create.

And so what I want you to do is I want you to get really familiar with what the emotion you've identified in this one setting, this one situation, feels like in your body.

And we do this just one emotion at a time.

So like I said, you can put a timer on this that you choose, I'm gonna work on this for five minutes today.

I'm gonna check in, I'm gonna ask myself What am I feeling today.

And you don't have to only do this when you're experiencing negative emotions.

We need to practice the skill with all emotions.

So even if you're feeling like, today I'm feeling pretty pleasant, I'm feeling hopeful, I'm feeling happy about something, that's fine too.

You can practice this process with positive emotions as well, but identify what is the strongest emotion that you're experiencing right now and then give yourselves five minutes to describe it.

That could just be, I'm taking a walk and I'm thinking about what does it feel like to feel grief in my body.

That could be I'm at a slow zen yoga class and I'm asking myself throughout the class what is it like to feel grief in my body.

That could be you're on a call with a coach and you're describing to them, I'm feeling grief today.

This is what it feels like.

That could be sharing with your partner.

So however that looks for you, but you want to get familiar with how that emotional experience creates sensations in your body and what those sensations are.

And so what this does is number one, being focused on defining that experience, defining those sensations automatically gives you time being open to the emotion.

And that's really an interesting thing that we can go through that experience of just letting the emotion be there and thinking about it in a way that's allowing us to process it.

And two, it gives us this reminder that grief, hopelessness, despair, all these really are are chemical releases in my brain that cause me to experience a certain sensation in my body.

Again, these are safe things to be feeling.

I'm not in danger, nothing has gone wrong.

I'm still here, I'm still on my two feet, I'm still in my chair, whatever I'm doing, and I'm still capable of experiencing other emotions in addition to this one.

And that is the beautiful thing that this can do.

And so over time, practicing this skill, checking in a couple days a week for a few minutes, teaches your brain, "Oh, this is what it's like to be with my emotions.

This is what it's like to experience authentic human emotions.

This is safe.

This is possible.

This isn't something that's dangerous to do.

" Now there's different intensities of emotions, right.

So if we're just randomly checking in on a Tuesday morning when nothing is heightened or crazy or heavy, that can be a lot easier of a place to start than starting when someone has just said something to you who has triggered you into this huge wave of emotion and tears and a lot of thoughts all at once.

What I always say is that that heaviness of processing emotions in the beginning should really be focused on those calmer experiences and we let the other heavy, spiral out emotional experiences go.

Let the tears happen, let the anger happen, let the frustration happen, and then we can reflect on those after the fact.

We can reflect on what was happening, what we were feeling, what was going on after the fact.

And as we build that skill and that familiarity with feeling our emotions over time you will recognize, "Oh, I can actually do that in the moment.

I can be with that emotion in the moment.

" And I shared with you earlier, sometimes in the moment doesn't work, sometimes that's not possible.

I shared with you about my client that was at work working on an assignment and that's okay too, right.

There's gonna be times where these emotions come up and I tell myself, "Yes, brain, I hear you.

You're feeling frustrated.

You're feeling angry.

You're feeling sad.

You're feeling whatever.

I hear you.

I need to focus on what I'm dealing with, but I promise you this evening, tomorrow, this week when I see my coach, I'm going to come back to this and I'm going to think about it and I'm going to address it and I'm going to allow it to be there.

" What magically happens, I mean this so sincerely, is that when we do this, when we allow these emotions to come up and be there and get comfortable and the uncomfortable, they're less intense.

They come less often.

They're more manageable.

We have more space, time, freedom, ability to experience positive emotions.

And we build belief that if we were to go something hard again, we can get through it.

That's called resilience.

We build resilience, emotional resilience, that I trust if I go through with this next cycle, this next attempt, and things don't go well, I will be able to get through it.

I will be able to take care of myself.

And that's the goal.

That's what we're all trying to do here is have emotional resilience.

So I hope, hope, hope this gives you guys some ideas, some ways to consider like thinking about being with those tough emotions and just know this, this is the work that I do.

This is the work that I support women on and help them through.

So if you are trying this out, if you're trying to practice these skills and you want some help, I'm here.

I'm ready to support you.

I'm always willing to hop on a call.

It's a free call where we just talk about what your fertility story has been thus far, what you've been through, and really what you're looking to get out of a coaching interaction with each other so that I can kind of share with you if it would be a good fit.

And if it would, amazing, we'll talk about how we can do that together.

And if I don't think it would, then I may share some other ideas for you and that's totally fine too.

And I would love to be the one to support you through this process of building your emotional resilience.

Imagine feeling as if you can go through infertility, not burnt out, but emotionally resilient.

That's possible.

And I can promise you it's going to take you so much farther than the avoidance method.

so much farther.

So I hope this is helpful.

Reach out if you're ready for some support.

Otherwise, I will talk to you all next week.

Hey there, Inspired Mama.

If you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to leave a review in your podcast player.

This helps to share the message with so many more women just like you.

Also, if you know of another hopeful mama on her path to motherhood, please share this episode with her.

I would love to get this into the ears of anyone who needs to hear it.

If you are ready to step this work up and not only learn these tools but to apply them to your unique story, head to the link in the show notes to apply for a free consult call.

I would be honored to help you.

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