The Method - How to Move Past Unpleasant Emotions
Decompressing
Decompressing is also known as venting, although decompressing is both a more accurate term and one that carries less stigma. That’s because the thing being decompressed here are your emotions. Most people have trouble dealing with their emotions once those emotions reach a medium or high-intensity. At this point, brain circuits that connect to your higher cognitive processes can literally get blocked, making it impossible to stop feeling your feelings, even if you logically know the thing you’re feeling bad about doesn’t make any sense.
Then why do people always apologize for “just venting” when someone listens to them talk about their feelings? Decompressing or “venting” gets a bad rap because if it’s the only thing you do, you never actually address what caused the negative feelings in the first place. It’s true that some people are chronic venters, and it’s also true that that can exhaust those around them. But decompressing is an integral part of moving on and moving forward. It just can’t be the only thing you do.
Understanding
Understanding should be self-explanatory. How are you going to work on your problems if you don’t understand them in the first place? Often people think they understand what’s going on when they really don’t. Because if they did understand, then executing would be a lot less trouble. That’s why my coaching business is called Know Yourself!
One of the best ways to test whether you truly understand what your roadblocks are is to explicitly outline them and see if you can find any contradictions in your own thinking. Have you resolved all the unanswered questions that you can? This can certainly be done well on your own through journaling, but often people don’t actually sit down and take the time to journal. Unless they already journal as a hobby, it can be like pulling teeth. They procrastinate and would rather do absolutely anything else.
One of the benefits of counseling of any kind is the accountability it provides. When you come to session you are then socially pressured to sit your butt down for 50 minutes and talk about your thoughts and feelings until we both understand them. If there’s anything unclear, your counselor will likely point it out and leave you to ponder on the cognitive dissonance. Once true understanding is reached it often leaves you sitting with uncomfortable feelings and ideas, and that’s when emotional processing begins.
Processing
If you’re confused as to what emotional processing actually means, you’re far from the only one! But it’s not just a buzzword, it might be the most important internal thing you can do to care for yourself. You can think of it as a counterpart to cognitive or intellectual processing. It’s what your computer is doing when it’s converting a file from a .doc to a .pdf, creating slightly new language to describe a similar idea as before. In this case the file is usually a narrative you’ve created about yourself, another person, or some thing or concept that exists in the world.
In psychology, there’s still a lot of debate as to the most efficient ways to emotional process, but there are codified strategies, it’s not just woo. These strategies can get complicated, but in short, what we know is that generally reflecting on and organizing your thoughts and feelings leads to processing.
Planning
This is the most fun part and usually the part everyone wants to skip to! But the reason NOT to follow this urge is because plans made with bad information often go awry. And if you don’t understand what you’re feeling inside, you’re not working with all the relevant information. Similarly, it you haven’t used emotional processing to move on from some of the other attachments getting in your way, you won’t be able to execute the plan anyways.
Executing
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