Embracing Your Feelings

Effective coaching dialogues that focus on feeling management reach a point of therapeutic climax right after the client has located, isolated, and owned a specific emotion. It makes for a powerful few minutes when:

• The clients emotion is exposed.

• The clients consciousness is filled with the experience of the emotion.

• The client is aware of whats happening.

• Though feeling the emotion fully, the client feels calm about it.

Each time I observe this process, I have the same reaction. I think to myself , ˜˜Now this is beautiful. It is an honor to participate in such a real and prolific moment.

How does this apply to you? The climax starts once you take ownership. Then the situation calls for some finesse. We are not looking here for passive immersion in your feelings. For example, processing feelings of sadness is not about rolling around in a pile of painful muck. That only exaggerates things and promotes victim thinking.

Your Threefold Goal

Your goal is threefold: to fully experience the emotion; to be aware that you are doing it; and, finally, to realize that, for lack of a better phrase, all is well. If you are feeling an undercurrent of insecurity, bring it into the light and feel it. Then say to yourself, ˜˜There it is. This feeling is a part of me. It is in my makeup . I fight to keep it away but it always returns. Instead, I must welcome the feeling as a part of me. I can let it wash over me as it wants to. There it is.

This threefold experience is the essence of disidentification. It is like sitting on a park bench watching your children play in the playground. You are loving, nonjudgmental, and accepting that these feelings are yours and they are what they are. The psychologist Piero Ferrucci says we disidentify by observing. Instead of being absorbed by sensations, feelings, desires, and thoughts, we observe them objectively without judging them. He says it calls for an attitude of serene observation. This observation removes the self and certain other meta-level constructs from the picture. The feelings being observed are at the object-level and there is no meta-level judgment going on other than the realization that all is well. You are responding to the feelings without ego. Congratulations, you are home.

Perhaps the real meaning of the phrase ˜˜the truth shall set you free lies in this nonjudgmental acceptance of your humanity. Rather than hiding from or resisting ownership of your pain, or anger, or fear, you embrace it as a part of you.

Just the Feelings, Maam

But there is a certain nuance to embracing a feeling that is worth highlighting. It involves the distinction between the object of a certain emotion and the emotion itself. For example, if you are afraid of losing your job and you go about your days with that fear gnawing at you, there are two things to sort out: the fear of losing your job, and fear itself. ˜˜Losing your job is the object of the fear; it is the thing you are afraid of. When we talk about embracing your fear, we refer to the fear itself.

In this case, bringing to mind the fear of job loss, recognizing that you possess fear, holding your experience and your awareness of that fear (without an object), and observing without judgment, you will discover a gradual relieving of intensity. Then you are left not with a fear of job loss, but simply with the possibility of job loss. That is a very powerful distinction. Against undesirable possibilities one is ready to strategize and act. Against something like fear of job loss, one is closer to being a deer caught in the headlights. There is magic in isolating a feeling, such as insecurity, and recognizing it for what it is: insecurity, plain and simple.

The six types described in this book all have an undercurrent of insecurity. In some way, they are prime candidates for embracing that insecurity. In a sense, they walk around the planet with an active, private hypothesis, ˜˜I am not okay. When they see evidence, via their operating strategy, that their hypothesis is true, they go into their dysfunction and get trapped. But embracing the insecurity moves them out of the cycle.

• We want the worrier to say, ˜˜Fear is a part of my life. I can feel this fear and I can observe it. Then I find peace .

• We want the controller to say, ˜˜The angst from which I run is a part of my life. I can feel this angst and I can observe it. Then I find peace.

• We want the fake to say, ˜˜My effort to be what I believe I am not comes from the sweetest insecurity of all: that I am not good enough. I can feel this insecurity and I can observe it. Then I find peace.

• We want the attention-seeker to say, ˜˜The child in me who seeks to fill my gap has an innocent craving for security. I can feel this insecurity and I can observe it. Then I find peace.

• We want the victim to say, ˜˜The pain I feel when I am the target of accountability is a part of my life. I can feel this pain and I can observe it. Then I find peace.

• We want the prisoner to say, ˜˜The angst that periodically settles in my consciousness is a part of my life. I can feel this angst and I can observe it. Then I find peace.

In each case, the idea is to become the observer of your feelings. But you must be nonjudgmental about the observation; otherwise too many meta-level thoughts become engaged, and they are what stimulated the feelings in the first place. By knowing that your meta-levelas beautiful a function as it is, being the source of your recognition of self, beauty, goodness, passionis the source of undesirable emotionality; by knowing that the meta-level creates what we have called ghosts; by knowing how this meta-level operates to create your problematic , periodic angst; and by isolating, owning, and accepting the angst, you transcend the robotic machinations of your emotional life and open the door to personal empowerment. You become the manager of your being.