Are you ever overwhelmed with emotions?
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2018.
If you’ve been following our blog or YouTube channel, maybe you’ve developed more emotional awareness, but now all these new emotions are a lot to handle. One of our alumni asked me about this very issue, so today I want to teach you about how to handle being overwhelmed with emotions without running away or suppressing them…so you actually deal with them in a way that makes you grow as a man.
Question an alum asked me at one of our free “FEARLESS Family” events: “For someone who just started to break out of their apathy and numbness to feeling, and is trying to break out of that shell but is feeling overwhelmed by the new emotions, what is a good process to handle this?”
Ok, this is a great question. I will answer in several parts, but first let me translate what he was talking about for those of you who may not understand.
Apathy
When you are in apathy, you are numbed out to emotions – yours and probably those of others, too. So if you’re having problems getting in touch with and feeling emotions, you are in apathy.
It’s a coping mechanism that comes in to keep you “safe”: Safe from too much trauma as a child, for example.
If something traumatic happens to you as a child, your system will try to do everything it can to limit the emotional trauma, and sometimes that means just numbing out your feelings. Apathy serves its purpose in helping you cope, especially in the short-term and when you don’t have any better coping mechanisms, but it does also prevent you from facing and going through the emotions to truly process and let them go.
All those emotions are still there underneath the apathy, and the numbing you’re doing limits you in other ways. It limits your ability to connect with people, yourself, and it stops you from actually letting go of the past so you can truly be free of it.
“I’m getting worse!”
After you come out of apathy, you typically go into grief or fear. This can mean some (or a lot of) crying, sometimes for the first time in years. Or you could feel all this fear you thought you never had before. That’s where the overwhelm comes in.
Sometimes I get clients who are “approach machines” when it comes to meeting women. They’ll approach everyone with no hesitation. No “approach anxiety”…at least to the untrained eye.
Emotions are for girls, right? Masculinity means NO EMOTIONS! GRR. I AM MAN. …In a word, no!
The thing with these guys who come to me despite their apparent lack of fear is that they’re not connecting that well with women…or usually, whoever they’re interacting with, women or men.
People don’t feel all that drawn to them or trusting of them. Maybe they even can get women’s phone numbers with ease…but they don’t usually get responses from the women when they text or call. That’s because as “FEARLESS” as the guy might seem on the surface, the women (and even other men) didn’t feel a real, genuine connection or a real, genuine, trustworthy human underneath the surface. Because his emotions are numbed out.
So when I get these guys to drop this facade of confidence and actually feel all the emotions underneath their apathy, they start feeling all these heavy emotions (like fear or grief) they weren’t aware of before, and they sometimes think they and their confidence are “getting worse.”
But you have to feel it all and start actually facing it to connect with others better emotionally. So you’re not getting worse. You’re actually learning to connect better with yourself and other people. You’re just going through growing pains.
For me, I have just been coming out of a grief stage as I am starting a new chapter of my own life.
Put that comfort food down!
I have been processing so much, just going through it and letting it unfold. The old me would have immediately gone to numb out with movies or junk food. But the new me is able to watch the grief move through me from the perspective of the observer – taking a step back and being the third-person watcher of your thoughts and emotions.
I ask myself questions that will cause more of the grief that’s already there to come up so I can walk through it, all while knowing that there is an end to it.
You will survive and the heavy emotions aren’t forever.
That’s one of the fears around emotional processing: that the apathy/grief/fear/etc you are in will never end. So that fear leads you to pushing down the emotions and not actually going through them and letting them go.
The key is knowing that once it’s processed, a release (of the emotions – you letting some or all of it go) will happen. Sometimes it can processed quite quickly and after 20 minutes or half an hour, you have moved right through it and let it go. Sometimes it takes longer. The less you resist and have resentment for the emotions, the easier it all is.
If you’re new to the blog, this will help you get caught up on what I’m talking about:
Start Believing in Yourself with These Powerful but Simple Steps (This teaches the basics of processing & releasing, aka letting go of emotions)
This is why I am always asking questions to invite more of the feeling to come forward. One of the ways Dr. David Hawkins (professor, philosopher, and consciousness and spirituality teacher) talks about it is emotions being unresolved. Even if they are from years ago. Did you ever really deal with them, or did you just deny them or push them aside?
The question he poses in the case of trauma, pain, or angst around a particular person (ie: an ex, someone who hurt you, or someone you wanted but never actually had) is:
“What is this person supplying me that if I lost them, I couldn’t give to myself? What is it they were giving me, for example, before I ‘lost them,’ that I now feel like I’m losing?”
It doesn’t have to be a person, either. It could be a belief system or a job, an opportunity you feel like you missed, some perceived “failure,” or anything like that.
Let’s say you got fired from your dream job, or maybe you got the interview but not the job. So ask yourself: “What was this job or idea of a job giving me that I don’t believe I can give myself internally?”
An example one of our team members, Mike, offered to let me share with you for this post was his “the one that got away.”
I asked Mike the question. And Mike felt like this adventurous, gregarious, confident, witty girl was giving him adventures he wouldn’t experience with other people. He felt like her outgoing, “fuck-the-rules” attitude and wit everywhere she went was making his life more fun and fulfilling. And the idea of them being in a relationship made him feel more complete and valuable.
And ultimately Mike felt like he wouldn’t have many chances to meet and attract other woman like her into his life…much less create all those experiences and (most of all) feelings for himself. Which is bullshit, because when he really lets those beliefs and emotions go and feels more fully self-confident, he’ll be able to do all of that. But becoming conscious of those core beliefs and the accompanying emotions is the first step. Then processing.
As you release, process, welcome it all up, and surrender to it one step at a time, it starts moving faster. Eventually you get to a stage where it all feels done and you can move through emotions more freely overall.
Advanced Practice for the times when the emotions feel too overwhelming to even move
This will be more useful if you’ve already been exploring releasing and feeling/movement a lot. If you’re new here and this gets confusing, just focus on the basics of releasing, How to Deal With Emotional Overwhelm & Anxiety – Stop Fighting “The Spins”, and check out the other resources at the end of the post.
Start feeling into your body. Don’t hold it back and move with it. Let yourself cry if that’s what comes up and let yourself process.
I used to play these really sad singer songwriter songs and just feel into the sadness. I would start moving my wrist just a little bit and ride the wave of the emotions through the movement. And I’m talking about tiny micro-movements because that’s where I was at with my feeling. Moving slow and subtly enough to really feel the emotions in your body as you move. It was subtle but it began to wake up my body to feeling.
If you move too fast or too big, it distracts you from the feelings and emotions.
This is also the foundation of communicating with turn-on, feeling, and personal power. Overtime, it gets bigger and you go deeper into yourself, but you have to work on it everyday before it gets smooth and buttery.
In some intensives, we do a lot of a movement processes with exercise balls. I have a whole program around this and it’s often difficult to communicate this concept through writing or video. Imagine a form of exercise that’s not to get you buff physically, but to get you deep emotionally.
Moving Forward
So remember that feeling overwhelmed by emotions, especially if you’ve previously been someone who’s not very emotional, is not going backwards.
It’s you getting in touch with what’s really going on inside you. Don’t run from the emotions. Face them, walk through them, and process them so you can truly let them go and grow into a happier, more confident, more successful person.
Related:
Achieve Your Goals Faster with the 1% Rule
3 Steps to Stop Being So Hard on Yourself
How to Be Emotionally Open with A Woman Without Being a Wuss
