Managing Difficult Feelings

From Ted

One of my clients recently asked me to share with them ideas on how to manage their anger.  My theory is that denying or holding on to a feeling like anger simply makes it stronger.  Feelings like anger (and all the others) have their origin with some kind of a physical sensation.  A recent study was able to document that a sensation always precedes a person’s awareness of a feeling.

A tightness in the gut, heaviness in the chest, a tingling in the arms, a pain in the neck, and so on.  Those sensations are messages from our bodies, telling us that something is going on that needs our attention.  My experience is that most of us are not very tuned into those messages, mostly missing them all together.  The body will not be denied, however, and such unacknowledged initial messages grow in intensity and finally register in our awareness as a “feeling”, usually a pretty big one, and quite often a difficult one, such as anger, fear, depression, etc.

I encourage clients to participate in activities and exercises designed to help them become more aware of the initial sensations, so as to make choices earlier in the process.  By doing so, one has many more choices than if they wait until the sensation becomes a full fledged feeling.

So back to the client’s question?  How to explain this rather dense concept?

Being a person of metaphors (you may remember the old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”, you may not be as familiar with “A metaphor is worth a thousand pictures”), I remembered that when typing on my Blackberry the way to capitalize a letter (make it go from ‘a’ to ‘A’ for example) is to simply hold down on the key an extra long time.  ‘So the way to keep an ‘a’ (a pain in the gut) from becoming an ‘A (anger at another person) is to pay attention to the ‘a’ when it first shows up. Much easier said than done for the average person, myself included.

Comments

[Suzanne Carter]

I love Ted's article on feelings.......as an Onsite A la TED-trained therapist, I have learned about paying attention( and certainly I don't do it very often), however, I have so many clients who are tuning into the New Age Gurus who say: Well does this feeling serve me.......of course pragmatically one usually says No, and they stuff it.

and thereby ignoring it until it gets too big to ignore. Thanks Ted for this article. Suzanne