Learn to master your basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, peace, love and joy.
As someone who has experienced a truckload of anxiety myself, I was very interested to come across the recent 2019 BBC documentary Nadiya: Anxiety and Me. In this video, I watch the documentary and capture my reaction to Nadiya Hussain‘s experience seeking treatment for her panic attacks; and I bet it’s not what the producers were expecting… (more…)
One of the consequences of being a sensitive child growing up with emotionally unavailable parents was that I didn’t feel loved and accepted for who I was. I developed a strong fear of rejection and abandonment which lasted long into adulthood. It would most often come up in conversations with women, especially if I got the sense that they didn’t like me or didn’t seem to want to talk to me.
For example, I was at a birthday dinner for a female friend a few years ago and was sitting next to an attractive young woman who my friend worked with. We struck up a conversation which went quite well and lasted for several minutes. After a while when there was a lull in our conversation, she turned to the woman sitting on her other side and started talking with her instead of me. I broke out in a sweat. (more…)
Journaling is a great way to release unexpressed emotions that can otherwise accumulate and make us feel anxious. Here is an example of some free-flow journaling that I did last year at a time when I was feeling particularly anxious. It helped me identify and release how I was feeling, so writing it felt very cathartic.
I am so anxious sometimes that it’s literally hard to breathe. Why, why, why, why, why? Or more importantly, what can I do about it? Where is it coming from? I’ve been contemplating this recently, and here are my thoughts: (more…)
I came across Susan Carell’s book Escaping Toxic Guilt while scouring the library shelves for something on topic of dealing with shame. Guilt and shame are close relatives. According to Carell:
Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done, while shame is feeling bad about who you are.
Hmm… I could relate to that. Furthermore, toxic guilt occurs when we feel guilty even though we aren’t doing anything that violates our own value system. Often the source of this guilt is conditioning by controlling parents or other domineering authority figures in our childhood.
The main thing I got from Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Fear is that fear and anxiety aren’t just individual problems; they totally impact the way we relate with each other. Anxiety is contagious and gets passed around between us whenever we interact with anxious people. Families, companies, organisations, churches, countries and social groups of all kinds can become infected with anxiety that affects everyone in the group. When a social system becomes fear-based or shame-based, everyone in it suffers.
Fear can be like a dance, often involving other people
Since anxiety causes suffering, we naturally want to escape. One way of escaping is to dump our anxiety on someone else. Being a sensitive person, I’ve always been susceptible to having other people’s anxiety dumped on me, but it’s only now that I’m learning to recognise when this is happening.
This book helped me identify such a situation once when I volunteered to lead a public speaking training course run by my Toastmaster’s club. I had run it successfully several times before and we always got great feedback from the participants on how valuable it was. But this time I wanted to make it even better by talking more about how anxiety works physiologically, and throwing in some exercises I had learned during my acting classes to help deal with fear right up front.
Do you ever get the feeling that you’re the only one on the planet with feelings? Does it sometimes seem as though your life is at the mercy of your moods? Does everyone around you seem to be cruising along just fine with their emotional barrier up, making it difficult for you to connect with them, and leaving you feeling like there’s something wrong with you? Do you feel out of place because you’re a man, and men aren’t supposed to have feelings; or do you feel that because you’re a woman with feelings, you’re playing second fiddle to the cold, hard men that rule the planet?
Emotional Intelligence is a vital skill we often don’t learn at school
I can relate to these feelings sometimes, and with this in mind I recently tackled Daniel Goleman’s book, Emotional Intelligence. It seemed to me that the message I’d received from my family, my all-boys high school and my society at large while growing up was that emotions were a sign of weakness to be eliminated at all costs. I wasn’t supposed to have feelings when I was a boy; and yet I still have them even now as a man. I’ve often felt deep down that there was something wrong with me as a result. Men were supposed to be emotionally invulnerable, but I’m not. I’d like to be. Other people seem to be; or are they just faking it? I often get hijacked by my own feelings preventing me from doing what I really want. Surely by now I was supposed to be past all that; I’m not a kid any more, after all. Perhaps a little EQ would bring an answer to the quandary.
Anxiety sucks, especially when we don’t know what’s causing it and what to do about it. When we feel anxious all the time for no obvious reason, it’s called generalized anxiety. However there are often things we can do to reduce, eliminate or manage generalized anxiety so that it doesn’t ruin our life.
There are many reasons why we may feel anxious. Solving this problem can sometimes involve trying a number of different approaches until we find one or more that work for us. Based on my experience of what works for me and my clients when feeling anxious, here are some strategies to try: (more…)
Unhealed childhood resentment is like a cancer that can destroy your adult life. We unconsciously project resentment towards our parents that we continue to carry from our childhood, onto other people. Especially people of the same gender as the parent we still resent.
If deep down you are still angry with your mother, you’ll tend to resent any woman who acts even remotely like her. If you still have resentment towards your father, it’s likely to negatively effect the way you relate to other men and authority figures in general. This operates unconsciously so you may not even be consciously aware of it.
If you grew up in an environment where anger wasn’t handled well and you learned to suppress your own anger, you could have a truckload of resentment simmering away beneath the surface that you’re not even consciously aware of. Symptoms of this are feeling rage when other people violate your boundaries, either exploding out of proportion to what’s actually happening or seething internally instead of standing up for yourself.
In the last few days I’ve had a couple of people close to me tell me that they didn’t want to talk about painful experiences that they have had. They said things like “I don’t want to dwell on it” or “I really want a cigarette”, rather than talking about something that made them feel bad.
We’re not always in an appropriate social context to heal emotional pain and it’s wise to be discerning about when and with whom we choose to share vulnerable feelings. Nobody really wants to feel bad; we all naturally want to feel happy and generally speaking we tend to get more of whatever we focus on in life.
However we live in a society which tends to glorify intellect over feelings. Many of us have been taught to suppress emotions while growing up; especially those that our family and friends were uncomfortable with. Few people really understand what emotional trauma is, how it operates or how to heal it.
I did A Show About Anger at the Sydney Fringe Festival in 2018. The show explored the topic of anger using music and comedy. It included songs and stories about childhood trauma, assertiveness, blind rage, people who complain too much, boundary issues with strangers, my epic list of things that annoy me, and various ways to manage anger constructively rather than destructively.
If you like a laugh, enjoy music and would like to learn how to manage anger better, this show is for you: