Emotions

Learn to master your basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, peace, love and joy.

Bravery Is Not The Absence Of Fear

I have a good friend who is in the process of working through her childhood emotional abandonment trauma and renegotiating fairer adult relationships with the people in her life.

This kind of work can be heavy going at times and during a recent heart-to-heart conversation about her experience, she said:
“People keep telling me I’m brave. I don’t feel very brave.”

I was curious about this so I asked: “Well what do you think bravery is?”

She thought for a moment and replied: “Bravery is superheroes rescuing defenceless people.”

“I have a different perspective”, I said:

“Bravery isn’t the absence of fear:
Bravery is taking action in the face of fear; even when you don’t know if you will succeed.”

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By Graham Stoney, ago

12 Adult Signs That You Experienced Emotional Abandonment In Childhood

If we were surrounded by emotionally available adult caregivers as an infant, our developing brain and nervous system learned to regulate our emotions via a healthy emotional attachment to the adults around us. However if we were surrounded by emotionally unavailable adults who routinely dismissed, minimised or suppressed both their own emotions and ours, we experienced emotional abandonment.

Being denied the emotional connection we needed as an infant can have a traumatic effect on our developing brain. Emotional abandonment can lead to Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) or what Susan Anderson calls PTSD of Abandonment in adults. The primary result is that we fail to develop healthy adult emotional regulation and can often end up feeling overwhelmed by our own emotions. This effect can last long into adulthood until we find a way to address it.

Emotional abandonment is a massive problem even in communities and families that are otherwise free of overt abuse. It’s fairly easy to recognise when you’ve been on the receiving end of physical, sexual or emotional abuse as a child and most adults recognise that reaching out for help is the appropriate, responsible and shameless thing to do.

However, with emotional abandonment the problem is fundamentally one of neglect and this is more difficult to recognise. We typically only have our own experience of childhood to compare against in identifying what is and isn’t normal or healthy. When you’re just a kid and everyone around you is avoiding emotional connection, it’s hard not to conclude that this is how to live. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Recover From Childhood Emotional Abandonment

One of the most challenging childhood scenarios for a man to recover from is emotional abandonment. I grew up in a household where emotions weren’t dealt with openly in ways that felt safe to me, so I know this scenario backwards; and so do most of my clients.

However, emotional abandonment can be hard to spot unless you know what you’re looking for so to find out whether emotional abandonment in childhood could still be affecting your adult life, check out my article on 12 Adult Signs That You’ve Experienced Emotional Abandonment In Childhood.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Overcoming Anxiety, Stress & Burnout with Emotional Intelligence

One of my most helpful mentors when it comes to learning to manage anxiety is a guy named Nicholas de Castella. I did his brilliant breakthrough workshop Passionately Alive, and I always remember a private session with Nicholas where towards the end he said to me:

“The reason you’re anxious is because you don’t know who you are”

Nicholas is an extremely compassionate and genuine guy who gave up his previous career as an architect to teach emotional intelligence to other people for a living. Since then he has helped thousands of people go from feeling stuck, blocked and frustrated to creating a wonderful life, relationship, and career of their dreams.

If you happen to be feeling anxious, burnt out or overwhelmed and would like to ignite some energy and move forward in your life, then Nicholas has an exciting opportunity for you.

Nicholas is holding a complimentary emotional intelligence webinar called:

IGNITE: Energy for Life! (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

3 Steps to Manage Anger and Other Emotions More Effectively

This is a guest post from Anger Management Coach Igomene Joseph.

Anger is one emotion that we have all felt at some point in our lives. However, the way we express and manage it can vary from person to person. For many around the world, anger is just a common emotion. Most have not felt it to an overwhelming amount in their lives.

For me, the story is different. Anger was a fierce emotion and it would consume me. I eventually realized that anger was not just an emotion in my case but a problem that needed to be resolved.

Why I Needed the Control?

Using FPS Can Help You Take Your Anger Less Seriously

When you let an emotion overwhelm or consume you, it can become a weakness. Emotions should be expressed but they say excess of everything is bad. Too many emotions make us vulnerable to the harsh world. But in case of anger, the situation is slightly different. Anger is not just something that affects you but the people around you.

Consider it as a metaphorical force of nature that leaves you wrecked as it leaves your body and then damages all other people in its way. It is ironic that subduing anger can also be a problem. In an attempt to save people, we often let the anger fester inside ourselves. And that is so much worse. The anger that festers rots us from the inside and erupts ferociously at some point. That explosion can cause lots of destruction in one’s life. (more…)

By Igomene Joseph, ago

Benefits Of The FPS Technique For Anger Management

This is a guest post from Anger Management Coach Igomene Joseph.

Anger as an emotion is neutral, it is neither bad nor good. It is a normal reaction of man to situations and circumstances of life and it may either be productive or counterproductive. It is productive when you use it to make some self-assertion and demonstrate how passionate you are about something. However, it becomes counterproductive when it regularly spirals out of control or flares up too often. Chronic fits of anger emotion may have negative impacts on one’s health, relationships and state of mind.

FPS is a Method of Communicating Feelings that helps Manage Anger Effectively

However, the fact is managing and transforming anger emotion into positive vibes is one of the easiest and most natural things you can ever do, but that is only if you apply a practical, workable technique to deal with it and that is where our heuristically developed technique, FPS (Feelings + Problem = Solutions), comes in handy.

FPS is not one of those scratch-at-the-surface, superficial and hence, ineffective techniques of managing anger, rather it is a down-to-the-root approach of managing and transforming the negative emotion of anger into a constructive emotion that could enhance your health, self-esteem, communication skills and emotional mastery. (more…)

By Igomene Joseph, ago

Using Music To Express Anger and Rage

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been studying Music Performance full-time at a local tertiary college, and the experience has been extremely healing for me. The interactions with teachers and other students have brought a lot of my unresolved adolescent insecurities to the surface: in some ways, going to college is like going back to high school. My fears about whether I would fit in brought up a lot of anxiety for me, coupled with a very strong desire to try hard to make other students like me. I often had to take a deep breath and remind myself to focus on what I was learning and just have fun participating instead.

“Full-time” at the college I’m attending is only 2.5 days per week; although I spend pretty much all the rest of the week doing homework of various forms: learning to play new instruments, practising songs for our performance night, writing my own songs and getting them recorded.

In the process I’ve found music an excellent way to express anger and rage. A lot of the songs I’ve been writing have a great deal of anger in them, inspired primarily by life circumstances and/or other people’s behaviour. Writing, performing, recording and releasing these songs has been extremely cathartic for me and the feedback from the other students has been very positive and accepting. Over half my fellow students are straight out of high school and also have a lot of anger and rage to express. Although I’m more than twice their age, they get where I’m coming from.

Finally, my inner teenager is beginning to feel accepted.

The Song To Play When You’re Having A Bad Day

After six months hard work, I’ve even released my first single: a song titled Everything Is Fucked that I wrote in a yin yoga class in North Bondi at 6:37pm on 17th February 2017 while in Frog pose for seven agonising minutes.

At the time, I had been suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for nine years and after five months pushing myself through three excruciating yoga sessions a week, wasn’t getting the results that I had hoped for: I had totally failed to pick-up at a yoga studio full of gorgeous young women, I was rapidly going broke because my Life Coaching business had failed to take off (who wants a sick Life Coach?!?), both my elderly parents had been diagnosed with cancer, a sweet hot girl I met online and completely fell for had started going out with a musician who lived 12,000 km closer to her than me; and I was still chronically ill. When the dishwasher in my apartment appeared to have stopped working properly, that was the last straw for me.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Deal With Other People’s Jealousy

An interesting thing happens when we get out act together, drop our victim stories, start taking responsibility for our lives and getting what we want in life: Other people’s response to us change significantly. The majority of people treat powerful, self-confident men with respect; but there will always be people who respond with hostility because they are jealous of our success.

Don’t Get Trapped By Other People’s Jealousy

The only real downside to letting go of our insecurities and learning to live life on our own terms is that other people’s insecurities can start getting triggered by us.

This happened to me today at music college when another male student walked up to a lighthearted group conversation I was having and suddenly said “Graham, you need to stop being such a cunt.”

That didn’t feel good to me: I immediately felt deflated. When I thought about it later, I felt angry; but when I interpreted what he said in the context of possible jealousy towards me, I could see that his comment was really about him rather than me.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Why I Got Upset In Guitar Class

I’m a full time music student at the moment, and I’m loving learning how to write songs, perform in front of people and express myself through music. Music is great because it deals with both the analytical and emotional side of our brain.

Becoming a rock star isn’t all riffs and distortion. There’s conflict with other musicians to navigate too.

However, the irrational nature of emotions means that they don’t always arise just when we want them to. Most of us are still carrying unhealed emotional baggage from our past which can get triggered in what might otherwise seem fairly innocuous situations. This can make dealing with unexpected upsets challenging both in ourselves and in other people.

In yesterday’s guitar class, I got triggered by my teacher’s response to what I though was a fairly intelligent question about whether the best way to improvise over a chord sequence in a major key would be by using the associated relative minor scale. My engineering brain thought that this would lead to less potential dissonance; but for any other budding musicians out there the answer turns out to be No: you use the minor pentatonic scale of the same key.

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By Graham Stoney, ago