Start Expressing How You Feel

Hey there, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project, and today you are going to learn all about the importance of expressing how you feel. Now, as guys, often we don’t get taught how to do this, we don’t learn how to do this, we don’t practice how to do this; we just tend to keep our feelings to ourselves a lot of the time and this is a massive problem because when we bottle up our emotions inside, we are prone to all sorts of horrible things like illness and depression and just unhappiness and frustration and it makes it hard to connect with other people, particularly with women who just love having an emotional connection with you.

And so I want to really advocate for the idea of you expressing how you feel in any moment. Like, right now I’m feeling a whole mixture of things. I’m feeling happy and I’m feeling frustrated and I’m feeling a bit pissed off and irritated and, you know, all this stuff is going on inside me all at once and it’s very unhealthy to just keep all that stuff bottled down inside.

So it’s very important to be able to express how you feel, and there are a few basic emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, joy, love, peace, frustration, fear, anxiety. These are the main ones; there’s not all that many when you actually count them, and that’s just completely off the top of my head.

http://youtu.be/2nNn14lI9h0

(more…)

10 Signs Your Family Is Crazy-Making

A few years ago when I did The Hoffman Process, one of the facilitators described [intlink id=”480″ type=”post”]my mother’s behaviour[/intlink] as “crazy-making”.

I thought, “Wow, that’s a fantastic description.”

And it wasn’t just my mother; it was the whole family dynamic that she and my passive father helped establish. Take a perfectly normal infant child, bring them up in a crazy-making emotionally disconnected family and you’ve pretty much got a recipe for insanity.

But how do you know if you’re living in a crazy-making family? Well, I’m glad you asked.

So here’s the top 10 signs that your family is crazy-making:

http://youtu.be/W8H98yKcymo

(more…)

What’s So Good About Feeling Bad?

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.

(more…)