mentalhealth

Happiness for Cynics podcast

This week, Marie and Pete discuss getting in touch with your feelings and why it’s so important that you express them. 

Transcript

M: You’re listening to the podcast happiness for cynics. I’m Marie Skelton, a writer and speaker on change and resilience.

P: And I’m Peter Furness a toga wearing, butt baring exhibitionist of joy filled indulgences. Each week we will bring to you the latest news and research in the world of positive psychology, otherwise known as happiness.

M: So if you’re feeling low.

P: Or only satisfied with life but not truly happy with it.

M: Or maybe you just want more.

P: Then this is the place to be!

M: And to take us one step further on our happiness journey on today’s episode, we are going to talk about feelings.

P: [Singing] Nothing more than feelings… [Laugh, de, de, de, du, du]

[Happy intro Music]

P: Right Muz, this is your episode. This is just for you.

M: Oh it is SO not for me.

P: [Laugh]

M: Before we do jump in though. I do want to talk about a great little news article. A school in Ireland has swapped homework for acts of kindness. Pupils at a primary school in County Cork were told they didn’t have to submit any homework, instead they’re asked to record acts of kindness they had carried out for friends and family.

P: Can you imagine being a kid in this school? You would be like “Yeah, I’m so gonna do this, I’m not doing any homework.”

M: Absolutely.

P: So this is very much like the schools that are replacing detention with meditation.

M: Oh, yes. Look at us softies.

P: [Laugh]

M: I thought you were meant to get more hard-lined as you get older.

P: I think a little bit of the science based approach to life has rubbed off on me Marie in doing this podcast.

[Laughter]

M: Absolutely. And this one I’m going back to my cynical roots.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: And when we were talking about during this episode talking about feelings, you know, I said “[euch] I’m really not good at talking about feelings” and you said, “That’s great because I am.”

P: [Laugh]

M: But we’re really not only going back to our roots here, but we’re taking different, stereotypical gender roles here.

P: We are.

M: Because normally it’s the other way around.

P: In line with that, talking about feelings is very, it’s documented science backs it up, that men do not express their feelings as easily as women, and that’s become a socially conditioned premise that was instilled by our fathers and everybody’s fathers before them. It was push it down, suck it up.

M: It was society.

P: It was, the men were supposed to be strong and not be affected by emotion and look after the women that was our societal conditioning and this has changed dramatically in the last 60 years I think and we’re really seeing that totally being stripped away and men now are being encouraged to talk about their feelings and I think the thing is, if you’ve never had the opportunity to have the language or have those discussions at a younger age, which many men around my generation or a little bit older than I am, didn’t they weren’t encouraged to have those conversations. All of a sudden, it’s very difficult to talk about your feelings and come up with words or come up with the concept of describing your emotions.

M: For a long time I struggled to communicate feelings and because we were just told to suck it up and shove it down and move on.

P: Yeah.

M: Yeah it can have, ah, huge implications for your mental well-being, and I definitely felt the repercussions of not being able to communicate or even have the language or understanding or self-awareness as a teen to understand what I was going through, and I went through quite a rough period in my teens. My sister was very, very ill, and I didn’t know how to cope with that will deal with that, so it definitely can have very serious implications if you can’t talk about your feelings.

P: And we’re going to get to that further when we actually to talk about some of the research that is out there. Not talking about your emotions has a physical effect on your body, and we’ll come to that maybe later on in the episode. But I hear what you’re saying Muz, and I think it’s really important that we learn those lessons young because otherwise you do… People can go through half of their lives without expressing their emotions and not dealing with conversations that are difficult to have and not being able to be happy or be happier or find some sort of calmness or quietness in the crazy world that we all live in.

M: Yep, absolutely. So, what is some of the research that you found?

P: One of the articles that I was reading was on ‘The Conversation’, which is a fabulous website –

M: Mmm.

P: – that does a lot of research-based articles, and it talks about how we are socially conditioned to judge emotions. So as a society having negative and positive emotions is normal, but many of us in a social setting are taught, we instantly judge people who are having hyper emotions so we’re going to accept some emotions and reject others and unfortunately, a lot of those hard to have conversations that involved people speaking honestly and openly and saying things that aren’t comfortable fall into that latter aspect of being rejected emotions.

Having that permission to feel and to express your feelings is something that not everybody gets to develop in their teenage years exactly as you’ve nominated Marie with your example and it comes to us later in life. When you are having very intense feelings of fear, aggression or anxiety. Your amygdala is running the show so the amygdala is part of the limbic system in the brain. This is the part that handles your fight or flight response. So it has a lot to do with adrenalin.

M: It’s the elephant.

P: [Laugh]

M: If anyone’s ever done the neuro psychology of the Elephant and the Rider.

P: Talk about that Muz.

[Laughter]

M: Um… When your emotions are running the show, in the corporate that I’m in right now, they’ve done a lot of neuroscience and psychology based work to help teams perform at their best and we talk about the elephant and the rider. And even though you’re the rider sitting on top of your elephant, sometimes that bugger of an elephant just takes off and does its own thing.

P: [Laugh]

M: And it could take a while to get control of it again.

P: Exactly.

M: And that’s your amygdala, and that is the root of all evolutionary, deep, deep feelings of fight and flight and all that stuff.

P: Yep.

M: All that fabulous stuff that kept us alive and led to us being the top of the food chain.

P: Exactly, absolutely. And the effect of this is shown it’s that fight or flight response. Your amygdala will rule the show and say, “OK, we’re going to be in a fearful situation here, so we need to enact actions, so we need to pump blood to our brains, [we need] to pump blood into our muscles so we can run away. These kind effacts are all ruled by emotions, not only by emotions, but they have that physical response. So it’s really important to be aware of that.

And if you look at some of the research that’s come out of the UCLA, they talk about this limbic system and diminishing the response of the amygdala when you encounter distressing or upsetting emotions, call it ‘affect labelling’. So this is being able to identify issues and give them names. Be specific about the name. So this comes back to a previous episode that we talked about in terms-

M: Fred.

P: What?

M: Like Fred or Mark?

P: Aah.. what?

M: [Laugh]

P: What???

M: You said I was going to name them?

P: [Laugh]

M: I’m naming them.

P: [Laugh] Well that’s a curve ball, Marie.

[Laughter]

P: I’m thinking more about nominating emotions [laugh].

M: Ohhh, like anger.

P: You’ve gone with Fred [Laugh].

M: I’m feeling Fred right now.

P: Horatio?

[Laughter]

P: Okay. So, Lieberman, Eisenberg and Crockett from UCLA talk about affect labelling and how we can diminish this fight or flight response when it comes to experiencing emotions. So being able to be specific with your language helps to downgrade that neuroscience response.

M: Yep, being able to say I’m feeling angry because you took my red car starts to move you out of that ‘elephant zone’ where the –

P: Yep, exactly.

M: – elephant is running the show and into the rider zone and giving you control.

P: It’s that whole thing of being specific with your language it’s like I’m angry, I’m frustrated, I’m wild with rage, I’m slightly inconvenienced gay man, you know?

[Laughter]

P: But having that ability is really important because it does, as you said, move you out of the elephants space. You start to get more control over the specifics of that anger, and you start to unpack it. And that’s, that’s affect labelling.

M: Yep.

P: And the Southern Methodist University talks about this, Kouros and Papp undertook a study that looked at the effects of holding back thoughts and emotions and what that did to the body.

M: Ooh.

P: The negative feelings became repressions and what they found was that taxes the brain and body and makes you more susceptible to being ill or [having a] downgraded immune system or just feeling bad. Holding onto those negative emotions allows the body to internalise, and it has a physical effect of downgrading immune response and makes you more susceptible to disease and illness.

M: I would love to do a cultural study on this because I, when I went to George Mason University in the States, I lived with a Yugoslavian, well she was Yugoslavian way back then, a Puerto Rican and an Argentinean.

P: [Laugh] Wow.

M: And you could not get more fiery personalities. And I am a descendant from England and we do not talk about health. We do not talk about money. We bottle. We do not confront. We hide and I was, you know very good at all of that. And I remember coming home from class one evening and they were throwing plates and each other in the lounge room.

P: [Laugh]

M: They were that angry. They were going “Blah blah blah!” “Blah blah!” I didn’t know what they were talking about, but they were yelling, and they were throwing, and I just turned right back around and went to the library, I was like, ‘I cannot do this.’

P: [Laugh]

M: And the next day, they were best friends again. We have no crockery anymore [laugh]. But they were good friends. Whereas, you know, looking at that and trying to understand it with an outsider’s view I was completely baffled. If that had happened in my household or with any of my friends that I’d grown up with, we would never have spoken to each other ever again in their lives.

P: Yeah. Well, that’s it because sometimes you need to get it out and there are some people who respond to that. When you’ve got that externalisation of emotions like ‘I just have to stand here and scream!’ and then I’ll be okay.

M: Yeah, well, I think it’s something that Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, anyone who really was colonised.

P: From the English perspective.

M: He he, yeah.

P: Definitely, I think you’re absolutely right.

M: We hide or shy from confrontation as a rule, not always.

P: Yep, definitely.

M: And I think it’s well, as you’ve just shown, it’s to our detriment.

P: Absolutely, yeah it has a physical detriment to us.

M: How do you change that? Because I hate confrontation. Hate it.

P: Well, I think that again if you’ve been brought up in that environment, say, a French environment where you have a mother and father yelling and screaming, and then the next minute they’re making love on the kitchen table [laugh]. Generalising here.

[Laughter]

P: That might lead you to have an –

M: That might scar you too.

P: [Laugh] – understanding that nothing is held on to. So it’s okay to yell and scream because at the end of the day, you come back to that loving space or to that space where everything is accepted.

M: It’s also a far more psychologically safe environment for a child to grow up in.

P: Yeah.

M: Knowing that you can lose your shit and still be loved. And sometimes you might cross a line when you lose your shit.

P: Yep.

M: And sometimes you might need to apologise for not having control over your emotions or things that was said in the heat of the moment.

P: Taking responsibility for your actions, definitely.

M: Yeah, but you’ll still always be loved the next day. Whereas when you come from a family where you don’t talk about these things, the implication is, if you do, you’re not really following the script.

P: Uh huh.

M: And that you don’t know what will happen off the back of that, it’s not a psychologically safe place to be.

P: No. Interestingly enough, I had the same experience as a teenager. I was encouraged not to express my emotions or talk about my emotions and there was a lot of repression that went on and I was a very socially awkward teenager.

M: Oh, I can’t see that, I can’t see it at all!

P: Oh, it was very real. Someone sent me a photo a couple of years ago. My old dance teacher, Judy Joy, sent  me a photo going ‘I found this Peter, looking through my, my archives.’ And there’s this sully, horrible teenager staring at the camera going ‘what are you doing taking a photo of me!?’ I was like ‘Oh my goodness, is that me?’ [Laugh]  What and unhappy child. [Laugh] An unhappy 16 year old. Getting to the point of getting into university. Getting into an arts environment where it was much more expressive.

M: Mm hmm.

P: All of a sudden, I did have to start talking about my feelings and opening up. And I remember having conversations with people and saying “how do you just come out with stuff like that?” and them saying “You’ve just got to share sometimes.” And I said “but you shouldn’t do that.” “Well, you’ve got to trust the right people.” And I think this comes down to some of that hints and tips that we’ll come to in a second. It is trusting who you share with and finding the right person to share with. But once I started, oh it came out like a flood of torrent.

M: [Laugh]

P: Everybody started knowing everything about me because I was sharing all the time.

M: And now there are no filters.

[Laughter]

P: And that as well is not great because again creates difficulty in social environments [laugh].

M: Yes.

P: And that’s where we do, we start to judge the emotions before they come out. So if we can find a happy medium.

[Laughter]

P: I think you’re right that it teaches us that it is okay to express those emotions and to come out with them at the right time and take responsibility for them when you have lost your shit for example, because at the end of the day there will be in a loving environment. There will be support. There will be ‘it’s okay to have said that. Let’s now, let’s look at it and let’s dissipate the intensity of the emotion, the fight or flight response and let’s get you more calm shall we say.’ [Laughter]

M: And I think… Look there’s an initiative in Australia called R U Okay? where people are encouraged to talk about mental health and I fully support that.

P: Mmm same. The mission statement starts, it’s something simple like this, ‘It’s so important to get people talking.’

M: Absolutely. So, I’m not at all criticising the initiative, and I think it’s done great things for opening up the dialogue in Australia.

P: Mmm.

M: What I do caution against is opening up to people who are just going through the motions on that day.

P: Yes.

M: You need to just, you know, reiterating what you were saying there, you need to open up to the right people.

P: Mmm.

M: If you are going to our someone is they’re Okay, I think you’ve got to take a little bit of responsibility to be there for them if they’re not.

P: Mmm. That comes into one of the tips that I’ve got here is:

Allowing space and time without interruptions.

M: For the conversation?

P: For the conversation, yeah. It’s not just a question, and then ‘oh that’s great bye.’ It is about allowing space and time without interruptions, without distractions, locking yourself away if need be, to have the confronting conversations; And give yourself a time limit like it’s going to 30 minutes and we’re going to talk it out. And if we don’t get to the resolution in 30 minutes, that’s fine. We’ve started the conversation.

M: Yeah.

P: And having that consistent 30 minutes every week. Will tease out those little things every now and then, and that can be a really valuable way, especially for people-

M: [Gasp] Every week?

P: Yeah, it’s confronting, but this is, this is the commitment. You’ve actually got to commit to the process.

M: Why? How long are we talking about? Oh my goodness, Pete!

P: [Laughter]

M: You want to talk about feelings for 30 minutes every week?

P: Yep. It’s just like training the more you do it, the better you get at it.

M: Like, if there’s a problem, right? Not just ‘let’s talk about our feelings.’

P: Well, I will give you an example there. I know some French friends of mine who have a monthly meeting where they discuss their emotions within the context of the relationship.

M: I think I know who you’re talking about.

P: Yeah [laugh].

M: They’re talking about a relationship, so that’s a bit different. So there’s not necessarily something negative they’re trying to, to use your words solve or to get over. I think that’s a little bit of, that’s a relationship chicken, and I love that. I think that’s great. But talking about your feelings, for half an hour every week… oohh.

P: Until you find a point of resolution, if there’s an issue –

M: If there’s an issue? Yep.

P: – that you’re not expressing your emotions and if this emotion is eating you up and causing your physical distress.

M: Ok, I’m on board with that.

P: If you’re wondering why your stomach doing back flips and you’re getting acid reflux every, every time you eat a meal. Maybe look at what’s going on mentally, and these are the kind of signals that I think warn us to be having these conversations and that’s what, you would, you commit to something for a month of 30 minutes a week.

M: I would say, though, just to be careful with that word resolution.

P: Mmm hmm.

M: I don’t think that everything can have a resolution, and sometimes the resolution is that we agree not to talk about this or not to engage on this because we are on opposite sides.

P: Sure.

M: So there’s some great examples of families in America who were pro and against an anti-Trump and it’s torn their families apart because if they couldn’t not talk about that. So I think there are situations where it’s OK to not talk.

P: Uh huh.

M: And maybe if you’ve got lingering feelings or issues that it’s okay to instead of laying it all on a loved one, talk to someone who’s not part of the problem or the issue and go talk to a professional.

P: Absolutely, yeah. This comes up in some of the other tips that I’ve got here is:

Finding a method of communication that works for you.

Now that could be chatting. It could be writing. It could be a person to person, or it could be external. So it is about sharing that burden, and it doesn’t always have to be the same person. But if you’re not getting the right venting that you need from having it with the person that’s affected, then maybe you do need to go on seek external help, such as seeking a counsellor or psychiatrist that could walk you through those places because sometimes for people it’s .. much easier to open up to a complete stranger –

M: Mmm hmm.

P: – Where there is no judgement.

M: Yep, and sometimes that stranger is far better equipped to actually get you through a bad period.

P: Absolutely, definitely, yep. A couple of other things I’ll just throw out here because we are getting to the end of the episode.

Planning your disclosure.

So you don’t have to disclose absolutely everything. Make a list of things that you do not want to discuss and things that you’re willing to discuss in terms of having this conversation about your emotions. If they’re emotions that you… violence or abuse and maybe you’re not ready to disclose those. Put them aside. You don’t have to bring that all to the table.

Come out with a wide vocabulary.

Again we’ve talked about this previously on an episode, getting specific about the feelings and labelling them coming into that concept of affect labelling.

Talk with not about.

I like this one. Keeping about you and your feelings don’t get torn away talking about what so and so did to me and how that what they must be feeling about that bring it back to what’s about you so that you can really think about how your reactions are and how that conversation made you feel, rather than postulating about somebody else’s feelings and the last one.

Letting go of outcomes.

Don’t expect to all come straightaway or easily and that’s where the regular scheduling, sometimes the really important. As you begin to open up, you can start to maybe open up more and disclose a little bit more if you feel it in that safe environment.

M: Yep, I think let go of outcomes is important. But also be clear about what it is you want from the conversation so if you’re going to talk about feelings. Have a idea; Sometimes you just need to talk.

P: Yeah.

M: You don’t need a resolution.

P: No.

M: You don’t need someone to fix things.

P: Yeah.

M: You just need to process it yourself, and having someone to bounce the conversation off is really helpful and useful. But if you find yourself talking through the same thing, we can week out with no outcome, no way forward. It can be really damaging to be reliving this on a regular basis. Whatever it is that you’re coping with and sometimes you need a circuit breaker and something to move on from. You need to call it and say ‘I’m going to leave this here now.’

P: Yep.

M: ‘And I’m going to move forward with my life.’

P: Yep, definitely. I think moving forward is really important. But if that if that element keeps coming back to haunt you, then maybe there’s something you need to address. Maybe that is where you do need to seek professional help.

M: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for joining us today. If you want to hear more, please remember to subscribe. And like this podcast on Remember, you find us at http://www.marieskelton.com. A site about how to find balance, happiness and resilience in your life.

P: And please if you feel up to it, leave a comment or a message we’d love to hear from you. And a rating will help us out.

M: Yes. That would make us happy.

P: OK, until next time, Choose Happiness

[Happy exit Music]

Related content: Read Happiness for Cynics article Words That Can Change Your Mindset, listen to our Podcast Why You Need to Develop Your Emotional Literacy (E42)