The speaker guides how to notice and process emotions by tracing surface reactions like irritability and anger to deeper feelings, sitting with sensations, naming them aloud and observing body cues. She models self-validation and practicing feelings in safe settings.
The speaker describes how trauma and perfectionism can make feeling emotions intimidating and introduces the importance of validating emotions instead of suppressing them. This section sets the context and why learning to process emotions matters.
She defines irritability and anger as often surface-level reactions that point to deeper feelings, and frames an exercise for tracing emotions back to their source. This chapter prepares you to notice patterns and look beneath immediate reactions.
The speaker leads a practical exercise—sitting with the feeling, naming it aloud, observing where it appears in the body, and following it to reveal emotions like anger and grief. This section demonstrates how to safely explore and identify what’s truly bothering you.
Here she emphasizes self-validation—telling yourself the emotion is justified, using mirror work or a supportive friend, and noticing how allowing the emotion reduces its intensity. The segment explains how validation helps you regain choice and move on.
The closing section encourages practicing emotional processing in safe settings, including fully feeling joyful emotions, and reassures viewers they won’t harm themselves. It ends with a preview of the next video about responding to others' emotions.
In this next part, I want to talk about how to feel emotions. And this part might apply to you, it might not. But if you're anything like me, you've struggled with this, especially if you have experienced trauma in your life. This is a very common response for people that have experienced any kind of childhood trauma, that experiencing emotions can be really scary. So I had this fear that if I allowed myself to feel emotions, especially anger, I know what was going to happen. So I was suppressed to them.
And I can tell you that the first time I really allowed anger to come up and feel it, I became homicidal. I wanted to kill my ex-husband for the pain that he had caused me. And that's a drastic response. I'm not saying that you're going to become homicidal if you allow anger to come up. But I want to just explain to you what is happening when you allow emotions to actually come up and feel them. Because a lot of us are good at experiencing happy emotions. We can allow joy to come. But especially if you are type A personality, perfectionist, overachiever, love doing everything in excellence and high integrity, similar to me.
You probably get kind of down on yourself when you let negative emotions bother you. And so I was having this conversation with a coaching client and they kept beating themselves up over, I just don't want to feel this way anymore. I'm frustrated. I'm irritable. And I'm just trying not to focus on it because I should be grateful for everything I have in my life. And I had to inform him that this is actually unhealthy to keep telling yourself I shouldn't be feeling this way. And so one of the things I work on with my coaching clients is actually validating your own emotions.
Because if you're like me, you struggle with that because you don't want to feel bad emotions. Who does? They're not fun, right? They don't feel good in your body. But it's really important to validate your own emotions because nobody else might do it. Maybe you have a therapist or a coach or a good support network, but at the end of the day, you have to be able to validate your own emotions because you're the one that has to live with you and it's how you can move past them when you validate them.
So processing them is really important. So I'm going to walk you through an exercise on how to do this. So let's say you are experiencing the emotion of irritability. This is often a surface level emotion. That means there's something else underneath. There's a lot of emotions like that. Anger is one of them as well. That's another surface level emotion that usually points to a root of something else. So a lot of times the initial emotion that we experience isn't even the one that at the core is bothering us.
So I was experiencing irritability the last few days. And I'm not a typical irritable person. People don't annoy me. I have kind of a lot of patience for people actually. So when I get easily annoyed by people, I know right away that something is bothering me. And it's probably not just that I didn't get a good night's sleep, although that probably has something to do with it because I probably didn't get a good night's sleep because something was bothering me. So again, just continue to point to the root.
So that's part of the exercise is figuring out what is the root emotion. So for me, it like meditating, it looks like praying and just really allowing them to come up. So and as an exercise you can try for processing emotions would be basically sitting with that emotion, almost inviting it to sit with you, have coffee with it. So for me, that looks like sitting in this particular chair. This is my processing, my prayer chair. And I sometimes journal. I'm not a huge journaler, but it does sometimes help kind of get my thoughts out and I just kind of write and write.
Doesn't have to have sentences, doesn't have to be legible. My journal is completely illegible. So it could be something just writing thoughts down that come up. and then just allowing it to kind of wash over you, like sitting with the ick and so saying, okay, so I'm irritable right now. I'm recognizing that I'm irritable right now. It's okay that I'm irritable right now, which is often what I'm telling my clients when I'm coaching them anyway. So I sometimes literally say it out loud to myself.
It's okay that I'm irritable right now. What is making me irritable right now? There must be something because this emotion is coming up. It's not going away. It's valid because I can't really control my emotions anyway. There's something happening in my life or in my mind that is causing me to have this emotion and my body is wanting to react in a certain way, right? The emotion means to move or to act. So my body's wanting me to do something and maybe it means I shouldn't be around people because I'm irritable.
But what is at the root of my irritability? I did this exercise with myself. I said, okay, I'm just going to sit here and I'm just going to allow the irritability to come up. And then I'm going to recognize where I'm actually feeling that in my body. For me, it started as just kind of like just, I don't know, like my face was basically making this motion and my stomach was feeling a little bit unsettled and I just like wanted to punch something. So then all of a sudden I realized I was kind of angry.
And I started to recognize my hand was in a fist and I'm like, my gosh, now I'm angry. Okay, well now what do I do with this? And this is where it can start to get a little bit scary. So it takes practice and give yourself some patience with this because this whole process took me actually a couple of years to get down to really understand what is happening in my body so that I can become in tune with my body when I'm experiencing emotions. So then the anger came up and then soon after I allowed the anger to just really set in and I ended up having just a pain in my stomach and I had a tension in the back of my neck.
And then I realized, you know what? I'm experiencing grief because something was taken from me. A memory, a hope of the future was taken from me and I am upset about it. I'm irritable. I'm angry. I'm frustrated because I have absolutely no control over it. So again, that's another emotion, this loss of control feeling that I have. And so as I allow this to just kind of come up and again, I'm just sitting here in this chair, sitting with this emotion and allowing it to kind of just notice where it's going in my body, I get to the root of what's actually bothering me, which is I'm grieving right now.
And No wonder I'm irritable. So in that moment, I had to say to myself, you know what, Carrie, it's okay that you're grieving and that you're irritable and that you're angry because it's justified. And this is the really important part of processing emotions. It is justified that you feel that way. I don't care what the emotion is, But it's okay and it's justified and it's valid that you feel that way because it's your emotions. It's unique to you. It's your body's physiological response to what's happening in your life.
And that's okay. And so start to validate yourself. And sometimes that means going to the bathroom, looking in the mirror and saying, you know what, it's okay that you're angry. It's okay that you're grieving because this, and this happened. Say to yourself what you would want someone else to tell you. And maybe you do want to call someone else up. I actually have a friend that I can do this with and I can say, what, this is exactly what I need you to tell me because I'm saying it to myself and I'm not believing it for some reason.
But this friend also knows me so well that they know exactly what they need to say when I call them up for this kind of validation. But just try it yourself. Validate your own emotions and then watch what happens. Because the second you start to validate your emotions, they don't have as much control over you anymore. So sure, I want to go punch something, not someone, something, because I'm angry and I'm frustrated and I'm irritable and I'm grieving. But once I allowed the emotion to fully kind of take over inside my body, it didn't have as much power anymore.
And then I validated it and I realized, You know what? I can stay irritable all day long. I really can. I have the ability and the permission to do that. But I also don't want to and I want to experience some joy today. So now that I've allowed it to come up, it's basically like I had my coffee date with it. great, checked it off my to-do list and we had that community time together and now we're moving on and I'm going to go about the rest of my day because that's really a key to processing emotions is letting them come up, validating them and then watching as they diminish.
It doesn't mean they might not come up again, especially if it's a negative emotion and you're in the midst of some sort of tragedy or turmoil, that's normal. But the more you practice validating your own emotions and processing them them and identifying them, the less power and control they have over you. And I also want to encourage you to do this with joyful, happy emotions. So when you are feeling contentment, you are feeling joy, recognize it. Recognize where in your body you're feeling that and just allow it to wash over you because it's the most intense, euphoric feeling to allow joy to fully feel you up.
so that you can experience that to the fullest. Because if you're like the way I was where you shunted emotions, you only had a very narrow window of what you could experience. So I actually shunted myself from experiencing true joyful emotions as well. So now that I have the ability to allow them to come up and feel them, I can experience joy on a different level too. But I just want to invite you to practice this. It takes practice and it takes doing it. And I promise you, if you do it in a safe environment, you won't end up hurting yourself or someone else.
You just have to allow them to come and validate them. It's really important to do that part, the validation part. And in the next part of this, we're going to talk about how to process other kinds of emotions and what to do with other people's emotions, because that's another piece of this puzzle of, we can validate our own emotions, but how do we respond to other people experiencing emotions? So stay tuned with me for the next video on that.
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