Hello, my loves, I am so excited to bring you this episode. Who is ready to feel better? If that’s you, you have come to the right place. This episode isn’t JUST about feeling better, which is a lot of what we’ll talk about but it’s also about seeing and thinking about emotions in a whole new way. 

First, I want to start off by asking two quick questions, “What are you currently feeling?” and “Why do you want to feel better?”

For those of us going through infertility and IVF those might seem like stupid questions with really obvious answers but I do want you to take a second and answer them. I ask those questions because understanding why you don’t want to feel the way you do is way more significant that you might think. 

The reason for that is that we think of the uncomfortable emotions that we experience as terrible. We hate them. Anger, Shame, Guilt, frustration, resentment, jealousy, anxiety, fear. We could list all the damn feelings that we experience during infertility and IVF and hardly any of them would feel comfortable to us. 

We truly believe these feelings to be the worst. But the truth is that most of us aren’t ACTUALLY feeling our feelings, and that’s why our experience of these is so awful. 

I know you might be saying, “Nah, that bullshit. I feel like crap most of the time.” Yea, I get it! I was right there with you. But when most of us think we’re feelings our feelings, we’re actually doing one of three things:

• Resisting

• Reacting

• Avoiding

I don’t know about you, but I was never taught how to feel my feelings. I don’t know anyone who really was- not as a part of growing up. I learned it a little more as I was working on my bachelors and then master’s in social work, but I was already an adult with some very established beliefs about feelings. But for sure, what we teach in our culture, by example, and what we demonstrate, is resisting, reacting, or avoiding.

We’re going to start by going through these three VERY common ways of dealing with our emotions, to help you better understand and recognize where you might be doing one or each of the three things. 

Then I’m going to offer you an alternative to those options and teach you how to use it. 

So, the first thing is Resistance. This is when we’re pushing an emotion away. We do this by trying to convince ourselves that we should feel something else, or we should feel differently. This is SOOOOO common with my clients. The emotional rollercoaster of infertility and IVF is FOR REALY, people! That is just the way it is. Too often, we tell ourselves things that are super unhelpful. We tell ourselves that we should be somewhere other than where we are. WE tell ourselves that we should feel differently. Like we shouldn’t be jealous of other people’s pregnancy or birth announcements. That we shouldn’t feel guilty because we don’t want to go to another effing baby shower. That we shouldn’t feel lonely in our grief. Or that we shouldn’t resent our partners, friends, or family for not able to fully understand what it is that we are experiencing. 

So, we resist these emotions that are a part of the rollercoaster of infertility. When we are so resistant, we try to will ourselves into other feelings, which ends up making us feel so much worse. 

We try to force positivity.

Force gratitude. 

We try to find those silver linings.

But instead we create more misery for ourselves. 

We think things like, “I should be more positive. I should handle this better. I should believe that I’m so young, I have plenty of time. I shouldn’t be so sad all the time. I shouldn’t be so angry. I should feel gratitude that I have the means and/or opportunity to do IVF” 

We tell ourselves we can “fake it until we make it” 

But the truth is that we don’t “make” anything by faking anything. 

Now, if any of those thoughts feel believable to you, that’s totally fine. 

What doesn’t work is resisting the emotions that are real for us and then we spend time trying to will them away. Trying to force ourselves to feel something that we can’t in that moment. It’s a bridge too far to try to go from hating that you have to do IVF to gratitude for the means and opportunity. It doesn’t make you a bad person, if you can’t get there. No one can get from hatred to gratitude in a single bound. So we fight with ourselves. We argue with how we feel. 

This phrase “what we resist, persists” is exactly it. 

It’s part cliché but 100% facts when it comes to emotions. 

All of these uncomfortable emotions, this rollercoaster we experience during infertility and IVF, the fastest way around them, the ONLY way around them is right through them. 

Resistance never works. It just perpetuates negative emotions AND it prevents us from processing emotions that need to be processed. That’s the trap of resistance. And resistance never works. 

The second way is that we react to our emotions. So, this happens when we notice an emotion, but instead of allowing it to be there, we react to it. We act from that place. If we’re angry we might cry or yell- I punch pillows sometimes. Maybe we slam doors. If we’re frustrated, maybe we snap at the people we love. If we are feeling resentful, we might lecture ourselves on how we should feel or how horrible we are for feeling that way. 

Instead of noticing the emotion, we let it control our behavior. 

For me, there were days that I would not get out of bed. I was reacting to my sadness that way. 

Ok, so we resist and react to emotions and the third one is we avoid them. I don’t want to brag but I can be pretty good at avoiding my emotions. It’s not really a brag and more like a “yea, I really do this to my own detriment.” 

Avoiding your emotions looks a lot like distracting yourself or numbing your feelings. When I saw “numb” I’m not just talking about alcohol, well, not specifically. Alcohol is a common numbing mechanism for many people. But there are others. Food is a big source of numbing. Over working, shopping—all of these things are numbing behaviors that we seek to avoid our feelings. We do this to avoid what we’re feeling.

Now, if you resist, avoid, or react to your feelings you’re not doing anything wrong. We’re just not taught anything differently. The vast majority of people have one or all of these behaviors modeled to us as children and when we are adults. Most people don’t have the tools to do anything but resist, avoid, or react. 

But here’s is the biggest truth, our emotions can’t hurt us when we know what to do with them. 

What is actually hurting us, as much as it is our inability to experience then for what they are. 

We don’t have to change our emotions, to change our experience of them. 

I’m sure you are waiting for me to tell you how to change your feelings. Don’t worry, I will get to that in a future episode. But my goal for this episode wasn’t to teach you to CHANGE your emotions, but rather teach you how to process them. How to actually feel them. When you know how to do THAT, then your emotions aren’t as scary or overwhelming. 

We don’t want to rush to change our feelings, I know that seems counterintuitive but when we rush to change how we feel, that’s when we get into the “bridge too far” territory that I referenced earlier. Most people are in a rush to feel differently. To feel better than they feel right now. But that’s because they think they way they feel right now is a problem. Because that’s what we are taught. We are taught that emotions are a problem that need to be fixed. 

But that’s not true. 

Emotions are a part of our human experience. Grief, sadness, shame, anxiety- all of them. It is part of the infertility journey. 

I know this might not be what you ever wanted to hear, I totally understand, stay with me on this for just a few more minutes. I want to teach you a simple three-step process to allow for and experience your feelings. Not changing your feelings, again, I will get to that later. But actually, feeling your feelings. 

That’s the fourth way that I alluded to earlier. So, we know resist, react, and avoid, but the last one is to allow for the feeling to be there. A huge part of allowing the feeling is to openly accept that that is what you’re experiencing. My clients will tell me, “If I accept that I am feeling grief, then I won’t be able to feel anything but grief. I won’t be able to change it.” But the opposite is true. When you accept something and own something, THAT’S when you have the power to change it. We want to be present with the emotion without making it mean that something has gone horribly wrong. 

When you accept what you’re feeling and allow it to be there with you, the emotions and their physical sensations pass through you faster (the racing heart, the tightness in your chest, stomach, or throat). This is what’s called “processing your emotions.” Processing our emotions, completely changes your experience of them- it’s a much more tolerable experience, dare-I-say pleasant as compared to the other ways we discussed. 

A fellow coach colleague of mine came up with this super easy pneumonic device to help people with processing their feelings- so that’s what I am going to share with you now. 

The word is NOW. So, if you can remember to feel better “NOW” N-O-W, then you will know there are three steps. 

The first step, the N is for notice and name the feeling. Noticing and naming the emotion is so important. You have to know what you’re dealing with, right? Is it happy? Sad? Lonely? Miserable? Angry? Resentful? Humiliated? Proud? Ashamed? Find one word that you can use to name it. 

So that’s the N, the O is “open up to it” When we don’t have the tools to process our emotions, what happens is that we notice it and then we close off to it. We hide, we try to avoid it. But that won’t work if you’re accepting and allowing your emotions. You have to open up to. Almost welcome it’s presence. Remember, it’s not a problem to feel it. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s an emotion to experience.

So, we’ve noticed and named it, we’ve opened up to it, so the W is witness it. An emotion is a physical vibration in our body that is the product of a thought we are thinking. So we have a thought, and it creates a feeling and that feeling or emotion is experienced in our body as a vibration. Knowing that, we can go into this watcher place and witness what it feels like in our bodies. We digest it. We process it. And this usually only takes a couple of minutes. Neurobiologically speaking, the hormone dump that we get in response to our emotions, only last about 90 seconds. So the adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, serotonin, and all their little friends- they only hang out for a minute and a half. So we sit with it, during that time. WE name it, we open up to it and then we witness it. 

When you witness your emotions, I want you to think about studying it. Being really curious. Be objective with your descriptions. Questions like, is it big or small? Is it fast or slow? Does it have color? If so, what color? Does it have a texture? Is it smooth or bumpy? Does it move? Start in one place and then travel to another. Where is it? What part of your body do you feel it? Does it make you want to do anything?

Explain your experience of it and witness it lessen and then dissipate. 

So often, my clients will tell me stories of conversations they have with people. Well-meaning people. One of my clients talked about her anxiety leading up to her egg retrieval. It’s a pretty nerve-wracking time, especially if you’ve never had one- which my client had not. 

She was telling her mother that she was nervous, and her mother responded with, “don’t be nervous. Everything will be fine.” 

That’s a pretty typical response you get from most people. I am certain I have said it to other people myself. Again, we do this because we’ve been taught that emotions are a problem to be fixed. And telling you “not to worry” is the solution. But what is really being said is “you shouldn’t be feeling what you’re feeling.” It’s almost encouraging resistance and encouraging you to push your feelings away. To silver-line your thought. But that’s not useful. It wasn’t useful to my client. It’s not really useful to anyone. 

So, we started talking about her nerves. I told her that being nervous was totally normal. That most, if not all, of us are nervous before our retrievals. Then I asked her what nervous felt like to her. 

Asking these questions helped her to witness the emotions she was experiencing. 

I asked her what it felt like, she told me it felt fluttery in her chest and heavy in her stomach. 

She told me it was very big, and had a grey color to it. 

She said it felt like a big pile of sand that was constantly moving around.

We talked about what it would be like for her to take that big, heavy, grey pile of sand with her to her doctor’s office on the day of the retrieval. That she could bring it with her and that she didn’t have to make it go away. 

For her, this wasn’t as scary as it was before. She didn’t have to fight the feeling. She didn’t have to resist, avoid, or react to it. She could just be with it and that being with it wasn’t a problem. 

Anxiety hangs out with me most days. I used to fight it so much. It was exhausting. Not the feeling of anxiety, but my fighting it. Anxiety for me is really fast and heavy. Its black and reminds me of radio static. I let the static be there, sometimes it goes away and sometimes it hangs out with me for the day. Either way, it’s not a problem. 

That, my loves, is feeling a feeling. And it’s such a different experience when you’ve never done it before. But when you get good at it, what you will learn is that feelings are not nearly as big a deal as we think they are. They aren’t problems. It’s just part of our human experience.  

What I learned, the hard way no-less, is that it doesn’t matter how much we resist, react or avoid emotions- especially grief or shame or anxiety, they will wait for us. That is why so many of my clients tell me they feel like they’re just stuck. That they can’t move forward. They can’t heal. Of course, this is a bit oversimplified because there are many things that go into this but the skill of allowing your emotions is something that will serve you forever. 

You’ll know that emotions are part of your human experience and when they happen, they’re vibrations in your body. You can allow them and they will pass. It takes some practice, I’m still practicing, but it’s practice worth doing. So remember NOW, notice and name the emotion, open up to it, and witness the experience of it in your body as it runs it’s course. 

That’s it for this week. For now know that I adore you, and you’ve got this.