How Can You Navigate Difficult Emotions? Make it RAIN.
How can you navigate difficult emotions without obsessing, suppressing or distracting yourself from them?
Does that seem like an impossible feat? Many times your natural tendency might be to either mull it over from every direction possible OR you push that gunk waaaaayyy down so you don’t see it or feel it anymore. These two extremes aren’t super helpful.
You need to be able to sit with uncomfortable feelings and emotions. You need to be able to hold the hard stuff and still move forward in the valued directions of your life. At Yellow Key Collaborative, our tag line is “Get Unstuck, Feel Better, Move Forward.” Knowing how to move through the challenging emotions, that is how we feel better or get better at feeling versus avoiding.
Sometimes the really hard stuff can feel easier to process. You allow yourself to feel grief after a death or a significant loss. Death, divorce, illness, injury: those topics are big enough that ignoring it often isn’t an option.
It’s the other stuff that tends to hold you hostage. It's death by a thousand tiny cuts.
The tiny cuts show up in a number of ways, like the time you put your foot in your mouth at work. How you keep getting hooked by your teenager, lose your temper and then feel like a failure as a parent. It’s the late night binge on junk food or alcohol, an effort to you quell the relentless anxious thoughts.
What can you do? Let’s walk through a process called RAIN.
RAIN stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate and Nurture.
Recognize. This is where you start. You start by simply recognizing that something is amiss. Something is going on. You can feel yourself getting hooked into something that does not feel good. You realize you’re triggered. Some of us have been stuffing feelings for so long, that this first step can take some time. This is when you start to notice that you tend to clench your jaw throughout the weekly meeting at work, or you feel irritated every time you get off the phone with that friend, or you feel anxious each time your phone dings. Recognizing is noticing that something feels off.
Allow: You intentionally allow the uncomfortable feelings and emotions to hang out. This means you notice the urge to push it away. You also notice the desire to dive in and completely examine it from every angle. You let it be.
How do you do this? One suggestion is to simply notice that this emotion is showing up. Instead of the obsess or resist response, instead you say, “Okay, this is interesting.” If your mind starts telling you, “This is terrible. You’re an idiot.They are gigantic jerks. I have to get the hell out of here. Or I’m going to kick this guy’s butt.” You don’t get hooked into this thought. Instead you let them all hang out and think, “Mmmm, okay, there’s a lot going on in my mind and my body right now. Interesting.” You start paying attention.
Investigate: Okay, that you are letting this difficult stuff hang out for just a bit, let’s put on our lab coats and investigate what’s going on. When investigating, adopt a stance of curiosity versus judgment. Curious statements often start with, “I wonder…” . Judgment statements revolve around good/bad, right/wrong or winner/loser. Judgment feels like closing in, shutting down and protecting. Curiosity feels like opening up, settling in and connecting the dots.
As you investigate you want to think about all of the things that could be going on. Here are a few questions to get you started:
What emotion are you feeling?
Have you ever felt this way before?
Describe the situation. What happened prior to this response? What was your interpretation? Could there be another interpretation?
Where are you feeling this in your body?
Nurture: This is where you adopt a compassionate stance toward yourself. In order to shift into a more compassionate place, ask yourself the following questions:
What do I need right now?
What would be the most healing act in this situation?
What small step could I take that would move me toward feeling more grounded and secure?
For the next four posts, I will address each step of RAIN separately. I will share specific strategies and techniques to help you move through each stage. I’ll share with you which part I feel is the most challenging and which part I find thoroughly enjoyable.
By the end of the series, you will confidently be able to “Make It Rain” when you encounter an uncomfortable feeling or situation.
You Got This,
Kate
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Would you like to learn more about RAIN? Does this information resonate with you? Would you like to dive deeper into how this could be implemented in your life right now? Fill out a contact form and let’s talk about some options. I’d love to work with you individually to help you “Make It Rain!”