Mind Drama: How to Clean it Up with Three Steps

Pain is a part of life.

Like the opposite side of the coin for pleasure, one can’t exist without the other.

But there’s the natural pain that occurs in life, and then there’s emotional suffering that comes from all the mind drama we add to the pain.

This is the torture we self-inflict with our brains through negative thoughts.

For example, your husband makes a comment about your outfit such as “You’re wearing that again?” And your brain, instead of just interpreting it as a question, answering, and moving on, goes “What the hell man!? Obviously, I’m wearing it again, it’s on my body. He’s so freaking critical of me. He doesn’t like it. He never likes what I wear.”

Now I’m not saying your husband likes the outfit. Maybe he doesn’t, but ultimately, we don’t care because where we want our focus is on you and whether YOU like the outfit.

And when you start bringing everything back to you and how you want to think and feel about the situation, a lot of the drama can fall away.

To do so takes three steps:

  1. HAVE AWARENESS – Notice the thoughts you are choosing to think and what emotions they are creating for you. Remember that no matter what your husband does or says, you get to choose how you want to think and feel about it. This DOES NOT mean you choose to always feel “happy,” but it does mean you remember that you do not have to take on any of his thoughts or opinions.
  2. PROCESS EMOTION – Allow yourself to feel whatever comes up for you in your body without judgment. Maybe you feel shame because you think “He doesn’t like the way I dress.” Allow the shame to be processed by dropping into your body and breathing into it. Then see what’s left behind. Be curious. Why does it matter to me that he likes how I dress?
  3. CHOOSE INTENTIONALLY – How do YOU want to think and feel about your outfit? If you love it and think you look amazing, then that thought and feeling is available to you regardless of whatever your husband says. If you don’t, then explore more around what thoughts and beliefs you want to have in the future around your body and what you wear.

Life dishes up plenty of experiences for us to grow and learn.

We don’t need all the excess drama on top.

Photo by Mark Thompson on Unsplash

How to Make the “Right” Choice When Considering Divorce

3 step process my clients go through in coaching.

Your thoughts are the most powerful tool you have for creating your reality.

One of the areas we focus on extensively in the style of coaching I use is a focus on your thoughts and how they create your feelings and actions.

We can take the exact same facts of a situation and what would be interpreted as awful and tragic for one person, can be viewed by another as life changing and inspirational.

It all depends on the thoughts of the person viewing the facts.

This is how divorce can be interpreted for some as the best decision they ever made, and for others the worst.

So what makes your decision “right” then?

How can you know what the “right” decision is?

I take my clients through three steps to find the answer:

  1. Clean up your current mind drama and process emotion so you can make the decision from a clean space mentally and emotionally.
  2. Know your reasons for your choice and love them.
  3. Make the decision and choose intentionally to have your own back going forward. 

This is the process that allows my clients to take whatever they choose, whether it’s staying married or getting divorce, and make it the “right” decision.

This is how they finally move forward after years spent spinning out in indecision and living half-in and half-out of their marriages.  

This is how they go on to have better lives no matter what their decision is.

There’s no “right” answer out there waiting for you to find it. 

You are the one who MAKES your decision either “right” or “wrong” with your thoughts.

That’s why it’s so important to do the work of cleaning up your brain ahead of time before you make the final decision. 

Photo by marianne bos on Unsplash

Allowing Fear While Considering Divorce

Cause running away from it isn’t working.

You know the feeling.

That deep dark stomach gripping, squeezing, twisting pain.

The fast fluttering in your heart and fingers and the urge to run away.

Fear is one of the most powerful emotions we can experience right up there with love and grief.

And if you find yourself considering divorce, then the emotion of fear has been visiting more often.

As humans, our brain interprets fear as if it were a lion about to eat us, and it wants to move us into fight or flight.

For a lot of us as women, that looks like fighting against yourself for even considering a thought that created fear (“maybe I want a divorce”) or taking flight and running away from the feeling through distracting yourself.

This can look like excessive cleaning, productivity, people pleasing, care-taking, and shopping among other things.

But here’s the thing,

Fear can’t hurt you.

It can’t kill you. It can’t even touch you, because all it is is a vibration in your body that’s created by a thought you’re having.

And thoughts like,

“If I get divorced I’ll have to find a job and I haven’t worked in ten years” or

“I’ll be alone for the rest of my life,” or

“If I leave, I’ll hurt my children, but if I stay, I’ll hurt myself” create loads of fear.

And the more you run away from the fear, the bigger it gets.

It doesn’t go away and you can’t outrun it because it’s created with your mind. And last I checked, you can’t get away from your brain.

So stop running.

Just stop, turn around, and allow yourself to look that thought of yours in the eye.

“If I get divorced, I’ll have to find a job and I haven’t worked in ten years.”

  • Notice the fear as it comes up. Name it out loud. Focus on what it feels like in your body, not in your mind.
  • Close your eyes and ask yourself, what color is fear in my body? Is it fast or slow? Does it move?
  • Allow curiosity instead of resistance – “If this is just a vibration in my body, I wonder what will happen if I step towards it, instead of running away.”
  • What do you notice? How does fear feel different than other emotions in your body like excitement, joy, love?

I promise you can open to the human experience of feeling fear.

It can’t hurt you. It’s just a vibration in your body coming from your thoughts.

Photo by Vital Sinkevich on Unsplash

Feelings are Meant to Last 90 Seconds

Say what?!

What do you think of when you hear the word sadness?

Or how about anger?

You might envision someone crying or yelling. A visual representation of what they’re feeling inside.

But what if I told you that you could feel an emotion as strong as hatred in a room full of people, not react at all, and still have processed it within 90 seconds. Crazy right?

Not so. It turns out this is actually physiologically what our bodies are built to do.

In Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s book she explains this fantastic ability we have to process emotion,

“When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again.”

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey

No one teaches us how to feel emotion.

In fact, we’re presented by the media with the exact opposite of that – movies and shows where people “act out” their feelings.

This makes for good entertainment, but it’s a different thing entirely when we start believing that’s what feeling our feelings looks like.

Instead, I describe this 90 second process of feeling emotion to my clients as a wave.

  1. You have the stimulus and thought that trigger the emotion.
  2. It starts to build rapidly and increases in intensity until you reach the crest.
  3. Then you come back down, and it’s like the emotion washes back out to sea.

This is how emotion is meant to be processed.

A wave of emotion cannot hurt you.

In fact, it’s only when we drive ourselves insane by running away from it all the time that we start to hurt ourselves with all of the excessive actions we take to avoid.

Instead, consider watching your emotions. Get curious.

How do they start? What does the crest feel like in your body? What happens after it leaves?

It’s Okay to Feel Sad While Considering Divorce

In fact, it can be really good for you.

In the Disney movie “Inside Out” there’s a poignant moment where the character Joy tells Sadness that she has a “super important job for her.” She then proceeds to draw a circle and tells Sadness that her job is to make sure all of the sadness stays inside of it.

Feeling a little familiar? Lock that sadness up.

A lot of my clients want to do just this with their feelings of sadness.

“Yep, come right over here, check out this great closet.” *shove in, lock the door, run away terrified hoping you won’t be able to hear the sobbing from the other side of the house while you clean, multitask, and take care of everyone else.

But the reality is, you can’t hide from emotions.

And actually, as you learn at the end of “Inside Out,” it’s the dreaded emotion of sadness that allows your brain to process grief and loss and eventually move forward. Without it, you just run around in circles feeling “happy” all the time while simultaneously feeling perpetually terrified deep down by the banging coming from that closet.

Sadness gets a bad rap in a culture where our most beautiful faces and spaces are on display through social media, and there’s constant interior pressure to keep up. But research on sadness has turned up some interesting insights.

For one, sadness can actually improve your judgment.

You know the saying about wearing “rose colored glasses?” Well, that’s all well and good until you’re trying to detect whether someone is telling the truth or not. A study by Joseph Forgas showed that when people are happy they’re more likely to make “social misjudgments due to biases.”

Basically, when you feel happy, you’re more likely to have blind spots about what’s really going on.

Sadness can also help increase your motivation to make changes.

It’s common for women who are considering divorce to experience what I have lovingly termed “the merry-go-round from hell.”

This is that cycle of something bad happening in your marriage, you feel upset and want to make changes, but then it starts to get a little better, the pain wears off, you talk yourself out of it, fear and complacency move back in and then Bam! another drop happens and you get to start it all over again.

Allowing the feeling of sadness can help you get clearer on where things are really at, what you want, and increase your perseverance for making changes.

In coaching we learn how to experience emotions in our bodies rather than in our mind, and it’s radically different than what most of us think “feeling our feelings” is like.

Letting yourself feel the sadness while considering divorce can be the very thing that helps you grieve and make peace with the past, and move cleanly into your future.

Photo by Jonatán Becerra on Unsplash

You Are Meant to Feel All of It

Emotions are not good or bad, they just are.

What if you were always meant to feel it all?

No good feelings. No bad. Just feelings.

Emotions that vibrate through your body and then leave.

Like colors on a painter’s palette. The red is no better than the blue. The green no less desirable than the purple.

But somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that our paintings needed to only have certain colors in them.

Only the bright and shiny and light ones. No dark and deep and heavy.

Have you noticed though, how a life filled with only bright and shiny colors can seem empty?

Like eating cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

We are meant to have contrast.

It is in the very nature of all life around us. Birth and death. Sun and Moon. The tide coming in and pulling back out. Pain and relief.

When we try to live in opposition to the duality of life, we can end up feeling stifled. Like walking along the top of a fence, we stay so focused on being in the middle to try and limit the depth of our lows, that we unintentionally also limit the height of our highs.

This can show up in your life as a general sense of malaise, depression, a lack of joy or anticipation for the future, and having no deep personal dreams or goals.

Sometimes we become so focused on living the “perfect” life, that we don’t end up living a “life” at all.

But if we accept that life is 50/50. Two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other. Then we can start living without fear of the dark colors that come our way. We can allow them, and feel them, knowing that they too shall pass.

Glennon Doyle describes this experience so beautifully in her chapter entitled “aches,”

“The Ache is not a flaw. The Ache is our meeting place. It’s the clubhouse of the brave. All the lovers are there. It is where you go alone to meet the world. The Ache is love. The Ache was never warning me: This ends, so leave. She was saying: This ends, so stay.”

Untamed, Glennon Doyle

This is your one human life. I guarantee it will be filled with the whole spectrum of emotion. That’s the very nature of this existence.

Instead of running away from it, slow down, breathe deep, open to what is in front of you, and stay.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash