When it feels like too much.
How to get back to yourself.
If these troubled times are making you feel all sorts of emotions, you're not alone.
I don’t know anyone who isn’t struggling in some way these days. For many of us it manifests as worry or anxiety. For others, it’s depression, sadness, or anger. This post offers a way to work with these tough feelings. It’s not the only way, but I learned it last year and have been using it quite a bit lately. You take it step-by-step and get relief with each step.
I’m going to use anxiety as an example, but you can use this with any tough emotion.
Your feelings want to keep you safe.
It may be tough to remember when you’re in the throws of it, but your tough feelings, and in this example, anxiety, are working very hard to keep you safe.
I have come to think of anxiety as an alarm. If I don’t turn to it to see what it thinks is dangerous, the alarm keeps ringing. Therefore, there is value in turning towards it to see if its concern is valid, but that can be a very difficult thing to do. The Polyvagal method below allows you to do just that.
Before you begin, see if your anxiety (or other feeling) has an overall message for you. For example, when I ask my anxiety why it’s ringing the alarm bell, it tells me I’m in danger. If I acknowledge this and then look around the room for danger, and then tell it, right now I’m safe, then it backs off. If I investigate the alarm, my anxiety will quiet. It seems its reason for being is to tell me I’m in danger.
Can you ask your feeling why it’s coming up. For anxiety, can you ask your it why it’s ringing the alarm? Is it telling you you’re in danger or is it something else?
Polyvagal Theory - a way forward.
Once you have a little bit of space through acknowledging your feeling, you can try the Polyvagal Method. I learned this from Abigail Morgan (formerly Abigail Steidley). She has been a Mind/Body coach for 10+ years. She was Martha Beck’s CEO for a number of years. She’s pretty impressive! You can find her here.
I’m not going to provide an in-depth explanation of the method. You can google it or check out Abigail’s work. I’m going to share the steps that the theory lends us so you can use it right away.
10 Steps that help, using anxiety as an example:
- Awareness / Acknowledging – As outlined above, acknowledging our anxiety can be a huge first step.
- You are in control – You get to stop this work any time you choose. You can pause, stop, try something else. It may not be the right time, the right thing, the right way for you. Be tender with yourself. Treat yourself with gentleness. Proceed with kindness. There is nothing that says you need to do this now or complete it in one go. It’s available whenever you’re ready.
- A Reframe – Instead of calling it “my anxiety” or saying “I’m anxious”, try saying “My nervous system has been activated.” Saying this, instead of “I’m anxious.” or “I have anxiety,” takes it out of your identity and into the realm of something happening that warrants your attention. It separates your anxiety from you so you have some space between you and it. It invites curiosity. This is big for me because it reminds me that there is nothing wrong with me. I’m not weak. There’s nothing to fix. There’s something to investigate. Sometimes just doing this is enough for me in the moment.
- Your still place – Imagine somewhere, doing something that makes you feel safe and relaxed. It could be as simple as how you feel with your cat purring in your lap. Or, it could be sitting on a dock with your feet dangling in the water. Choose a still place that you can visit in your imagination and really go into that feeling. If you’re finding this difficult, I created a guided meditation to help you create your own still place. Once you’ve created your still place, you can go there any time.
- Feel around the edges – If you’ve done steps 3 and 4, perhaps you feel relaxed enough to look at the situation that’s causing you to feel anxious. But, you don’t have to dive in and re-activate yourself. You can give yourself permission to go slow and feel around the edges of it. If it feels okay, you go a little further. Where is it in your body? For example, if it’s in your solar plexus, notice that, and feel around the outline of your body, moving inward. If it gets too much, visit your still place until you breathe a sigh of relief.
- Toggle – Go back and forth between your still place and what has triggered you. With your nervous system calmer, you can look at your situation and respond to it. Instead of reacting, or avoiding, or staying in fight, flight or freeze, you can address what’s happening and make a plan. If it gets too much you’re going to stop and go to your still place. It’s always available to you. You go back and forth in the manner that serves you.
- Anchor it – You may want to find and revisit the actual moment that triggered you. Something made your anxiety decide you were in danger. Was it something someone said? Was it something in your social media feed? Are you anticipating a possible future event? Are you jumping to a conclusion? We do inquiry around that moment to loosen anxiety’s grip. If you start and it feels like you have bitten off more than you can chew, go back to your still place. Find a partner you trust, or a coach, who can do this with you.
- Inquiry – We often suddenly feel anxious, but we can’t link it to anything specific. It feels free-floating and out of our control and unfixable. But, usually, something has happened, even something small and fleeting, that has caused a thought that we didn’t know we had. You may have activated an old story or a belief about life. Or, you’re unknowingly imagining a worst-case scenario. Doing inquiry to find the actual moment is where the richness lies. We invite in curiosity. I wonder what made me anxious … I was watching TV and then …
- Find the thought. This morning I coached a client who had been feeling anxious for most of the week. After reviewing what had happened over recent days, we found the moment that triggered her anxiety. In that moment, her thought was, “There’s no place to rest.” This thought came after a stressful day and an incident that “broke the camels back”. Not even really knowing she had this thought, her brain looked for evidence to support this conclusion. Everywhere she looked, she found no place to rest. It made her feel hopeless, and she started asking herself, “What’s the point?” We call that a rabbit hole. We did work around this and realized that, yes, the pandemic has eliminated many of our usual ways to rest, but that doesn’t mean there are no ways to rest. Without that thought taking over her entire brain, she remembered ways she enjoys resting and was even motivated to create new ways. We used the tools above and gently found what had triggered her. She loosened the grip of that thought and felt tremendous relief and empowerment.
- Pace yourself – You don’t have to do it all at once. If you’ve found relief at any stage in this process, maybe that’s enough for now.
Reach out
If you need some support in this area or have questions, you can email me at karen@karenharbin.com. I’m a “reluctant expert” on anxiety, and I’m happy to help.
Your toolbelt.
Tough feelings are, well, tough. But, they’re not inherently bad. In fact, they can hold the gold if you can sit with them. The way out is through, not around, not avoiding. They’re worth getting to know. But, go easy on yourself as you mine for gold.
