Are you indulging emotions, or processing them?

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Do you struggle with indulgent emotions?

Something I struggled with for a very long time was self-pity.

I was an expert at stewing on how I'd been wronged; why things were never going to work out for me; I played out entire worlds of scenarios in my head of how things "should" have gone if only the other people involved, and fate, had understood what really was the best for everybody, particularly me.

Along the way, I think I had an understanding that was a bit mixed up: that this was what it looked like to process my emotions.

I've long known enough that suppression of emotions wasn't helpful; I couldn't stuff away anger or grief or doubt and expect it to resolve.

So by stewing in these emotions of self-pity, of anger or rage, or sadness and loss, or self-doubt and fear, and being with them day in and day out, I believed I was doing the healthier option: allow them. Processing them. And that was how I should be in relation with my emotions.

But there was a distinction I had failed to learn that was not helping me.

I was actually INDULGING in my emotions, instead of processing them.

We're taught so little emotional literacy and emotional intelligence in this society that 1. you likely aren't even aware of what genuinely processing emotions could look like for you 2. and even if you do, you may not understand this difference between indulging in emotions vs processing them.

So let me see if I can help you a bit.

Let's use the emotion of fear, a very common one and one I talk a lot about.

Fear is an emotion you can absolutely be indulging in, and it's also one that we experience a lot but don't truly process.

The first way to identify if you're indulging in an emotion vs. processing it is the action around the emotion involved. If you're indulging, it will look a lot like stagnation without much action. So you will be talking about fear a lot; bringing it up a lot in conversation with others or in your head; and using it as an excuse not to do things.

But the experience is a very intellect-oriented one. You're circling in this emotion, over and over again, and you know you have this feeling, but you're only discussing or experiencing it cognitivtely. You're kind of just flapping about in the stagnation pond waters of fear.

There's also, perversely and counter-intuitively, a sense of comfort and safety when you're indulging in an emotion. It feels like a safe prison of pillows in a way. If you're indulging in fear, that emotion becomes the reason you convince yourself not to move forward towards what you want.

One of the first clues that you're instead learning to process your emotions is that you will appear to yourself very messy. and it will be so much more a physical experience than a mental one. Indulged emotions can be contained; processing is all over the place because you're allowing the emotion to be felt in the body. So it may look like crying; extreme physical discomfort and agitation; shallow breathing, in the case of fear, or panicky feelings.

But when you are processing, you become the observer of these sensations, without necessarily reacting from these places, if that makes sense. I think when we learn to process and regulate emotions we think that gives us permission to take the emotion out on somebody else with the idea that that's how we process it. Not so. We may want to mindfully REACT from an emotion, after we've processed it, and discuss it with a person, or make asks or set boundaries.

For example, if the fear we're feeling is fear that we will be abandoned by a partner, in the throes of that fear we may be making demands of assurances from them to attempt to resolve the fear. But that is reacting from the emotion of fear, rather than processing the fear, to then take calmer stock of the situation, see if our original fear has genuine data behind it, and deciding what asks we may want to make from there.

With the processing of emotion, there's also continued action. I feel a lot of fear in my business, but these days I notice it, name it, observe it, work to process it, and continue moving toward my goal, allowing myself to feel the fear along the way.

The processing of emotions, I find, also needs some physical movement to go along with it. For something like fear, I like to stomp around; lift heavy weights; shake or dance; do EFT tapping. For an emotion like anger, I write angry, scrawl-filled letters that I then rip up; scream; beat pillows; boxing; go running really fast. For an emotion like sadness, I take baths and imagine the sadness moving through me; of course, lots of crying without trying to deny the tears; do lots of hip and hamstring stretching and yoga.

And for all of them, I often just sit with the emotion and breath into it and don't try to numb out from it (with social media or booze or food or complaining).

Finally, a wonderful clue if you're indulging in an emotion vs. processing it or honoring it comes from life and relationship coach Maggie Reyes, whose work I really admire and benefit from. She wrote, "Stating facts like 'the soup is cold' is not complaining or indulging in emotions. But just repeating 'the soup is cold' over and over doesn't move you forward."

This soup analogy really hit home for me, as does the idea that complaining (which is, the occasional good healthy vent session notwithstanding, generally about indulging our emotions) is not useful. Try the concept of turning complaints into requests, of yourself or others, for just a week. This will often clarify where you are indulging in emotions and how you can begin to start feeling and processing the emotions.

I hope this is helpful. Authentic emotional regulation for sensitive women will be a big part of Soothe, my mastermind for sensitive women that starts in September. I'm enrolling about 8 more spaces now and would love to have you in it. Read about Soothe here, and book a discovery call with me about it here.