This transcript was created with AI and has had some light editing. Please forgive transcription errors. Thank you.

If you're tired of feeling never enough, of constantly being derailed by your own fears or the reactions of others, then you are in the right place. I'm Deb, a licensed psychologist, and this is Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to women who've spent their lives trying to stay within the lines of what's acceptable, who've never felt good enough and who are ready to break free and bloom. Let's talk about how you can build a solid foundation connected with your strength and your wisdom. Before we start, I need to make sure that you know that the information I share with you is just that. It's just information. It's not meant to be a prescription for what you should do or meant to replace the advice of any of your healthcare providers. It also doesn't mean that we have a professional client-therapist relationship.

Hi there and welcome. In this episode, I want to talk about how we can use our feelings to bloom, to know who we are in the world, what is important to us, and to be able to set limits or boundaries around what is okay and not okay with us. If I were to ask you right now what your strongest feeling is, would you know?

Many or most of the times when I ask a woman what her strongest feeling is right now in this moment, I get a deer in the headlights type of look. Most of us are just not very good at identifying what we're feeling. And I think there are good reasons for that. We're socialized to be caregivers, to pay attention to the needs of others, to be pleasing, kind, nice and not to make waves. For those reasons, 

I think most of us are okay with what are often referred to as the positive emotions, like being happy or feeling grateful. I tend to think of those or refer to those as the reward feelings. They bring us a sense of reward or pleasure.

And just based on my experience, there may be some of you listening that feel guilt around rewarding feelings. Logically, feeling joy may make sense. And when it comes to spending time laughing, or being silly, or simply staring out the window at the clouds. 

Many times old wires light up about wasting time or somehow not doing what we're supposed to do, and we quickly move away from those feelings. And my experience is that oftentimes a connection is not made between being able to recognize how we're feeling and what we need. 

So having a hard time identifying our feelings or acknowledging our feelings becomes problematic in self-care and also in blooming into who we want to be or we're meant to be.

Not being able to identify or know how to deal with our feelings is particularly problematic for the sensitive, intuitive ones of us. If I'm picking up on a multitude of feelings from others and I'm also sensitive myself, so I feel things intensely, what am I going to do if I don't know how to deal with those feelings?

I know some women are more sensitive than others, and in general, because of our socialization and genetic heritage related to surviving by being chosen, I think most of us are pretty darn good at reading others. And because we have wires linking safety with approval, we're sensitive to the reactions of others.

If we don't know how to deal with those reactions, what are we going to do? Most times, I think we're going to avoid them. Often as children, we learn to find relief from them in some other way. I've had clients share with me the experience of being distressed and eating something sweet and then eating becoming their go-to, or sometimes our caregivers try to soothe our feelings through food or gifts. 

Other times, we try to keep people happy as a way of avoiding uncomfortable feelings. If we're lucky, if we're very lucky, we had some adult in our life who helped us learn to navigate the rocky road of emotions we learned how to acknowledge them and figure out the need the feeling was pointing us toward.

that adult acknowledged our feelings and helped us to recognize whether there was truth to what was triggering the feeling. Having our feelings acknowledged helps us to learn to trust ourselves. If I feel sad and share that and my caregiver says there's nothing to feel sad about or don't feel sad, maybe with the best intentions of not wanting me to get stuck in my sadness,

The end result is that many times I start to question my reality. Well, it feels sad and my knowing parent is saying there's nothing to feel sad about. It starts to feel confusing. I'm not saying this is a conscious process. I think this happens without us realizing it.

I was a highly sensitive, intuitive child born to parents with little capacity or skill in dealing with feelings. I'm quite confident from the time I spent with their parents that they had little acknowledgement of their feelings growing up and they had no idea what to do with me. And as a result, I didn't know what to do with myself.

And I started to believe that there was clearly something wrong with me, that I was having these strong feelings and reactions that no one else had and that I wasn't supposed to have. We are so limited in our cognitive abilities as children. We have no ability to consider the gray or the both and the idea that my parents might not think there's something to feel sad about, and it's normal and okay for me to think that there is something to feel sad about. 

That's just not possible in the brain of a child. Things are either this way or that way. This is also true when we're tipped, limiting our abilities to free ourselves from the situation that has us tipped.

The result of this disconnection and even devaluing of our feelings, especially, well, in my case, especially the painful feelings, was that I had no idea what I wanted from my life, nor did I have any idea how to set boundaries with others. If I'm disconnected from my discomfort, from the pain feelings, as I refer to them, ow can I know that something is not okay with me? And if I learned not to voice those feelings, even if I'm feeling them, how do I know how to speak up?

I didn't, which led to a number of experiences I wish I could go back and redo or didn't have to live through.

This is why when I mentioned in another episode that learning to recognize feelings of anger is so important. I’m talking about anger, I'm not referring to identifying with the feeling of anger. So seeing myself as an angry person or acting on my angry feelings. This is where I think women often get mixed up. We mix up feelings of anger with the actions of anger, like yelling or violence. And we don't want to go there. 

Or, And I think this happens more often than not. We don't want to be an angry person. we want to be kind and nice and pleasing. And so we just keep going, going and going, stuffing or ignoring our feelings of anger or irritation.

Or over the years we may have learned not to trust those feelings and so we don't even feel them.

I know what I put together in my child brain was that it wasn't okay to feel angry. So what happens for me is that I ignore it. I put up with things. I try to be kind and nice and patient until I reach my limit. And then I tip and I blow my stack. And then I feel extremely guilty. because that isn't the person I want to be. I feel guilty about losing my temper, about getting angry, and I end up believing that I need to be more patient, which is really kind of the opposite of what is true because I'm missing that there were all those things that were not okay with me that I was ignoring.

What I'm noticing is the guilt that I feel about acting on my anger. When in fact the problem is, that I've ignored my anger until I tipped. And then when we're tipped with our primitive brain running the show, with no ability to think about the consequences of our actions or to consider the feelings of others,

We say and do things that we regret.

And if I don't know how to notice and pay attention to my feelings, it's pretty darn hard to bloom into the person I want and was meant to be. If someone is upset with me because of a choice I make, how do I know how to figure out what I want to do about that? If I've learned to avoid painful feelings, do I just go along with what they think? to try to avoid the feelings that might come up if they're disappointed with me?

And then what happens to my dreams, what I want? And what happens to those feelings of...fear about people being disappointed with me or maybe people being disappointed with me. Feelings don't usually disappear. Do I eat to numb the discomfort or do I just keep pushing them down until I explode? Or do I never really go after what it is that I want in this life?

All of our feelings are messengers. That doesn't mean that they are all factual. I love to use the example of a child believing there's a monster in their closet, as most of us can imagine this either as a parent or from some scary experience in our childhood. 

We realize that the child needs something even though their fear is not factual. based, right? They need reassurance. They need to know that their parent, someone with much more power than they have, is aware of the situation and will keep them safe.

If I have a fear that a friend is no longer my friend because I haven't heard from her, this fear is very unlikely to be true. And much like the child fearing the monster in the closet, my emotional brain needs reassurance from my adult capabilities that just because I haven't heard from her doesn't mean she's no longer my friend.

that it doesn't make sense to put those two things together. So the fear was pointing me to the need to correct an assumption that was lighting up. It was also pointing me to the need to reassure myself. If I don't do this, what's likely to happen? I'm probably going to stew about it.

And in the meantime, I might start worrying about other friends that I haven't heard from. I might start worrying about whether I'm likable at all or whether I have any friends.

This is my brain in action trying to help me be prepared for any future danger. Once we start to worry about something, our brain matches it with other things that we might have similar fears about. 

Now, let's take that same fear that's coming up about a friend who I haven't heard from. And I realized that I've called and reached out to this friend 10 times with no response. And I know that she's not in the midst of a life tragedy or major stressors. I might have a different need. 

This is where our feelings help us gain awareness of boundaries. where we start to identify what is okay with us and not okay with us and what we want in the world, I might realize that it doesn't feel good to me not to be responded to and that this friendship is not going to meet my needs. It doesn't mean anything about how likable I am. It doesn't mean anything about who this person is.

It gives me information about what I need in a friendship. I might need to stop reaching out, stop trying to get something from someone who isn't available to give that to me and start looking for someone who's more compatible with my needs, with my level of need for interaction.

Or let's say I'm thinking about which direction I'd like to go with my career. Thinking about what I want is important. It's also important to consider the pain I will be required to face or endure in making the choice to follow that path. We tend to make pros and cons list, and those are helpful.

And I find it much more useful to examine the pain that I'll have to face in making each choice. All choices involve pain. If I'm trying to decide about taking a new job, the reward might be more money. And the pain might be moving to a climate that is not a good fit for me. I need to decide which pain I'm more willing to endure. Staying here and having less money until I find something else or moving and having more money and enduring a climate I don't like—which is the pain I'm willing to face. 

I can't consider that if I'm not connected with my feelings. If I'm just considering the reward of the new job, I may end up in a climate that I am miserable in and not willing to endure. So being able to identify

The full range of our feelings is really essential, not only for our self-care, it's also important for setting boundaries, for deciding what is okay and not okay with us, and what we're willing to tolerate and who we want to be.

As women, we're often so busy trying to take care of others that we rarely even know how we're feeling. And without that knowledge, we're missing a huge chunk of information about who we are and what is important to us.

How good are you at identifying your feelings?

If I were to ask you right now in this moment what your strongest feeling is, would you know?

If you respond with words like, I feel disappointed or I feel worried, see if you can go under those feelings to find the basic feeling. Disappointed and worried tend to have strong thinking components that can make using our feelings less effective. They tend to make it a little more confusing.

So try to go for the basics. feelings like angry or sad or afraid. Think about little kids and the words that they use is a way to try to stay out of our thinking.

I'd encourage you to challenge yourself to stop at various times in your day and to use those skills that you use so well with others to identify what you are feeling in that moment.

Right now, my strongest feeling is happy. I feel happy when I'm sharing this kind of information. I really enjoy this.

Try not to get caught up in the story. We lose the benefit of the feeling when we end up storytelling. if I start to talk about, feel sad that, ⁓ let's go back to the friend not calling, I feel sad that my friend hasn't called because I've been really lonely and I really could use a friend.

Can you see how there's all these different needs that might be there? There's all this other stuff that's going on. So if I can simply stick with, feel sad that my friend hasn't called, then I can delve into that and figure out what I need.

Also, to get good at describing your feelings as feelings rather than who you are. so saying, I feel angry or I feel sad rather than I am angry or I am sad. We want to see feelings as messengers rather than our state.

If it's our state, it's much harder to figure out the need. I think I might try to put together a feeling diary to include with this. Hopefully I'll do that. So look for it. ⁓ 

And I'd love to hear how it goes with checking in with your feelings. I always love to hear from my listeners. And so if there's anything that you feel willing to share, I would love to hear from you. Take good care and I'll talk to you next time. Bye bye.

This has been Blooming Outside the Lines, a podcast dedicated to supporting you in blooming into all you are meant and wish to be. If you enjoyed it and gained value, please consider leaving a review, as it will help other women to find it and please share it with anyone who would benefit from it. And if you would like to be notified when new episodes become available, be sure and follow on your favorite podcast app. Until next time, how will you light a candle of self-acceptance? Because you deserve to be you, even if others disagree.