This week, in a lot of disparate conversations, the idea keeps coming up that our emotions — both easy and difficult — are thankfully not permanent.  We can honor them, learn from them, be changed by them, but not let them move in and take up residence.  Also, I wonder if Rumi is speaking from an experience of literal guests who stole his furniture, and that makes me laugh. 💙

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

“The Guest House” by Jalaluddin Rumi

(Part 1 can be found here.)

“Disappointed” is a pretty nefarious word, especially when we use it with a child or our partner.

Consider the commonly said, “I’m not disappointed in you, I just feel disappointed.”  There is that tricksy You-statement pretending to express emotions like we talked about in Part 1.  The sentence becomes, “I’m not disappointed in you, I just feel that you have disappointed me by not living up to my hopes or expectations.”  That’s quite the narrative built into one word!

And especially to a younger person, a simple “I am disappointed” can sound like:

The thing about disappointment is that there is no defense against it.  If someone says, for instance, “I feel ignored,” we can rebut it by rewording it into the narrative statement that it is and then argue against the narrative (if there is an argument against the narrative), “You think that I was ignoring you, but I wasn’t because…”  The reason that we can’t defend against disappointment is because it’s a shorthand way of saying, “You made me feel some heavy emotions because you didn’t go along with the narrative/plan in my head.”

So how do we keep from poisoning our relationships with a word like “disappointed”?  Answer: break out the actual heavy emotions buried inside and put them in your Emotion Expression model.  For example, let’s take a parent who is (ahem) disappointed in his child for not joining the family business.  He might say instead:

Note that these feel a lot more vulnerable than “I feel disappointed…” but that’s exactly what makes the Emotion Expression model so powerful — you are starting from a place of vulnerability rather than a place of attack and accusation.

See if you can catch yourself before you use a word like “Disappointed” and if you can instead express your emotions, not the shorthand.  It may or may not cause them to change their choices, but it will save the relationship.

Also, try it with other past-participle emotional shorthand words: annoyed, irritated, offended, etc.

One of the things that I love to teach to people who have any relationship with any other human beings ever is what is called “Emotion Expression,” AKA “‘I’ Statements.”

You have probably seen this model before. Sometimes it is laid out a little differently, but this order is my favorite because it starts with “Most true,” goes to “True as long as one’s perception is correct” and ends with “Maybe true but maybe not true.” So while the narrative (most suspect) at the bottom has a direct impact on the emotion(s) felt at the top, the emotions themselves are absolutely true and valid, and that’s a great way to start a discussion that can be kind of vulnerable.

So here is where the grammar lesson comes in: sometimes we cheat by putting in the Emotion space something that seems like an emotion but is actually a Past Participle.  Yes, the verb.  The thing about past participles is that most of them aren’t emotions at all, they are sneaky, one-word narratives.  Let me give you an example:

Correct: I feel sad and lonely (absolutely true and valid) when you didn’t return my calls (a verifiable fact) because I think that you ignored me (an interpretation of the behavior — maybe true, maybe not).

versus

I feel ignored (um, that’s an interpretation, might very well be inaccurate) when you didn’t return my calls…

In the example above, what was really said was “I feel (think/imagine) that you ignored me.”  That’s not an I-statement, that’s a sneaky You-statement.  It weakens the expression of emotions because at no point was any real emotion mentioned, just pure accusation and narrative.

Consider some words that you typically use for difficult emotions, and look for the past participles.  (Not all past participles will be cheaters!)  You can tell that they are troublesome words when you can expand them to a whole sentence of “You past-tense-verbed me.” There are a lot of them.  They are fine in other conversations, but where you want to be the most clear, connected, and heard, put them where they belong at the bottom of the emotion expression sentence, and find clear and accurate words to describe your real emotions.

_______

In Part 2, we’ll talk about the most toxic past participle that we can use in lieu of real emotions — “disappointed.”

I am not the best at content creation anyway, but definitely not when I am distracted by an international move.  Back in July, my hubby and I moved from the suburbs of Washington, DC to the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.  I took a long stretch to just settle in while we waited for our household effects to arrive, then jumped back in to coaching and compassion training last month.  Now I am ready to give some love to the website again, so welcome back!

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

—Mary Oliver

(Evidence: Poems https://amzn.to/3Bq3AeQ)

A few years ago, I was in a completely familiar and common situation — I was introducing myself to a new person at church. I reached out my hand to be shaken, and I said, “Hi, I’m Jenny Bryson.”

At that point I had been Jenny Wolfer for twenty years, and I had never, since the day I signed my marriage license, ever used my maiden name except when filling out official forms, and then only paired with my full official first name.

We are capable of putting down new neural pathways by using a new habit or way of thinking, over and over, until it becomes a superhighway in our brains, and we just default to it.  But the old pathway, like a Roman road, never completely goes away.  And sometimes, especially when we’re in an old set of circumstances, we wander down the old path.  Maybe we revert to an old childhood role when we go home for the holidays, or maybe we find ourselves back in an old maladaptive coping mechanism when faced with an old trigger.  (And maybe those two examples are actually the same experience.)

This can work to our advantage too.  We actually have an expression for this in English, “It’s like riding a bicycle.”  There are ways of thinking and doing that we might need to revert to, and when that need arises, we step right onto the path and go where we need to go.

To avoid falling back on those old negative pathways, we can bring awareness to what used to take us down that path, and make an active choice to take the safe road.  We also can bring awareness to and savor the helpful times that we find ourselves automatically cycling down the ancient abandoned Roman roads of our mind. 🚴🏻‍♂️

What are the good habits or ways of thinking that you’ve been able to easily pick back up again as needed in your own life?

I typically start journaling in the morning and finish it up at night, adding insights as they come to me throughout the day. First thing yesterday morning, I wrote at the top of the page a statement that I meant to immediately expand on,

To undergo self-development, you must have self-awareness.

Later that morning, I wrote about some things unrelated to the topic I had chosen, and then the whole day was incredibly busy in these huge coaching groups that I assist with. The groups were finishing up multiple weeks of a deep dive into their personal results of various psychometric assessments that they had taken, and at the very end of many hours of this conversation with 180 people, someone says in the last 10 minutes, “With this knowledge of myself, now I can improve myself in real and meaningful ways.”

This alone is not noteworthy — I am a transformational coach who spent the day neck-deep in developmental coaching — it was bound to come up. Maybe it is actually surprising that I didn’t notice it more throughout my day.

But last night, to wind down, my hubby and I sat down to watch TV — “The Book of Boba Fett” — and [not really a spoiler] the Mandalorian Armorer says, “Persistence without insight will lead to the same outcome.”

The importance of knowledge/insight/awareness to positive change is so fundamental that I cannot escape it even in a galaxy far, far away. 🌟

My grandmother eloped.

I don’t mean that she eloped 65+ years ago when she married my late grandfather.  That was all very traditional. I mean last week, my 85y.o. widowed grandmother met up with her 84y.o. widower beau and ducked into the justice of the peace’s office and came out married.  She’s over-the-moon happy and I am over-the-moon happy for her.

But in situations like this, there can be some unhappy reactions to someone seemingly “moving on” after a loss.  In polite society, we can only have one spouse at a time. Emotions, however, are a different beast altogether.  With wonder and awe, I consider how amazing it is that my Mimi (and each of us) can hold grief and sorrow over the loss of my grandfather and at the same time also hold joy and hope, neither diminishing the validity of the other.

I think sometimes we forget the infinite capacity that we possess to hold onto separate, disparate, often opposite-feeling complicated emotions all at the same time, that these feelings don’t cancel each other out but can be co-located.  When we get caught in the myth of “one at a time,” we short-change ourselves and others.

• We might deny ourselves happiness that is right there for the taking because we don’t feel we can set down our sorrow.
• Or we might deny ourselves compassion and holding space for our very real suffering because we are currently in a situation of joy.

A few months ago, I participated in The BIG JOY Project.  Twice a day there is an emotions check-in (seen here ►).  I loved that it asked both about pleasant emotions and unpleasant emotions at each check-in. Typically, I would have picked the prevailing emotion — that’s what we tend to do.  But this made me really stop and think and tease out from the great jumbled ball of positive and negative affect what exactly was going on.  On one day, I was feeling pretty low, but because I was asked to also consider my positive emotions, it actually drew me out from the difficult feelings and let me have a much healthier perspective on where I was at emotionally.

Try it yourself.  Take a week and check in on both the spectrum of pleasant emotions and the spectrum of the more difficult emotions.  How many diverse feelings are you holding space for right now?  Isn’t that amazing?

I had such great plans for the end of the year.

I love the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day anyway, and this year it was perfectly situated between two Sundays.  Sundays are already unique markers of time.  Lines in the sand that delineate between last week and next week.  I’m always torn if I want my calendar weeks to start on Sundays or Mondays.  Sundays are such liminal days — both endings and beginnings.  So I was especially tickled by this magical limbo week sandwiched between two holidays, the latter of which is the ultimate line in the sand, the finish line, the starting line — New Year’s Day.

On Christmas day I finished reading Daniel Pink’s book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, and of course he mentions the power of the great beginning that is NYD.  But Pink also gave time to the surge of energy at the conclusion of things.  I made great plans to use this final week of 2022 to identify and complete what was both unfinished and needful, while honoring the quiet and dark and peace that comes after the winter solstice and Christmas.  It would be a week of preparation and getting ready for new and exciting things.

And then I got Covid on Thursday, Dec 29th.  I recognized the aches that were coming on from past vaccinations and boosters, so I started cramming.  But I had paid, time-sensitive work that needed to get done first.  I prayed that I could get that finished and have something left for myself before I was truly ill.  I completed the work, but there was nothing left for me.  The year ended and a new one began while I was in bed.  My line in the sand had washed away.

Emotion regulation is a real bitch when you’re sick.  Our emotions are embodied — we feel our feelings.  So it’s hard to say how much of feeling a bit discombobulated and adrift over my best laid plans going “aft a-gley” was because I missed my magic window, or because I was literally drugged up to my eyeballs.  But eventually I was able to complete my main goal in preparation for the new year — make this website.

The great thing about sand — you can draw a new line.  And the great thing about Sundays — a new one comes every week.  My own church, which sets apart first Sundays as a unique time for fasting, declared that this Sunday, Jan 8th, would be our Fast Sunday.

So I’m redrawing the starting line.  Watch this space — things are about to take off! 🚀