How to Cope with Negative Emotions While Navigating the Rollercoaster of Divorce Recovery

I want to talk about how to cope with negative emotions because I’m gonna take you on a wild ride, telling you a story about a recent weekend, when my friend and producer for the podcast Joy was out of town and her children were staying with me, and get into the nitty-gritty of how we get stuck in our healing journey.

Today, we will cover many concepts, including how to know when to suppress emotion and how to know when to lean into it and fully process it.

We will talk about how many people, including Joy, are afraid to feel good feelings.

I’m not talking about the good feeling you get from that first sip of coffee or that last sip of wine. I’m talking about feelings like contentment, joy, and gratitude. I will also talk about an intellectual faith versus an embodied faith and how to move from one faith to the other.

Cope with Negative Emotions: Breaking Free from the Shame Spiral

First, I want to use a recent example of a shame spiral that Joy experienced while she was traveling with her husband. Similarly, a smaller one that I got into while I was putting her kids to bed one night, and what that has to do with our healing.

As Joy and I were unpacking all of this today and processing it, I was explaining to her what was happening inside her body and mind, why it was happening, and what to do about it differently.

It all started as we were kicking around ideas about what we wanted to record for the podcast today – we keep a list of creative ideas that I’ve had as a result of sessions with patients or things that have come up in my own life after the divorce. I was explaining to her the process of people being afraid to feel really good feelings.

How Your Subconscious Mind Sabotages Positive Emotions and Keeps You Stuck

The brain’s primary mission is to keep you alive, and it often interprets that as avoiding things it has experienced in the past.

So if, in the past, you were feeling safe, saw no threats, were able to connect, and then boom, something came and knocked you on your ass, your brain remembers that.

I started explaining to Joy that because our subconscious mind drives so much of our lived experience when we women have internalized negative beliefs like, “I am not safe, I cannot trust myself or other people, I am not good enough,” when we feel good feelings, our subconscious mind comes in to warn us, “Hey, remember, my job is to keep you alive,” and interrupts those positive feelings.

When Feeling Good Feels Unsafe: Unpacking Subconscious Sabotage and the Hidden Triggers Behind Our Emotional Blocks

It can be difficult to consistently feel good without subconsciously sabotaging it. How did that play out with Joy this weekend? You may have heard a bit of her backstory with her husband, as they overcame some massive, betrayal-oriented issues—both with attachment-related concerns. There are times when she still combats some of the painful feelings associated with that. So, they’re away for their anniversary, and she’s feeling some type of way, her nervous system is perceiving a threat, and she’s having memories surface about things that happened that were painful.

Why Quiet Moments Can Uncover Hidden Pain

Now, I think there are a handful of elements here that I want you to pay attention to.

The first thing: Her kids weren’t with her. And as moms, we’re used to taking care of our kids all the time, so when they’re not around, we’re not distracted. This means that what we’re feeling and what we’re still grappling with comes to the surface.

You’ve heard me talk about why taking breaks is important for our healing process.

When your mind is quiet or when you have more space to process, you will see what is lurking in the corners of your brain.

In this instance, Joy had space to really feel what was there.

The second element? I’ve been giving her a homeopathic remedy related to disappointed love.

When we take a well-paired remedy, we will have a response where stuff surfaces – we have dreams about it, and we feel all the things.

How to Recognize and Transform Your Cycle of Quick Fix Good Feelings

The third thing is that she still feels afraid to feel good feelings. So, how could that possibly be?

Often, we women are living life from a place of comfortable numbness – we get used to feeling good feelings, like that first sip of coffee in the morning, or when we scroll Instagram or when we’re on Amazon, and we find the perfect thing, and we hit buy now. When we get home at the end of the day and we have a therapy session, and then it’s a glass of wine time. And then it’s time to scroll Instagram a little more, binge our favorite Bridgerton season, and go to sleep.

Of course, in between all of that are plenty of highs and lows.

But we have become so used to those dopamine hits that it’s our version of feeling good versus a true, embodied version of feeling good.

An embodied version of feeling good is where you can sit in a quiet room, in nature, without your children, without boyfriends, without your phone, and strip away all the distractions in life and still be able to consistently access contentment, optimism, happiness, gratitude, and enoughness.

So, if I plopped you in a room and stripped away all those distractions, what would come up for you? Probably a lot of your fears, anxieties, and griefs. Because we women tell ourselves that when I get on that Disney cruise, I’m going to feel good. When I have the perfect partner, I’m going to feel good. When my kids feel safe, I will feel good.

The reality is that those are all examples of feeling states that we’re chasing when the reality is we’re carrying around a bunch of baggage inside of us.

For Joy, she was afraid to feel really good because her brain was protecting her from getting caught off guard by her husband doing something again. Her subconscious mind wants to keep her safe.

Very often, we don’t want to be accountable for our feelings.

We women want the perfect partner to fix our feelings for us a lot because we’re tired. We’re tired of being strong. We’re tired of having to be responsible. We’re tired of having to be accountable. We are so tired of all of it, but very rarely do we own our feelings.

Why ‘Stop Thinking About It’ Doesn’t Work: Harnessing EMDR to Fully Process Fear and Heal on a Somatic Level

While Joy was away, I had her three kids stay at my house, and one of them is afraid of thunderstorms, and we happened to have a thunderstorm. So I pulled her kiddo aside and I said, “Let’s do a little bit of processing.” And so as we’re doing EMDR about the thunderstorm, she says, “When I think about it, I feel more scared, so I need to not think about it as much.” How many times have people told us to stop thinking about it? How many times in cognitive behavioral therapy are you taught, “Change your thoughts, change your life”?

And that’s not wrong, except when we haven’t fully processed our feelings on a deep, somatic level, there’s still content in there that can resurface.

And so I said to Joy’s child, “I want you to lean further into it right now. I want you to see if you can turn the volume up on what you’re feeling.” And so I asked her to feel it even louder if she could. I asked her to identify where in her body she was feeling it.

Learning to cope with negative emotions is a nuanced skill. It’s knowing when to lean into them and to process them in the body, and when to say, “Now is not the time to focus on this.”

I want you to notice how often you’re distancing yourself from your feelings.

Suppressing what you’re feeling versus processing it to its fullest depth and thus integrating the experience into your sense of wellness.

From Suppression to Embodied Faith: How to Take Responsibility for Your Emotions and Embrace Healing Through Life’s Challenges

Joy and I talk a lot about emotional eating, which is the tendency to use food to subconsciously soothe and distance yourself from whatever you’re feeling. If it’s a week when things are busy or a patient has an emergency appointment, I can feel that in my body.

So then I distance what I’m feeling with chocolate, rather than saying, “Oh, I need to actually change the structure of my life. I need to have better boundaries in my calendar. I need to have done something different. I need to take responsibility for my feelings.”

Are Subconscious Beliefs Blocking Your Manifestations? Unlocking the Power of Embodied Faith and Divine Alignment

Now we’re going to talk about the piece of embodied versus intellectual faith. So there are these concepts that we have a loving co-creator in our God. And that God is the perfectly attuned parent. So this means that everything Joy went through with her husband, and everything that I went through with cluster headaches, my ex-husband and infertility, and all the things, they weren’t caused by God. God is not a punishing God.

But when painful things happen in our lives, God uses those things to forge us into powerful weapons. He takes all painful experiences and turns them into good.

Do you know how many people block their manifestations because their nervous systems, their mental loops and habits, their emotional loops and habits, and their subconscious negative beliefs do not allow them the capacity to let in their intentional manifestations?

From Reflexive Fear to Embodied Wellness: Transforming Emotional Triggers with the Right Tools for Healing

When you go to the doctor, they do the reflex test, and they hit your knee with the hammer, so your leg is going to kick. This is a reflexive response that you’re not thinking about — it just happens.

When you hear a storm is approaching, do you instinctively react with fear and panic, or do you feel a sense of safety and trust that you’ll be okay – an embodiment of wellness and resilience?

We women all judge ourselves harshly for not being done with the healing process and still feeling painful emotions.

We have to trust that they are coming up for a reason. These emotions need a very specific, proper tool to release it, to shed it, to transmute it.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It has to be transformed.

And so when we have these repetitive thoughts or feelings come up, we have to transform them, and we have to use the proper tools.

Lean In to Let Go: Overcoming Negative Beliefs by Tapping Into Your Body and Transforming Emotional Blocks

When coping with negative emotions, lean in – don’t lean out.

Get at the negative beliefs that are causing you to block positive feelings. When I was talking to Joy about this, I went back to when I was processing with her kid during the thunderstorm.

Why Feeling Fully Into Emotions Is the Key to Healing: How Guidance and Co-Regulation Can Help Clear Emotional Wounds

We women have to feel fully into the feeling state to adequately clear it out.

The nervous system and the subconscious mind know when we’re avoiding or suppressing something, and so they demand us to fully clean it out. Time heals clean wounds.

But, sometimes, we need healers to help because co-regulation is how we lead to solo regulation.

Transforming Emotional Chaos into Contentment: How Attuned Guidance Can Help You Heal in Real-Time

You can find a perfectly attuned healer who can help process in real-time when emotions come up. When you say, “I’m going through something right this minute, and I don’t know what to do,” you need very specific, clear direction at that moment, which is how you clean out that wound. So that when shit hits the fan, your reflexive nature becomes contentment, optimism, gratitude, and empowerment.

Now, when I was putting Joy’s kiddos to bed, I was getting very agitated. My daughter and her three girls all have a difficult time sleeping. And I believe that we’re going to see more and more and more of that as the generations go on. Our lives and forms of entertainment are overstimulating. Our vacations are overstimulating. The dyes and the additives that we put in the foods are overstimulating.

So I put the kiddos to bed, and I gave them a little bit of CBD and a flower essence. I did a tapping series with them about how it’s safe to relax and fall asleep. I held space for them while they settled, but they were having a hard time, and I was getting agitated. As I felt myself getting agitated, I started doing the work right then and there. I adopted a meditative posture.

I was rocking, and I started breathing and saying to myself, “What is it about my young self who didn’t have this attuned parent holding space for me while I was experiencing restlessness and sleep? What about my inner child is related to these girls’ lived experiences?”

I started holding space for that inner child within, and I could see how sometimes, in some spaces, my reflexive tendency can still be anger.

From Agitation to Regulation: How Processing Emotions Transforms Pain into Peace and Connection

I had my little miniature shame spiral about how I should be further in this journey, but I am not perfect yet.

I recognized my feelings and I held space for my younger self. I dug into what I was feeling, and I worked to process what I was feeling, so that my nervous system could recognize I was safe in that moment and that it was a joy and honor to hold space for these four little girls. I knew that there was an energetic solution for the anger that I was feeling.

So, when you are feeling painful feelings, I don’t want you to chronically suppress them.  Leaning into painful feelings is scary. Our habit is to lean out. Feeling good feelings is scary because that’s what your subconscious mind is programming you to do right now.

So it is more likely than not that when you have attracted that great guy or when you’ve attracted that great job, there is going to be an element of self-sabotage.

This is complex work that requires a complex situation.

So if you have big dreams and goals for your self-love, I need you to hear that your solutions need to be bigger than your dreams and your goals. And I believe that that is what is promised to us by God.

When I study the Law of Attraction energetically, the solution is always bigger than the problem.

Ready for Big Solutions? Let Me Help You Claim the Healing, Hope, and Transformation You Deserve

There is a solution that is bigger than this problem, and that gives me so much hope – it’s always what I have clung to.

The answers and the promises are out there, but you have to be willing to claim them.

And I live to hold space for you while you claim them. It is my purpose.

And it’s okay if you need help. I would be so honored to be your help.

So if you’re ready to step in, step forward, learn how to cope with negative emotions, and feel safe and good, then you can book a call with me. You can also send me a DM or you can send me an email. Let’s jump on a call and let’s get you well. Let’s get you to your goals. I love you so much. Peace.