Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

by Meg Josephson

What part of me is feeling discomfo...

Remove the Extra Layer of Criticism

Perhaps one of the most significant roots of our internal suffering is our tendency to judge ourselves for what we’re feeling.

This voice is trying to protect us from feeling emotions that once got us in trouble or resulted in love being withheld. The mind wants to have control over any emotion that feels uncomfortable to protect us from it, and so we resist and criticize ourselves as a way to feel in control.

when we judge ourselves for feeling an emotion, the emotion doesn’t go anywhere.

We now have the emotion plus self-criticism and shame and anger.

We tend to compound our emotio...

The emotion itself (fear, for example) is allowed to be here—this is the primary emotion. The stuff we add on top of it—Why am I feeling this? When will this go away?—is the secondary emotion, which is...

The motivation for self-inquiry comes from awareness and curiosity, instead of judgment and urgency.

trauma can “freeze” your emotional response at the age when you experienced the trigger most deeply. And because it probably wasn’t safe for you to process that experience and those emotions at the time, this younger version of you, frozen in time, is unconsciously dictating your reactions and behaviors.

An emotion is the inner experience; it’s a physical and mental state, paired with thoughts and bodily sensations.

Anger, for example, may create tension in the body, maybe some heat in the chest, constriction in the throat. And maybe anger is saying: This is really bothering me. Something about this isn’t sitting right. How we react to the emotion—the behavior we engage in—that’s what’s in our control, and that’s our responsibility.

The emotion you feel is valid, but that doesn’t mean the behavior is.

There’s one thing that lies between the emotion and our reaction to the emotion: a pause.

When we insert a pause, we’re creating a small break after the trigger in which we can choose to respond instead of react. This pause is an opportunity to acknowledge the emotion we’re feeling without immediately reacting to it.

In this pause, we have the opportunity to decide whether we want to continue an old pattern or start a new one.

The immediate reaction is unconscious, and it’s often a window into our past, into our habitual reactions. A response is cons...

We have the choice of staying with the familiar (an unconscious move) or stepping into the inner freedom that exists in ...

When we’re stuck in a fawn response, we’re going to react because our bodies think we’re in the past and so are acting from a place of survival. When we insert a pause, we’re naturally communicating to our bodies that we’re safe beca...

This work is not about controlling our emotions; it’s about managing our reaction to the emotions and bringin...

By shifting our focus to how we react to the emotion, we give the pow...

The most important part of any sort of rupture is the repair that comes after the fact: acknowledging our reaction and being curious about it, owning up to it, and taking action to soothe ourselves in the future.

This isn’t a practice of perfection; it’s a practice of compassion.

Emotions Are ...

The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp defined emotions as “inherited ancestral tools for living.”

These emotions are not you; they’re visiting you with little pieces of information.

We resist an emotion that’s inherently temporary and is trying to pass through us, and we end up prolonging the emotion by trying to control it.

Instead of treating our emotions as things to be muted, we can ask ourselves: What is this emotion communicating to me? What am I needing right now?

My values are being compromised.

There’s an injustice here. My needs aren’t being met.

When anger is swallowed again and again, it bec...

Anger can also be protecting us from another emotion, like fear...

Something about this feels threatening. My safety or sense of security is being compromised. It may just feel scary because it’s unfamiliar, but let’s inquire further.

There’s a gap between my expectations, assumptions, or beliefs and what I’m seeing in reality. Whether or not these expectations were realistic, this disappointment is letting me know that what I’m experiencing isn’t what I was hoping to experience.

This is nudging at a deep desire I have that hasn’t yet been fulfilled.

I feel guilty because my behavior violated, or is out of alignment with, my own personal values or standards.

Shame is a more pervasive feeling that I’m inherently flawed or inadequate as a person, leading me to want to hide or withdraw.

Resentment is the magical little messenger that can support us in determining whether we’re fawning (resentment is present) or just genuinely being kind (there’s no resentment).

This is a sign that you’re listening, a sign that you’re reconnecting to the internal world you’ve been disconnected from for so long.

Emotions carry messages, yes, but they don’t always need to mean something.

The emotion you’re feeling is valid, but the story the mind creates about the feeling isn’t always true.

Often the emotions we feel are simply reflections of the impermanence of every aspect of our lives.

It’s also normal for us, as humans, to have dips in our closeness in relationships, in our motivation and energy. Perhaps what you’re feeling is just a natural part of that cycle.

Constantly intellectualizing and analyzing our emotions is a way of keeping ourselves from really feeling them. It’s a protective mechanism: if we’re always thinking about our emotions and analyzing them, we won’t need to physically feel the pain or discomfort that’s behind the rationale.

Physiologically, emotions have a life span of ninety seconds.

“when a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a ninety-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.”

When we can practice (key word: “practice”) acknowledging our emotions without getting stuck in the stories around them, we’re in a more grounded place to receive any information they may have for us.

The irony is that when we resist our emotions because we think they’re unproductive, we end up prolonging them.

We’re stuck in the feeling for so much longer than if we had just allowed ourselves to pause with the emotion...

But reminding ourselves that uncomfortable emotions are temporary allows us to say, Yeah, this is really hard, and lets that be okay, because we no longer are the pain; we are just experiencing it.