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Emotional Overwhelm
EMOTIONAL OVERWHELM
You know when you have one of those weeks or several of those weeks where everything just seems to happen? When you want to say to the Universe, stop, please stop, I need to get off and take a breath and regroup. I am having one of those and not quite sure if it is over yet, but I sure hope so. My normal reaction to these types of “episodes” is just to sort of ignore them and try with all my might to carry on as if all is good.
The thing with this is, it all comes back in an avalanche when you least expect it and then way worse. Someone makes an arb comment which sends you in a flood of tears, way worse than the comment warrants or you lose your top over nothing and later wonder what the hell that was all about.
So instead of burying it all I decided to talk about it, because I know we all get handed these circumstances and most often we don’t know how to deal with them. For all of us it will be different, so you may be able to take some wisdom from how I am dealing with things.
My circumstances…
…ranged from family issues, death of a close family member, my car being vandalized, my son dealing with some sleeping issues (which for all you mamas who know means our sleep also gets compromised). So I am dealing with anger, disbelief, sadness, grief, tiredness, irritability and frustration. And as you all know all these come up all over the place, you are chatting to a friend and burst into tears, you get irritated because someone gave you the blue cup instead of the red one, and you wonder if you are genuinely losing your mind.
Firstly,
it OK, have compassion for yourself, you are allowed to feel all the things (Emotional Overwhelm). The trick is to feel them. Perhaps carve out a bit of time to allow yourself to think and deal with things. What I did was compartmentalise all my circumstances into “pots” (but whatever works for you) and then did some thinking work and feeling work around each particular circumstance.
Something to remember is that life is both, good and bad, up and down, black and white. You are here to experience all of it, so allow it. It is not so bad to feel sad or mad or scared. I promise you, if you are willing to feel them, they are not nearly as scary or daunting, they do not like the light, so bring them out. A lot of you ladies want to feel good a 100% of the time and then beat yourself up when you don’t, but that is not life, life is messy and all over the place. You don’t want to feel happy when a loved one passes away, or when someone gets murdered, you want to feel sad about it.
Once,
and only once you have done the above work on your mind, you can now decide what you want to feel. So when your loved one passes away you want to feel sad and that is perfectly normal, but once you have felt that sadness it eventually passes on to beautiful memories and thoughts about that person. You can think of that person with love and what they meant to you. You can decide that. That will look different for all of you.
Sometimes we create emotional overwhelm for ourselves with our thoughts about what is happening (our circumstances). In my case, it was my car being vandalized. Who did it? No idea. Can I do anything about the vandals? No. Was my mind going crazy thinking about it? Absolutely. Was it scary? Hell, yeah. I allowed all the feelings, angry, scared, vengeful and then I went back to thinking it is just a circumstance, completely neutral. Is there anything that can be done? Yes call the insurance company and get my car fixed. And ladies, that was the end of that. I put the lid on that little pot!
Just give yourself the space to be with your feelings, this is how you show up for yourself. And if you show up for yourself in difficult spots you trust yourself more. The next time something really hard happens, you will go ok, I can do this, I can handle this and this time it may even be a bit easier because you are not fighting it.
Another note about overwhelm is we tell ourselves we-have-to do this and we-have-to-do that. The truth is we don’t have to do any of it. We choose every single thing we do. A better way to thing about things is, I get to go to work, I get to take my child to school, I get to do the laundry or clean my house. Think of these things as a privilege and you will feel the overwhelm melt away.
Remember – You are strong capable women who can do hard things!!! Till next week….
Thank you for reading and hope this helps you when you are feeling emotionally overwhelmed. Love to hear your comments….
A
xxx
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