3 Things to do When Your Emotions Hijack You
While everyone else in my house peacefully slumbered, I found myself wide awake, consumed by overpowering emotions that were hijacking my night. Despite my exhaustion, sleep eluded me, and no amount of deep breathing was calming the tightness and pressure in my chest. I kept running conversations through my head over and over – conversations with myself, my husband, the universe, and people from my past.
Weird as it is – it took me a minute to realize that I was feeling upset. I thought I was just annoyed that I couldn’t fall asleep. It was like, I was feeling upset and unable to calm my mind down, without actually realizing it. Once I realized it though, I started actually making progress towards tending to myself and being able to fall asleep.
It wasn’t a huge process either. I got up, went downstairs and just sat in my living room in the dark, and felt it. I didn’t think about my feelings, I felt them. I closed my eyes, focused on the tightness and pressure in my chest, and just noticed it. Focused on it. Paid attention to it. I didn’t try to deep breathe it away, I didn’t wake my husband up to try and talk it away, I just gave it – myself and my feelings - space, time, and most importantly, my attention.
About ten minutes later, I went back upstairs, laid down, and went to sleep. Nothing was fixed - the things upsetting me were the same as they were before - but I felt calmer and less like my emotions had totally hijacked me.
I know I’m not the only one that struggles with this because I talk to my clients about this a lot. There’s a lot of deep, long-term work that can happen when dealing with our internal worlds, and, that work is best built on a scaffold consisting of paying attention to and and being in a relationship with our emotions and thoughts. Here's my basic outline for how that scaffold is built.
Step One: Stop Resisting It
Emotions are kind of like toddlers – the more you ignore them, the louder they scream because the more upset they get that no one is listening. I really can’t blame them – I don’t like to be ignored either. And like a toddler, a lot of the time, our emotions just need to know we’re paying attention. They don’t need us to fix everything at once, they just need to know that we will respond to them when they need us.
This is because there a particular kind of fear and panic that sets in when we feel afraid/scared/hurt etc and then also feel alone/ignored/dismissed/invalidated. When you realize you are experientially engaged in an emotion (or, let’s be honest, hijacked by an emotion), make it a priority to pay attention to it as soon as you possibly can.
Instead of pouring a drink or getting a snack or turning on a show or calling a friend to vent, try going someplace where you can focus and be quiet. Just sit and turn your attention to that feeling – notice it. Stop resisting it, fighting it, ignoring it, or putting it off. Let yourself feel it. Think of it as a separate piece/part/person of you, a little sub-version of your whole being, and look it in the proverbial eye.
Step Two: Get curious about it
Once you start feeling it – whatever it is, get curious about it. Try and put specific words to what the emotion is. Once you can name the feeling, imagine asking that feeling why it is upset.
This can be hard because there are two ways to ask “why”. You can ask “why” in a “What-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you-for-feeling-this-way” tone of voice, or you can ask with an “oh-my-gosh-please-tell-me-what-has-upset-you-I’ll-pause-everything-to-listen-because-I-care-when-you’re-upset” kind of way.
Spoiler alert – the second is the more effective way to ask because it is truly curious – not defensiveness clothed in curiosities clothing. Listen to what this part of you has to say without any pre-judgments because 1) this is just a part of you, not all of you (which means this part does not speak for all of you when it talks about how it feels) and 2) it holds wisdom and important truths you'll benefit from hearing.
Step 3: Offer the Comfort of Validation
After the first two steps, you might notice yourself soften and compassion for the initial thought or feeling. Imagine actually offering that softness or feeling of compassion towards that part in whatever way feels natural.
If you're not sure and you’ve been paying attention to these feelings like a separate person, imagine how you would respond to a friend you paid attention to when they were upset and you let them just talk bout how they were feeling. You typically feel for them and offer validation and comfort – maybe through a hug or saying things like “I’m so sorry you are going through this”, or “I totally understand why that made you feel that way”. Imagine doing that for this part of you.
If you get stuck along the way (and by the way, the curiosity piece is where most people get stuck because they wind up distracted by a secondary feeling about the first feeling they were trying to focus on), talking to an Internal Family Systems therapist can help - we specialize in focusing on the relationship our clients have with their thoughts and feelings.
