Unpacking process: the nitty gritty

Day late on this one..busy in Minneapolis with clients and trying not to freeze my eyeballs. This week I want to write about the nuts and bolts: what I actually do to move through a process. My life is unsettled and bumpy right now. When I go through spurts like this my brain kicks up a fantasy it’s been playing with for years. Dump a few things in my car, drive as far as I can and start over. Run away! Run away!

    Yes I could do that….but I won’t. The urge to flee does bring up a valid question. Why bother with process? Why not just ignore all this till it recedes a bit and get on with life? Simply allowing time to pass often does make the fallout from an intense lessen. If I ignore what’s going on inside me, chances are it will eventually fade into the background where I won’t notice it very often.

    However, when an experience fades it doesn’t go away. It gets pushed off into my unconscious and my shadow. Once there, it’ll stay just as volatile as it is now. The next time I have a similar experience all that old, unprocessed gunk will come back.  Avoiding it entirely isn’t an option. The choice is do it now or do it later. I’d rather wade through the emotional storm now.

     Emotion is part of every process. At its simplest, emotion is energy in motion. It’s meant to move. Part of being in process is being so immersed in what I’m feeling that I can’t see anything else. Immersion is the place to move the emotional energy by venting, having a meltdown or three and throwing a fit. Doing those things lets me move through the emotional storm and not get stuck in it.

    Identifying what I’m feeling is usually easy for me. I have a strong relationship with my emotional body and know myself pretty well. One of the things I’ve learned to do is sit with and be with how I feel. That literally means sitting still. Simple but it can very hard to do when I’m feeling restless. I sit still. If I find myself noticing the dirt on the floor and feeling a sudden urge to get up and clean, I close my eyes. No doing, just be.

    The story is the other place I tend to get stuck. My mind wants a reason. It wants logic and order and to figure things out. When there’s no obvious reason, my mind will make things up. This is where “don’t believe everything you think” comes in. I have to separate what I’m feeling and what’s going on in my internal world from the narrative my mind makes up about that.

    This is tricky piece of discernment. In order to get there I ask myself questions: 
What am I feeling?
    Emotion comes in layers. I need to go beyond my immediate answer to what’s deeper. If I’m angry, is the anger covering fear, vulnerability or powerlessness? I feel more powerful when I’m angry so it’s easy to grab that feeling to mask other emotions.
Where is this feeling coming from?

            Again my first answer is probably pretty surface level. This is the opening to looking at what I’m feeling vs. what my mind tells me about it. If my emotional response was out of proportion to what actually happened, either too big or too little, I’m reacting to something else. That something else can be an old experience where I felt similarly or a fear, a story, etc.

     Feelings aren’t facts. Whatever I’m feeling now is real, but the “why” I’m feeling that emotion may not be real. Process moves according to emotional logic, not brain logic. If I’m feeling betrayed, it doesn’t mean I was betrayed. Now could remind me of a similar situation where I was betrayed. The emotional link between the two situations brought the feeling of betrayal back up.

 Is this something I know or is it a story?

        My mind works best in concert with my heart and gut. When all three are working together, there are things I just know as what is true for me in the moment. When my mind goes off by itself, it tends to create a story about what’s happening.
What else could be going on?

            Even if I acknowledge that I may be getting caught up in a story, that doesn’t change how attached I am to the story. This question does. When I look at other possible explanations, the truth of the story is in question. This doesn’t make the story go away. It does take some of the power away from it and allow me to be less attached.

     Sometimes the story involves projection. My mind can go from this moment to a catastrophe that hasn’t happened (and might not) in a millisecond. Like resistance, projection is often a part of my process. I seem to need to let the first layer of projections run until it’s out of steam. If I find myself continuing to project, I go to being as present as I can in this moment. What’s really happening right now? When that doesn’t work I use an exercise where I name off everything in the room with me, out loud, until I come to present.

    This questioning process is not a one shot deal. I keep doing it over and over. Many times the answer is “I don’t know.” Staying in the unknown and resisting the urge to make something up is always a part of my process. My mind doesn’t like the unknown because it can’t be categorized or quantified. My gut and my heart are more okay with not knowing.

   Internal entanglements are another thing I watch for. We all have past experience. When something happens now that feels or looks like a past experience, the two experiences can get entangled in each other. The content of a past experience can be a vital clue about why I’m feeling the way I do now. It can lead me to what got triggered. After looking at whether there’s something in the old experience that I need to pay attention to, I move on to separating the two experiences. I look at what’s similar and what’s different between then and now.

   At some point I’ll start to make judgments: about myself, about the situation, about the way other people behaved, etc. No matter how intent I am not judging, I’ll go there. While I can’t immediately stop the judgments, I can shift how attached I get to them. When I judge something I want to make it an absolute. Judgments only retain their power if I don’t examine them. When I ask “Is that really true?” and “What else could be going on?” I take some of the power away. Even though my mind may continue to cycle through those judgments, I can let them pass because I’m not long attached.

     To do any of this questioning, I have to observe myself. When I’m able to be the observer, I am simultaneously in the moment and watching the moment. I have some detachment, but am not so disconnected that I don’t feel anything. Often I experience a delay in being the observer. I see what I’m doing a few seconds, minutes or hours after I’ve done it. The moments when I can do both at once are gifts.