It you have felt stuck in a cycle of crying and emotional pain after a breakup, most likely you are "overthinking and under feeling." True healing comes not from mentally analyzing the breakup, but from allowing emotions to be physically felt and processed to completion. Learn how to recognize being stuck in the thinking brain and how to shift into the feeling brain.
"You're not too emotional. You're overthinking and under-feeling."
Sign up for the free one-hour masterclass Hot Mess to Badass happening on January 28: https://sarahcurnoles.com/masterclass
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low, lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk through you. I'm Sarah Kernows, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk to heal your heart, let go of the past, reclaim your power and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together let's build a new better world. Let's go.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Hello my friends. Welcome to another episode of Breakup Puff Talks. I am Sarah Kernows, your breakup bestie, and I am just so delighted to be here with you today. I wonder if this resonates with you. Do you have a frustration around, it feels like you have been crying nonstop for months. It feels like you wake up and you start crying. You hear a song and you start crying. You get in the shower and you start crying. And you can't understand why it's happening because you've literally talked about this to anyone with ears. You have a therapist, you've been crying at girlfriends about it or friends of yours. Anyone who listen, you have talked this thing to death. And you are left wondering why am I still not over this? Why am I so broken that I can't seem to heal from this? Most people assume that they're too emotional.
(01:48)
But here's the truth. You're not too emotional. You're overthinking and under feeling. All right. And I know what you might have in response to that. You might be thinking, "But Sarah, I am crying all the time. How can you tell me I'm under feeling? It's like all I do is feel." But here's the distinction. Crying is not the same as feeling. Okay? And it's not even feeling to the completion of the emotion.
(02:26)
So emotion ... Let's talk about this for a minute, actually. Where does emotion come from? Where do you think your feelings come from? And that's actually, those two words get thrown around a lot, but I actually want to draw a little bit of a line between them. Emotions are naturally occurring in the body. They happen just automatically. Your feelings come from your thoughts. So that's why I can say, if you're crying for months and it never feels like you're getting to a resolution and you're talking about it all the time, your thoughts, you are probably overthinking and your thoughts are creating feelings causing you to cry. And you can be totally in your head about this and never in your body. And so it can feel like you're going through the emotions of crying of feeling, but it never comes out of your head and into your body, so it never gets to complete itself.
(03:33)
You can be emotional without being embodied. There's a really big difference. And I didn't know that for my entire life, basically. We are taught to disconnect from our bodies, to over prioritize our mind. And so when we have emotion, we think we can just process it with our mind because that's what's important is being able to think, right? And being able to understand. And so what we get stuck in are these mental loops of trying to understand things, thinking that if I can understand it, it's going to resolve my emotions. But what we're dealing with in reality, I want you to think about it like two separate brains that are processing the information. You've got the thinking brain and the feeling brain. And I mean, feeling is a verb. So your thinking brain is language based. It is going to live in the past and the future.
(04:43)
So it's going to be thinking about stories from your past and replaying certain scenes, or it's trying to escape the moment by fantasizing about something in the future. Okay? Your thinking brain asks questions like, "Why? And what does this mean? Why am I feeling this way? If I could only understand it, then I could control it and I could feel better." And what happens is it produces these looping thoughts and eventually it leads to mental overwhelm. Okay? Now your feeling brain doesn't speak in language. It's sensation based. It is based in your body. It's the rest of you below your neck. Remember that? Remember that part of you, everything below your neck.
(05:40)
The feeling brain is in the present moment. Okay? It only knows the right now, which is kind of interesting because you could even imagine something that has happened from your past, but your feeling brain is going to feel it as if it is happening right now, because it only knows the present moment. Doesn't even know what the past is. It can't distinguish it. Okay? The feeling brain isn't telling stories. It's moving energy and it moves in waves. Okay? So it's going to have a pattern of rising, a crest, a fall, and almost like a moment of calm, right? Just like a wave would. Okay. So I want you to think about the thinking brain is what is making meaning, right? It's telling stories, it's having thoughts. Your feeling brain is experiencing the moment through sensations and energy.
(06:53)
So overthinking, one of the big traps that we all get into is this idea of like, "If I could understand it, then I could feel better." What you're trying to do is you're trying to cross brains. You're trying to use your thinking brain to handle a problem that should be dealt with by your feeling brain. So some common traps and ways to know if you are in your overthinking phase, if you are overapplying that thinking brain, you are replaying conversations in your head, right? You're reenacting the whole thing in your head of what they said and then what you said and what you could have done differently and how you should have responded and you're replaying the whole thing. You might be analyzing texts, looking for what are the clues? Where were the red flags? What did I miss? What did they really mean when they said X, Y, Z?
(07:55)
Or, "I bet now that I know what I know, but I know what that actually meant." And then you are also outsourcing it to your friends too, right? Let me copy paste this conversation and you tell me what you think or let me tell you what he did and we can analyze what that means.
(08:19)
This feels like it's productive because it's generating an emotional intensity. It feels really intense to keep overanalyzing these things and keep replaying these moments. It's conjuring up feelings of intensity, excitement, maybe a little bit of self-righteousness, maybe even like some pity of like, "Poor me. Look how badly they treated me. " Any of those feelings are being generated by how much you're thinking about the situation and analyzing it. And it is real. I'm not even going to say it feels real. It is real because the feelings you're experiencing from your thoughts are real. But this isn't emotion that is ever being processed through your body. You've ever heard that phrase of like working yourself up into a frenzy. It's exactly what you're doing.
(09:18)
And we often do this of like, if I stir up this frenzy of feelings, I'll feel better. I'll exhaust myself from it and I'll feel better on the other side. But what's happening is that you're never touching the underlying emotion that's naturally present from your breakup, right? And those could be emotions of rejection, of disappointment, of grief, of heartbreak, of anger. These emotions are still there, present in your body because they haven't been felt through to completion. So what is happening is that insight without sensation processing is going to keep that emotion stuck. So just to be really clear, feeling is not venting or ruminating or telling stories.
(10:15)
Feeling is a physical sensation. It is temporary like a wave, right? You might have multiple waves, but writing out a single emotional wave is going to last under two minutes. And then you might get another one or you might have a break. Anyway, feeling is also nonverbal. All right? So I want you to think about that wave. And when feelings are felt fully, they finish. Okay? So here's how you can know if you are in your thinking brain too much. You'll know you're in your thinking brain too much if your head feels really busy or foggy.
(11:07)
If your feelings come with a story like, "This is never going to end or I'm always going to feel this way or I'm too emotional." And you might feel emotionally exhausted. You might just feel overwhelmed, right? Like, "This is all too much. I can't handle it. " And you never get to a point of relief. You'll know you shifted into your feeling brain if the sensation is primary and your thoughts can quiet for a moment, right? You're able to put them to the side. You don't have to tell stories about the feelings you're having. You can just be with the sensations and then you'll notice that there's even a subtle relief afterwards.
(12:01)
So here's where people, most people get really stuck with this. It is really hard to do this alone because you can't think your way out of overthinking. You see, it's like a paradox and the thinking brain kind of hijacks and overrides your whole system because we've been taught to do so much there. And this is why it's so useful to work with a coach, because a coach has that outside perspective who can see what's going on. It's not always about like, I have the perfect ... It's never about, I have the perfect answer. Honestly, let me tell you that. I never have the perfect answer, right? I am no one's guru. You are your own guru.
(12:50)
And what it is, is about revealing the truth to you, teaching you new skills sometimes so that you have new pathways to walk on, right? Maybe this whole feeling brain is completely new to you and you're like, "How do I even do that? " That's where a coach can help you, can help you drop below the neck, get out of your head and into your body, and can help you notice when you're slipping into story, when you're flipping into your thoughts. They could be like, "Ooh, there you are in your brain again. Let's come on down from the thinking brain. Let's cut into the feelings. Let's get into the body." Yeah? And it can be very powerful to have that outside perspective who's giving you real time feedback of what they notice is happening and showing you these are the patterns of your brain that are happening automatically.
(13:46)
Here's what your brain is doing.That's leading you down a bad path. Let's pick different patterns. These are the patterns in your body where you are shutting down and you are feeling like you are not capable of feeling. Let's build your capacity so that feeling feels safe because if you never feel your feelings, they just stay with you. They just linger in the background, lurking, waiting for that terrible moment where you're in a really important meeting with your boss and you just start crying. I mean, ask me how I know. I definitely have done that. But this is really the work that I do with my clients and what this gives them is actually a sense of ownership over their own experience. They feel in control of their life again. It's not about numbing or bypassing or positive thinking. What we want is to create this mastery of I am capable of feeling anything.
(14:48)
I don't have to be afraid of my feelings. I can process them through to completion. And by doing that, you have less attachment to the past and you build more capacity for healthy love and connection in the future.
(15:07)
And what most people tell me they come to me for is they want to feel free again and freedom doesn't come from avoiding your feelings, right? That's that sense of like if you've watched any crime movie ever, if they were to run to the border and hide out in Mexico, right? They're always going to be on the run. That's what avoidance is. Like you're always on the run trying to avoid something. No. Freedom is when we feel like I am capable of handling this and I can process this all the way through. I have nothing to run from. I can let this feeling finish and feeling that relief on the other side.
(15:54)
So if this has shifted something for you, if it's reframed how you're thinking about feelings and emotions, I want you to sit with it for a moment, right? We're going to drop into that presence. We're just going to be with it. And I want you to know this is really just the beginning. In order to do this safely and effectively, there's more to learn and it really helps to work with somebody who can hold you through it, not physically hold you, but who can be there with you as you're navigating. All right? And so if this felt good to you, even though maybe it was a little uncomfortable, that's okay. You're allowed to be uncomfortable.
(16:44)
But if there's something about it that resonated that you were like, "Yeah, yeah, that sounded really good." I want to invite you to something really special I'm planning. I'm teaching a masterclass on January 28th at 1:00 PM Eastern time, and in that class I'm going to help you identify what your root block is of what is keeping you stuck and preventing you from letting go of your past relationship and really healing from it. I'm also going to teach you how to help your body to feel safe again so that you feel like it's capable of handling whatever comes your way and show you how to build a life that's not dependent on your ex, but instead it's really grounded in who you are deep down. So this isn't a class about fixing you and it's not about getting it right or perfect. Really, this is about helping you get started in a way that works so much deeper and so much more effectively than 99.9% of the breakup advice that's out there.
(17:55)
So if that sounds good to you, it is a free class. It is going to be ... You can sign up for it at the link in the show notes. It's at sarahkernolls.com/masterclass. And even if you can't make it live, sign up and you'll get the recording and you will get some really useful tools that you can start applying right away. I hope that this was a helpful episode for you. I hope some things shifted and I really hope that I'm going to get to see you on the 28th. All right, my friends, until then, take good care of yourselves.