Ep #121: An Emotional Clean Up

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm super excited to be here with you. We are wrapping up this first month of 2024, and we've been talking about really cleaning up your co-parenting, and that's really a theme that has been really integral to the work that I'm doing right now with my clients and even in my own life. I was just on a client call the other day, and there's so much noise out there about ways to get the other co-parent to do something or parent without even needing the other person even present, right? All of these things of kind of noise that's happening. What I really wanna focus on here on this podcast and certainly in the work that I do with my one-to-one clients, is stepping out of how can we control everything and everyone around us to make our lives more comfortable?

But how can we really step into emotional freedom? How can we step into responsibility? How can we really take care of ourselves and our children and our co-parent and our family in a way that feels good? I mean, I think that gets so lost. We can hustle and we can willpower our way to things, but ultimately, we get this one life and we get this one childhood with our kids, and how do we wanna spend it, right? And a lot of times when we're co-parenting or after divorce, we're like, "Well, this isn't it. I feel like, you know what?" I don't want you to feel like that forever. And I know that it's possible to feel better even when things don't change, right? We don't go from zero to feeling amazing in a second, but what we can do is learn how to help ourselves out.

And that's what I wanted to talk about certainly this whole month. But that's what I wanna talk about today, is how can we just feel better? And so before I dive into that, I do wanna make a quick note and tell you of something that I'm doing right now that I think you probably will want. Actually, I don't think you'll want it. I know you'll want it because it is going to help you create so much clarity. What is it? It's a co-parenting wellness assessment. Oftentimes, we're like, we know things aren't working, we know it's not feeling good, but we don't even know where to start. Maybe there's so many problems, right? Or there's so much that we have to do that we're kind of, it's like we just get into an analyzing and we don't even know what to do, or we just shut down and dissociate.

What I wanna do, and what I've created for you is a really easy way for you to stop and assess what is going on in your co-parenting. I walk you through a series of questions so that you can actually figure out what the heck is going on, who's responsibility is it, and how am I going to show up? And then, here's the best part. This isn't just like a freebie. What I wanna do for you, the listeners, is I want you to walk away feeling really empowered. And so the way that we're gonna do that is you and I are going to get on a call for 90 minutes. We are going to go through this assessment, and we are going to create an actionable plan for you to start moving forward. And even better, because I don't want you just doing this one and done, because that's not how life works.

You and I are going to spend two weeks on Voxer after that integrating and implementing this assessment and this plan that we have moved going forward. This is essentially how you start to move the needle, right? It's one thing to want to do something, but it's a different thing to actually strategize, get the help, get the support, and get the accountability. And that's what I want for you in this really simple, easy container. It's only 297 for this 90 minute call and the two weeks of access to your personal co-parenting coach. So why would you not sign up? Right? Okay, so how do you sign up? You go over to Instagram, you DM me the word 'Assessment', I will send you back the link and we will get started. It's super simple. I want this to be simple, simple, simple, but maximum impact. And I want this for you today. I want you kicking off 2024, really moving the needle forward. So let's do it together.

Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who wanna move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly wanna be. My name's Mikki Gardner. I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother. And I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, well get ready and let's dive into today's episode.

Well, what I wanted to talk about in this episode is really about emotions and feelings, because literally everything we do in our life comes down to our feelings. Our feelings drive the actions that we take or don't take, what we do, what we don't do, how we're feeling is really driving the ship. And so, for so many of us, we get overwhelmed by our emotions or we were taught, don't have any, don't feel the negative ones, right? Only feel positive. Yes, it would be great if we didn't. Well, I'm gonna take that back. I'm not even gonna go there. It wouldn't be great if we didn't have negative emotions because they're actually necessary, right? It's like the dichotomy between everything. We have to have balance. For there to be joy, there has to be sadness. For there to be really so much love and happiness, sometimes there's grief and sadness on the other side. Frustration, right?

All of these things actually are guiding us towards what we need or what we want. When we're really disappointed by something, it's because we were really holding onto a dream or a belief. And when that doesn't come to pass, we're disappointed. That doesn't mean stop, quit, put your head in the sand. It simply means, "Okay, I really, really want this. This is important to me. How do I reroute?" Feelings are directive. They are moving you towards something, and they're simply messengers. And the more that we start to understand these messengers that are constantly moving in our body, the more freedom we have. I have so many moms and dads come to me just wanting to feel freedom from their ex, not wanting to feel tied down to them, not feeling like the ex and the other co-parent is in charge of them in their life.

The way to be able to do this is to create emotional freedom in your life. This is a skill that we learn, where we learn how to process emotions without the emotions taking over our lives. And that's what so many of us didn't learn. And so, we're having to learn it now. But here's the best part of it. When you learn to do this for yourself, you are able to teach your children. We are constantly modeling for our children what sort of adulting looks like. So do we wanna be able to be an adult who can feel uncomfortable, who can feel negative emotions and still move forward, still show up the way that we want to with love, with respect, with kindness, with strength, with courage? Or do we wanna be an adult who gets completely sidelined by their emotions, is constantly having adult temper tantrums, which is us just offloading our emotions onto other people.

I don't think that's what any of us want. And it's okay when we do it. This isn't a shaming or a blaming, but what I wanna do today is talk about emotions and learning how to clean them up so that we're not creating more emotional mess to clean up later. So the first thing that we have to understand is there's kind of two different things. We use these terms, and I realized as I was talking, I did it a number of times. But there are emotions and there are feelings. Emotions are really energy in motion. We are emotional, energetic beings, and emotions are those energies that move in and out of our body. These are nervous system based, they just sort of happen. So, you get into a car accident, you get angry, or scared or whatever the emotion is, you win the lottery, and it's like, whoa. Immense joy.

You see your kid when they come down, like maybe you haven't seen them and they're getting off the plane and you feel so much love and joy. These are emotions. It's just that energy that moves through your body. Then there are feelings. Feelings are created from our thinking, from our thoughts. And so it's important to start to understand these because a lot of times, and I know that I try to do it all the time, we try to think our way out of how we're feeling, but that isn't always possible because we can't think our way out of emotions because they're energy. But oftentimes when we try to treat emotions like feelings, we just end up getting really, really more frustrated and stuck. And so, I'm gonna go through a couple of negative emotions that we feel often after divorce and co-parenting or separation.

Things like anger, disappointment, frustration, grief, these are energetic vibrations in your body. Now, these things happen, and they're not necessarily happening necessarily from our thinking, but they just happen based on what's going on around us. These can easily become feelings when we attach a thought or a story and meaning to them, then they become feelings because now we're attaching a lot of thought onto it. When we attach these thoughts, this meaning and these stories, what it does is it sort of sinks us down into them, sort of it makes us stuck inside of the emotion or the feeling, and we end up staying there longer. Again, when I said a minute ago that feelings and emotions, they are directive, they are a messenger. They're meant to sort of guide us on the journey where we really get tripped up. And I know I see a lot of my clients, and I am raising my hand, 'cause I get stuck here all the time too, is when we attach story and meaning to it, and we start playing all of the thoughts into our head, and we kind of set up camp and we live there.

That's what we don't wanna do, right? We don't wanna set up camp near the grief and frustration and anger because it perpetuates it. And when we start to do this, common feelings that we have in co-parenting are shame, rejection, jealousy, depression, anxiety. This is when we're really attaching so many thoughts and we start to get really into our head and creating more and more and more of the negative feelings that we don't want. And again, there's zero shame and judgment as we're talking about this. I wanted to talk about this emotional side of things because it's important that we understand. We have to understand theoretically what's going on so that when we actually are experiencing it, we have some sort of frame of reference and know what to do next. And I'm gonna get into some tools to be able to clean that up.

But the more and more that we don't learn how to handle our emotions, and when I say handle our emotions, it's learning how to self-regulate, how to regulate our emotions, manage them. This isn't meaning control, suppression or sort of overriding them. No. Learning how to navigate and regulate and manage our emotions is really done from a place of learning to understand, learning how to notice what's happening. And this we notice awareness as we talk about a lot on this podcast, we're noticing what feeling or emotion we're feeling without judgment. No blaming, no judgment, no criticism, we're just noticing, I'm feeling really, really angry. We allow that feeling to be there. Oftentimes we don't wanna sit with it. Listen, this is why so many of us don't wanna do the work because we don't wanna feel the negative emotion. And I get it, it's not fun.

But here's the thing, when you actually learn how to be present with your emotions and you learn how to be more regulated, you don't end up doing the things that get you into the situation where you're really unhappy about it. Suppressed emotion, ignored emotion, avoiding emotion, looks like sleeping all the time, right? Rest is great, but not when it's at the expense or to avoid what's going on, right? This might be where you're so emotionally invested or so emotionally overwhelmed by what's going on with the other co-parent or your children that you just nap, right? Hours of napping. Again, rest is important, but when we're doing it to avoid life, it's not helpful. Drinking, taking drugs, numbing out, excessive worry, excessive busyness. Busying yourself so that you don't have to be present with how you're feeling, over exercising, gossiping, allowing overwhelm to be there, dissociation. Really like sort of not even feeling present in your body is often based from trauma and not being able to handle what's going on.

And sometimes we just, even if it's low level, we just don't even wanna feel it. And so, it's like that out of body experience where we sort of separate from our body so that we don't feel what's happening. Netflixing, right? Any of these things to avoid what we are actually feeling. This prolongs the feelings. All it does is sort of say, "Oh, okay, you're not gonna feel it now. Great, I'll save it for later". No, we don't wanna save it for later because then it's just more, and there's more to do with more of the other feelings we haven't felt. And that's where we get really, really stuck and trapped in the cycle of anxiety, in the low level depression, where we start to really in the shame spirals. And this is a really unhealthy place where we actually cannot and are not taking responsibility.

So how do we start to really navigate emotions? I just did a whole workshop on this, and if you wanna talk about this, this is what I do in my one-to-one coaching with my clients. We learn how to regulate our emotions, we learn how to navigate them and manage them in healthy ways while you have someone alongside you to do this work. But I wanted to offer you a few tools here on the podcast today. So let's divide it up into two areas here. One is the feelings, and I'm gonna go to those first because this is the thinking part, right? So when we're talking about feelings, we're gonna treat these a little bit differently, but feelings are again, what you're feeling in your body that is created by what you are thinking.

And so when we have these kind of feelings like, and this you know because you're really in your head about it. Emotions again, are those energetic feelings, like you're feeling it all over in your body. Feelings you know, because they're really coming from your head. I know when I'm having feelings of shame, of jealousy, of anxiety, it's all happening up here. These are those points where we need to stop and notice. Notice without judgment, notice with curiosity. What am I feeling? Where do I feel it in my body? Because feelings are felt in our bodies. So we need to notice that. And allowing, allowing them to be there without trying to attach any more worry or drama or story to it. Allowing yourself to notice, where do I feel it? How does it feel? Just getting more and more curious. One of the greatest tools is Byron Katie's work here, right?

She is unbelievable. But her four questions are really directed towards this kind of feeling and learning how to investigate. So her questions are, when we identify a feeling that we're having and we start to understand, well, what am I thinking? When I have that feeling, what am I thinking? I might be thinking, my ex never helps me out. I might be thinking this is gonna be the next 18 years of my life. It might look like I can't do this on my own. Any of those thoughts, you can go through Byron Katie's four questions. The first one is, is it true? Oftentimes it's not true. If your brain's still saying, "Yep, it's true", then you ask, can you be absolutely sure that it's true? If you can be absolutely sure that it's true, then that's a different story. But oftentimes with our thinking, that's not the case.

So is it true? Can I be sure that it is absolutely true? The answer is no. So then you say, well, how do I react? What happens when I believe that thought? Right? This is a really important thing to understand. What is this thought creating in my actions and what I'm doing? And then, the last question is, who would I be without that thought? If I didn't think that this was hopeless, if I didn't think they were out to get me, if I didn't think that this is gonna be forever, who would I be? And oftentimes it can start to help us move through the feeling that we're feeling. So now I wanna talk about emotions, because again, these are energy in motion, and so we can't think our way out of them. We have to learn to do things a little bit differently.

And so, I wanted to talk about a few ways that you can do that. So one of them is just moving, moving your body. And this is really, really important because it's energy. So we have to be willing to do this. So it might look like just shaking, right? Shaking it off. When you are really frustrated or you're having a ton of disappointment or grief or anger, we got to move it out. We got to shake it off, we got to wiggle. You might go for a run around the block, you might walk around the block, you might punch something like, I recommend a pillow or something soft, in the safety of your own private space. But do something to move the energy. I'm a huge fan of Hal Elrod's five minute strategy. What this looks like is you set a timer for five minutes and you allow yourself to feel what you're feeling.

You allow yourself to be with that emotion. You allow yourself to be with the intensity. Maybe it's a feeling, maybe it's an emotion, but let yourself be with it. Try to move through it, journal about it, hit a pillow, scream, punch something, whatever it is. But when that timer goes off, you stop and you say to yourself, "I cannot change this person, thing, whatever. Now what? Now how do I wanna move forward?" You learn to allow the feeling to be there, actually acknowledge and be with the feeling. But then this is where you sort of put on your adult pants and say, "Now what? What am I gonna do moving forward?" The last thing that I'm gonna offer you, because I think it is extremely helpful, is tapping. EFT tapping. And specifically, if you haven't heard of it, EFT is a treatment for physical pain or emotional distress.

It's like a psychological version of acupressure. And so it helps us actually move and restore the balance of your body's energy. So again, when we're talking about emotions, which is energy in motion, we sometimes need these things to be able to help us. So there's five steps. Once you identify the issue, once you identify the fear that you're having, the emotion that's going on, that's where we are going to focus. And so you are going to acknowledge the issue. You're gonna accept yourself despite this issue. We're not gonna say, I'm awful because I'm having this, or I'm a total loser because I feel frustrated. No, we're gonna see that we're frustrated. We're gonna acknowledge I am here having this frustration and I am going to help myself move through it. So tapping is actually a sequence of methodical taps on the meridian points. So those are the side of the hand, which they call sort of the karate chop.

It is the top of the head, which is sort of one of the biggest vessels. There's the eyebrow, which is the bladder meridian. There is the side of your eye, which is the gallbladder meridian. There's under your eye, and my glasses are on, which is the stomach meridian. There's under your nose, which is another governing vessel. There is your chin, which is a central vessel. There's the beginning of the collarbone, which is the kidney meridian. And here's this little bit strange one, the under your arm, which is the spleen meridian. So you're tapping each of these things seven times, going from eyebrow to the side of the eye, to the under eye, to the chin, to the collarbone, to under your arm, right? And then you move back through it. And so while you're doing this, you are just repeating the phrase that you've identified.

"Even though I am frustrated at blank, I accept myself. Even though the other co-parent is making things really difficult, I completely accept myself. I am here for myself deeply. I am trusting and caring for me". And you just keep saying it while you keep tapping. And I'm telling you, this stuff works. And we have to recognize that it is energy in motion. Those are our emotions. And so, we have to meet it there. Be respectful of yourself and how you're feeling, because like I said earlier in this, the only way to help our children not feel the anxiety, maybe the depression, the generational patterns that have been passed down, is for us to break them. And we have to start really learning and understanding our emotions to be able to change the trajectory. We cannot continue to try to think our way out of things.

We have to learn to be present. We have to learn how to clean up our emotions. Otherwise, we're just gonna have more mess to clean up later. I know you can do this, my friend. I know emotions are scary. I know feelings are really overwhelming and nobody wants to feel the negative ones, right? And we have to learn how, because that is how we learn how to take full responsibility in this life. This is when we learn how to really show up in a different empowered way. This is when we don't need our ex to change and become perfect and easy because we have the confidence to move through it. And we have the confidence to care for ourselves deeply and compassionately, to care for our children deeply and compassionately, and to have the love and respect to move forward in this world the way you want to. I believe in you 100%. And if no one tells you that today, I want you to know it from me. I love you. I am here for you. Your kids need you doing the work to learn how to manage your emotions, your actions, and really show up as the strong, loving parent that you are. Wishing you nothing but the best. Until I see you next time, take really, really good care of you, friend.

Oh, and one more thing, the legal stuff. This podcast is solely intended for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for any medical advice. Please consult your physician or a qualified medical professional for personalized medical advice. Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week.

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