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When Feeling Bad Is Good For You · Gay Men Going Deeper

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:04
  Speaker B: Welcome to Gay Men Going Deeper, a podcast by the Gay Men's Brotherhood that showcases raw and real conversations about personal development, mental health, and sexuality from an unapologetically gay perspective. Today I'm your host, Michael DiIorio, and joining me is Matt Lental.
• 0:21
  Speaker A: Hey, guys.
• 0:22
  Speaker B: Today we are talking about something that sounds backwards at first, but I promise we'll make sense of it when feeling bad is actually good for you. I wanted to do this topic because one of the biggest contradictions in personal development is that we repeat two very different messages when it comes to dealing with emotional pain. One is change your mindset. It's reframing. It's changing your perspective. The other one is just feel your feelings. And so they sound contradictory, but they're actually not. And the skill is knowing which one the moment requires. So why is this important? Why did I want to do an entire episode on this? I consider this a life skill, knowing how to handle emotional pain and what tact to take meaning. When I say life skill, it means that it's something that you can learn and practice, because the better you get at feeling bad, the better your life gets. Think about this. When you're willing to feel bad, you become more willing to be authentic, be yourself, express yourself naturally, which is what we talk about on this podcast. You're more willing to put yourself out there, you're more willing to love harder, you're more willing to fail faster, and then do it all over again because you're not as afraid of the emotional pain that will be on the other side of all these things. Feeling bad is a part of life, everyone's life, okay? It isn't going anywhere. So let's just learn how to deal with it. Well, so that's what we're talking about today. So I think the first question I have for us, we, Matt, is why do you think people are so bad at feeling bad? Where does that come from?
• 1:53
  Speaker A: Why are people so bad at feeling bad? I think people are just bad at feeling. And I work within the. The gay male context, and just working with men is very different than working with women. Men are conditioned to not feel. We're told to go up into our minds and try and think our way through our feelings. And so I think that's a big part of it. I think it's conditioning. Gender conditioning is. Is. Is a piece of it. But then I also think in the human. Broader human context, I think just human beings tend to not be. Be good at this. I don't think it's a skill we learn, I don't think that. Well, even. Just think about the generations above us, right? They had no access to Internet, they didn't have chat GPT to tell them what emotion regulation was. They, they didn't have any of these resources. Right. And then a lot of that generation was using like tobacco and drinking, lots of alcoholism in that, that era. So it was almost like white knuckling your way through emotional experiences and, or just completely dissociating. And we had no awareness around it, like nervous system regulation and where all of our emotions come from. So, yeah, I think that's a big one. And then just disconnection from bodies. It's amazing. Like in, in my practice, like how much of the work has to be connecting people back into their bodies. Most people have no connection to their emotional body at all. They have connection to their physical body. They can feel some sensation. They can, right. But when it comes to their emotional body or even their energetic body, it's like they're completely severed from it. So it's.
• 3:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I, I think that's. They're all solid points. And what I would say as well, in our society, in our culture, and I feel like I say this on every episode, kind of the, the way that we're living these days is we are taught to chase, I won't say taught. We are conditioned maybe to chase good feelings. And if you look at marketing, marketing for literally anything is like, this will make you feel good, this will make you feel good. This will make you feel good, this will make you feel good. And so we then treat negative emotion or emotional pain like something has gone wrong. Like, like there's a malfunction. And the point that people miss is that emotional pain is part of the plan.
• 3:56
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 3:56
  Speaker B: It's always been meant to be this way. So the belief out there. I think people are bad. To answer the question, I think people are bad at feeling bad because as soon as they feel bad, they think something terrible has gone wrong and that we're supposed to be happy all the time. And that's just, that's never been the goal. Full human life is, is all of it. It's. Yes, it's the joy, love, excitement, connection, and it's grief, it's shame, it's loneliness, it's. It's frustration, it's uncertainty. So I think what happens is people think emotional pain. When it happens, there's the pain of actual pain of it. And then, and then we add on to it, like, oh my gosh, something has gone wrong. I shouldn't be feeling this way, I need to feel happy. And it's almost like it just exacerbates. It compounds the problem. And what I help people realize is that you're alive. Like, welcome to the human experience. This is. This is what we all signed up for in this human body, in this human life. Right. You. You want to put yourself out there. You want to feel grief when the circumstance calls for grief. If your dog dies, you want to feel sad.
• 5:01
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 5:02
  Speaker B: There's nothing there that needs to be fixed. You just want to feel sad about it. Right. And so when we can recognize that nothing has gone wrong with feeling bad, we can just deal with the pain cleanly, as I call it.
• 5:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, well said. I think we. We also wouldn't have the contrast of sorrow and joy.
• 5:22
  Speaker B: Right.
• 5:22
  Speaker A: Like, we need. We need both sides of it to understand one or the other, I think.
• 5:27
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 5:27
  Speaker A: It's interesting when it. Most people grew up in homes, at least this is what I see in my work. They grew up in homes where they didn't get emotional validation. So they. When things were tough and they were feeling shame or embarrassment or fear, their parents didn't know how to get down to their level and attune to their emotions, so they didn't get validation in their emotional experience. So that. Therefore what happens is they get. They start to judge their emotional experiences if it's a bad thing. And that's when we start to reject or shame our emotions. Right. And I think it's like we internalize these messages. I'll speak for myself. I internalize this message that was like, there's something wrong with me. Why am I having all these big feelings?
• 6:06
  Speaker B: Right.
• 6:06
  Speaker A: I'm a little empath. I'm a highly sensitive little boy. Right. But I think the key was to just take off the. With me at the end of that sentence.
• 6:14
  Speaker B: Right?
• 6:14
  Speaker A: There is something wrong. Not with me. There's something wrong. And that's what an emotion is telling us. A negative emotion is telling us there's an unmet need. And we actually need to look at what that is. And you know, in the case of sadness, it's like we need healing, we need connection. Right. Something like that. With shame, we need acceptance, we need approval, we need belonging. Like, so we're able to. To really use emotions as a way to. As almost like a compass to. To getting to our needs met.
• 6:44
  Speaker B: Right?
• 6:44
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 6:45
  Speaker B: That's the emotional or that's the life skill I call emotional mastery. I have a life skill review on my website, and one of them is emotional mastery. And that's exactly it. It's, it's learning. It's basically what you would call maybe emotional intelligence or emotional maturity, but knowing that emotions are not, not nothing has gone wrong. And it is, it is communication. It is a message. And you don't need to run away from these things. Right. They're, they're, they're there to teach us something. And I would say that feeling bad is a skill. Knowing how to feel bad, because it's going to happen, as I said. And most people, I think in the personal development, self help world, right, they think that the goal is to feel better. And yes, sometimes that is the goal. You do want to feel better than how you feel. Sure. But I think oftentimes the goal is to feel fully, not necessarily better, but to really feel fully like all of it. We're really good at feeling joy and excitement. We love staying in there. But then sometimes we don't want to do the other side of it. So when I talk about emotional health, that does not mean constant happiness. In fact, I think sometimes when you go down that route, and I've seen these kinds of influencer types on Insta, it's like toxic positivity, it's, it's perfectionism, it's people pleasing. It's like, let me just gloss over all the bad things that are happening and try to reframe my way into happiness. And you can't always do that because negative emotion is part of it. Shame, grief, all of it. I think that's, that's one big thing I'd like to, I'd like the audience to take out of this. I, I use the 5050 rule. So people argue that it shouldn't be 50 50, it should be like 80 20. And I love 5050 because it's even 50% of life is great. 50% is not. I'm here for all of them. Bring it, bring it on. Right? And then when you're not afraid of the negative 50, then you just, it's like, okay, well this is going to happen. How am I going to show up through this? That's the skill is how do I feel bad?
• 8:43
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 8:44
  Speaker B: Right, yeah.
• 8:46
  Speaker A: This is ultimately a conversation about capacity, I think. And it's not about, like you said, it's not about trying to reduce the amount of bad feelings we have. It's about expanding our nervous system so when they come, they don't annihilate us. We're actually able to sit with shame and sit with inadequacy, which are part of the human experience. And they don't take us out. We're like, oh, yeah, I recognize this feeling. I'm going to breathe into it. I'm going to. And then the mental mastery stuff can come after you feel. I think a lot of times people try and mentally master their emotions, but you have to feel first, and then you can practice mindset stuff along the way. And after, like, no, I'm not. I'm not inadequate, or I'm not less than because I'm experiencing jealousy. This is just a feeling that's coming up. And we're, we're able to make sense of our emotions after we process them in the body. But I think people try and process their emotions before they. Or they try and make sense of their emotions before they've processed it in the body. And that's, that's the intellectualization of emotion, which never works. It keeps us caught in loops of, of rumination. So one of the, one of the things that I teach you call it emotional mastery. I call it emotional curiosity. And what most people do is they, they. They practice emotional judgment. Right. So they judge their emotions, they reject them. They think they're yucky. They're like, you say over there, I'm not going. Instead, I'm going to scroll on my phone. Emotional curiosity just makes room. It makes space for you to just welcome whatever's there and just get curious about what it might be. So it's a completely different approach of turning toward emotion as opposed to turning away from it. And then the door is now open and you can start working with the emotion. But a lot of people have a hard time with that because their nervous system is so entrained in pushing away, turning away.
• 10:24
  Speaker B: Right.
• 10:24
  Speaker A: So it's actually, you have to stop that initial impulse to want to turn away from a feeling that feels strong or heavy or intense. And you have to actually choose to slow down and be with it.
• 10:35
  Speaker B: Right.
• 10:35
  Speaker A: That's the skill.
• 10:37
  Speaker B: Yeah. And, and that's either way, as you said, either way, you have to feel it so that you know what you're dealing with, because you can't. You have to invite it in. So you see, and then once you invite in, then you can start discerning, okay, which of this is what I would call clean pain and which of this is just my narratives about it. You know, an example that I love to use is, I'm sad because I broke up with my boyfriend. That's clean pain. And then you add, and he broke up with me because I'm unlovable. Well, now we've now we've ventured into territory of telling false narratives. So when we add both of those, then you're dealing with two types of pain. It's double the load where when you can eliminate the false narrative and see it as a false narrative, then now you're just dealing with the sadness of having broke up with your boyfriend and all that goes with it. The longing, the sadness, you know, whatever. Whatever that is. And that's how I think a lot of folks make emotional pain even worse. They. They add this other layer that I'm the problem. Something is wrong with me taking a circumstance that is very human and making it about them and personalizing it. And I get why we do that. That's fine. But just to recognize it's not a problem that you do. It's to. It's to. When you don't recognize that it's a. It's a narrative that you can change.
• 11:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, I like that. And I actually make a distinction between emotion and feeling with that. I look at his emotion as the physiological response to some sort of stimulus that happened to us. It's going through the body, it's going through the nervous system. It's clean pain, as you call it. And then the judgment of it or the stories we tell of it is the feeling.
• 12:09
  Speaker B: Right.
• 12:10
  Speaker A: It's like, I have a feeling about this emotion and I'm creating a story about it, which is then therefore causing me to have. So if you can start to look at it as these two pathways, it's like, okay, well, I'm going to maybe hop on the pathway of just somatically experiencing this emotion, and then I'll maybe hop onto this pathway and work with some of this mindset stuff or some of the storytelling that I'm doing about the emotion.
• 12:30
  Speaker B: Yeah, I call it facts and stories. Similar idea. But, you know, the facts are what you would call the clean pain. So grieving after the breakup, you know when you're disappointed, when you do something and it doesn't go the way you want it to go, it's okay to be. It's okay to be disappointed. Right. Or if you lash out at your loved one, lash out at somebody and then you feel guilty after that, guilt is exactly how you're supposed to feel. Nothing has gone wrong. And those ones don't need to be reframed away. You don't need to reframe away your guilt or your disappointment or frustration or shame. There, there's. The work is not to try to fix it and get out of it, simply to the work There is to let that be clean and not add on the false narratives, which would be something like, this proves that I'm not good enough. This proves that nobody wants me. This. This will never work. And then we start to dramatize all of these bad things and making it worse. And so those are the parts that you do maybe want to question and reframe and say, okay, that's. That's just an optional narrative that I'm putting on top of my clean pain. And now your clean pain is now muddied up pain. And that's the part that it is such a skill. I don't know. We're talking here on a podcast, but it does take a lot of refinement and skill. And I do think that. I mean, I know that it's something that you can learn, because I didn't know how to do this at all for most of my life. And then I learned, and I'm like, oh, my God, this is a superpower. Why are they not teaching this in school? Because this would have made my life a lot easier had I known this right from the jump.
• 13:57
  Speaker A: Totally.
• 13:58
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 13:58
  Speaker A: Totally. Yeah. And then I want to say one thing, too, because I look at, like, whatever the. The stories, right. Is accumulation, because you call it facts and stories. So the stories, for me, would be not just mental stuff. I think it's also emotional debris that we have not allowed ourselves to experience. So it's stored pain that we've never let ourselves experience. So that can also still be clean pain because it's literally living inside of our bodies. And we. And I would frame that as, like, core wounding. Right. That we have in our bodies. And then we have beliefs that have come from that core wounding from. From living with that pain for so long. It becomes beliefs about who we are, becomes identities. Right? Our pain becomes our identity. So that's where I think therapy is really effective. Like somatic therapies or internal family system therapy. These sorts of things that really get to those, like, deeper kind of core wounds that people have been holding for a long time.
• 14:54
  Speaker B: Loneliness and abandonment is mine for sure. So if. Let's say something happens, like a small. What I would call, like, the circumstance. The fact is, maybe something small, like, I had plans and someone canceled last night. Okay, okay. That happens all the time. But, like, feeling wise in my body, it's so. It feels so much heavier because of. It's not just this one moment. It's actually triggering all the moments in my past that I've felt abandoned or that I felt lonely. Or that I felt isolated. And that's why it has this almost like, it's almost like a wave. Like, why is this, why is this affecting me so much? But it is because there might be some unprocessed stuff back there or some, some trauma for, for some folks, some big T trauma, small T trauma, that it just triggers all that. And so you really need to know. Part of emotional mastery is you just really need to see the pattern play out. That's all it is. The other thing needs to get fixed. You just need to understand, oh, this is why this is happening. I'm understanding my pattern. I'm understanding why this particular trigger is having this particular impact physiologically, mentally, emotionally, and then not making it worse.
• 16:00
  Speaker A: It's a good example because I think abandonment is a big one for people. Also for gay men, I would say rejection is a big one. And you used this earlier, which I would say is a core wound. I am unlovable. It's a core wound. We have experiences of repetitive rejection. We develop rejection sensitivity which we've done an episode on. Usually the core wound underneath that is going to be, I'm unlovable, something's wrong with me. It's like a shame based wound, right? That. So, yeah, it's. It's big stuff. And this is, you know, to answer your initial question, this is why people don't feel. Because it's complex, it's messy, it's painful.
• 16:31
  Speaker B: Right.
• 16:32
  Speaker A: It's so people would rather just avoid.
• 16:34
  Speaker B: Right.
• 16:34
  Speaker A: I think.
• 16:35
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 16:35
  Speaker A: But they're missing out on so much.
• 16:37
  Speaker B: Right?
• 16:37
  Speaker A: They're missing out on so much because when we, when we avoid emotion, we avoid all emotion. So if you're blunting yourself to shame and, and fear, you're going to also blunt yourself to joy and love and all the good stuff.
• 16:52
  Speaker B: What emotion do you have the hardest time with?
• 16:55
  Speaker A: Fear, for sure. I used to think it was like shame or jealousy or any of these things. But the root of all negative emotions is fear, right. Shame. It's like you're. You're afraid of being outcasted. You're afraid of. If there was no one else around.
• 17:09
  Speaker B: Right.
• 17:09
  Speaker A: Would you feel shame? No, because we have a fear of other people. We have. It's a social fear. Same with jealousy. We have a fear of loss. So the fear of emotion, I think is. Or the emotion of fear is for. For sure. For me, all encompassing.
• 17:22
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:23
  Speaker A: What about you?
• 17:24
  Speaker B: I would say the hardest is probably shame. When I get into those shame spirals. But I mean, I'm really good now. At recognizing it, but still. And then abandonment. Still.
• 17:39
  Speaker A: What does abandonment bring?
• 17:41
  Speaker B: Shame. Like, unlovableness.
• 17:43
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's.
• 17:43
  Speaker B: It's all goes back to shame. Yeah. That something is wrong with me, and it's personal, and it's a me thing. And. Yeah. And anytime we make that very personal, that's what starts to feel like shame. Like, it's not a trait. It's who I am. It's, like, not something I. It's just intrinsically. I'm intrinsically inadequate in some way. Yeah.
• 18:02
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's.
• 18:03
  Speaker B: That's. That's the hardest one I've had yet. I've had the most experience with it, and I probably know it the most at this point. I feel like shame, like, oh, here she is, James. Here. And that's such a great way to. Personally, I really like talking to my emotions. Like the movie inside out, and I imagine them. And for me, that's really helpful.
• 18:21
  Speaker A: Do you hear the fire alarm Just a little bit?
• 18:24
  Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. I have to pause.
• 18:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's just making me think. The last, I don't know, year, I guess I've kind of made a commitment to myself to start going for what I want. That means I'm putting myself out there. I'm. I'm. I'm being less passive. Matt. And more assertive Matt. And that's in dating. That's in just everything.
• 18:50
  Speaker B: Everything.
• 18:51
  Speaker A: Anything that I desire and I want, I'm going for it. And that means my rejection experiences have increased because you don't always get what you want. Right. And so, yeah, it's really helping me grow. It's amazing. Like, I am now, like, noticing, like, I have this, like, crazy resilience to shame because when I get rejected, I'm just, like. It doesn't phase me as much. Right.
• 19:13
  Speaker B: And. Yeah.
• 19:15
  Speaker A: I don't know, the last few years has really taught me a lot about emotion and how to process emotion and how to actually really embody emotion. Spread it through your body, move it around, like, you know, and start working with it and make sounds and move your body and dance it out. Like, I'm literally like, you should see how I process emotion. I look like a weirdo, but I'm like, I'm. It's. I'm awesome at it. I'm so good at about experiencing emotions now, whereas before, I wouldn't like. So, yeah, let yourself get a little bit weird, people and. And move emotion out of that body.
• 19:45
  Speaker B: You know, so many guys I talked to want confidence, and they would say, oh, you know, I want the confidence. Of that guy. Or even they see me and say, oh, yeah, you're so confident. I'm like, yeah, that's because I have gone through it and. And I've survived it all. So now when, like, rejection. I've been rejected a thousand times. I'm like, yeah, this. It always sucks. It always stings. I'm not saying it feels great. It always stings. But that fact that I'm not afraid of the feeling of it as much as much I'm not gonna say I'm perfect, but as much I know that, okay, this is gonna suck for a little while. Sometimes it sucks for a second, sometimes it sucks for a whole month. But I'm okay at knowing that it's supposed to suck. This is what I sign up for, you know? The way that I like to call it is a big life. When I say big life, I don't mean stuff. I mean a fully felt life. Like, I want to. I want to be in my deathbed and look back and say, damn, I felt it all. I left it on the field. And then I could exit this world very happily. Yeah.
• 20:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, I like that. I like to live similarly too.
• 20:52
  Speaker B: Yeah. When it comes to feeling bad, what are some of the ways you think people avoid feeling bad?
• 20:59
  Speaker A: Oh, my God. We. We have a buffet. We live in a. In an era where we literally have a buffet of things we can choose from. Like, then that's why, again, why it's so rampant. Like, yeah, like everything. Everything. Look on your phone. There's a million things on your phone that can do it. Porn, sex, food, people. Right? People that become codependent, they hyper fixate on others because they don't want to look at themselves. Dissociating. Yeah. Like, even things like meditation, working out, being in nature, those can all truly be escapes from ourselves. And is that a bad thing? Absolutely not. Right. I think the things that we do, the things we choose to do, they can have consequences and some kind of less consequence than other. Like, you know, if I think about. On the. On the spiritual path, it's like, you don't sit and meditate when you're feeling bad. Because meditation is not meant to regulate emotion. Being with the emotion, embodying it, being present with the emotion is.
• 21:50
  Speaker B: Right.
• 21:50
  Speaker A: So maybe meditate after you have an emotional experience to. To help downregulate, but you need to process the emotion. Right. I think a lot of people, they're like, oh, I'm starting to feel a big emotion. I'm just going to go sit and white knuckle it through a meditation. It's like that's not actually emotional processing.
• 22:05
  Speaker B: Right.
• 22:06
  Speaker A: So there's a million things. Honestly, for me, I. I love. But my. It's. This has really decreased in the last, like, year. Like, I don't really do this much anymore. I was going to say I scroll and eat. Those would be my two things. Like, I would say scrolling maybe a little bit, but eating. I'm. I've cleaned that all up. Like, I'm no longer eating sugar. I'm, like, eating super healthy because I'm not actually craving that because I'm processing my emotions and I'm doing it somatically. So my brain is not actually needing to escape that. Right. So. But the scrolling, I think, is more just habitual. And it comes with the territory of having an online business and all that sort of stuff.
• 22:41
  Speaker B: So I try to try to stay off it if I don't have to. I would say that there are. Yeah, there's no shortage of ways. But I put them into four kind of buckets. I would call. One is to numb. We talk about that. There's no shortage of ways to numb alcohol substances. You know, we just try to. Basically, you feel it, but you're trying to numb it away with something else. Okay. Then the next one is repressing it, which is kind of pretending it's not there.
• 23:03
  Speaker A: Like, I'm just gonna ignore this.
• 23:04
  Speaker B: I'm gonna ignore everything's fine, everything's fine. The building's burning. I'm fine. Smile it away. The third one is to react. So that's people who take it out on other people. They. They project their negative emotions. They project their pain onto others. Lashing out, losing their temper. They become a hater. Going back to previous episode of Hating, and they just become very negative towards others.
• 23:25
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 23:26
  Speaker B: And then the last one is indulging, and there's a very fine line, which is a whole other episode between feeling your feelings and indulging in them. But there can be a moment where you're indulging in it a little bit too much, I think, you know, you might call that wallowing in it. It's very high victim energy, and it does not serve. Moving on. It's. It's staying in the pain for too long.
• 23:47
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. The ego has taken over the emotion and it's no longer in the body.
• 23:52
  Speaker B: Right.
• 23:52
  Speaker A: Like, the ego has grabbed onto it and it's getting something from it. Like, that's what I would say indulging would be. It's like, there's something and victim Energy is a big part of that, I think.
• 24:01
  Speaker B: Yeah. And all, all of these things just compound the pain. It doesn't go anywhere. It's not going anywhere. It's not. You're not actually numbing it. When you're numbing it, you're not actually hiding from it. When you're hiding from it, it's still there. And it compounds and gets worse. And there's our physical, negative, physical effects for when you do not know how to process that. Actual pain.
• 24:20
  Speaker A: Yes. Big time disease. Addiction. You know, you look at our communities like, riddled with addiction. That's one of the reasons why we've stuffed stuff. Stuffed for so long that we have all this thing. What's the number one way that you think gay men escape from feeling bad?
• 24:36
  Speaker B: Numb.
• 24:37
  Speaker A: Numb. And how do you think they do that?
• 24:40
  Speaker B: Substances, sex. Just any kind of dopamine that will make it better. Please make this better. Like, I feel bad and therefore I need to outdo it by feeling better. And I'm gonna have sex, I'm gonna drink, I'm gonna do drugs, I'm gonna. Whatever that is. And just. We find ways to numb. And there are no shortage of ways to numb. Yeah, yeah, that's. That's what I see the most.
• 25:04
  Speaker A: I would probably say, because this, this conversation reminds me of the four Fs, like fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Those are the strategies we use to cope.
• 25:10
  Speaker B: Right.
• 25:11
  Speaker A: And I would say gay men, I would say I see a high, like, flight response and which is like, get busy. And they have a hard time being still. They have a hard time slowing down. And I think Grindr is a perfect thing. Always on Grindr, scrolling, looking, hunting. And then when you achieve it, you get the dopamine hit. So I think, you know, those apps, I think are how a lot of gay men soothe.
• 25:34
  Speaker B: Their nervous systems are part of the numbing. All right, let's send this on a little bit of a high. Speaking of. That's not intended, guys. Okay, so let's give the audience some tips on what it looks like to actually feel bad. Well, how do you get good at feeling bad? Give us some, some tips.
• 25:57
  Speaker A: You gotta resist the urge to speed up. That's me. I'm a speeder. I'm. I'm you. When you'll know that I'm having emotions and I don't want to be with them. If I'm cleaning and organizing and moving everything and I'm like, I can't sit still, that means there's something in my nervous system that needs to be Processed. So slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down. I can't emphasize that enough. If you take one thing from this conversation that I've shared at least it's this. You got to slow down to feel your emotions. I think that's key. Yeah, work with the, work with the vagus nerve. So I do ohms every single day even when I'm not feeling emotions. I'm, I'm training my vagus nerve to be able to bounce back from anything. It's like going to the gym. Your vagus nerve is the nerve that governs your nervous system basically and it moves through your whole body. It's your largest nerve in your body. So vagal toning exercises, just you know, google them and find out what they are and practice those. They're more preventative but they can also be used reactively if you are feeling an emotion to help down regulate. And then hand on body, wherever you're noticing the sensations of the emotion, just kind of, you know, be with, be with that. And don't, don't be afraid to be weird. Like get up and dance, shake, shake the body. Fear and anger move out of the body really well when you shake. You know, bouncing up and down, shaking your limbs.
• 27:09
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 27:10
  Speaker A: There's a book actually that I read by who he's my acupuncturist in Calgary. He's just this amazing human. His name is Dr. Jag Johal and he, he wrote a book called ease. So a shout out to that book because that book taught me a lot about how to process emotion. And like he, he teaches it like you move from the threat which is the emotion to motion which is movement or something like vocalizing, expressing. And then you return back to ease. And he like looks at it. That's the cycle. Threat, motion, ease, threat, motion, ease. And we're always going through that as human beings. We can learn how to use motion to process threat. Then we will return back to ease which is our natural state that we're meant to be in as human beings.
• 27:49
  Speaker B: So love all those.
• 27:50
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. What about you?
• 27:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, in addition to that, I mean I'd love to let myself cry. That's always a good one. That feels so nice after a good cry. I feel so much better. What I do is, is I will name it like I just did with shame. Like ah, I know who you are. Here you are, here you are to greet me. Shame. My little shame monster within me. And then as soon as I name it, then again it's like I, then it's not, it's not this emp. Ambiguous, ethereal monster under the bed. It's like I know exactly what I'm dealing with. Inadequacy. Okay. This is what inadequacy feels like. This is where I feel it in my body. These are the stories I'm going to tell myself about inadequacy. And so once you can name it, and I'm not just saying, like, bad, like, try to really get specific. I. I use the emotion wheel that I'm sure a lot of people have seen out there. But get really specific on what you're dealing with. Frustration, anger, shame, inadequacy, disappointment, whatever it is. Guilt, shame. And then once I name it, it becomes this thing that I'm just like, okay, I'm going. I'll say to myself, I'll put my hand on my chest. This is what shame feels like. Yeah. I'm like, huh? Okay. And I know that emotions don't last forever. That's all that always helps me is like no emotion I've ever felt has ever lost it forever. Although in that moment, it's easy to think this is going to be how I feel forever. And then another thing I remind myself of when I. When I have the urge to want to escape it in some way is I know that the fastest way out is through meaning. The longer I sit here in stillness and just feel it and cry or feel it in my body, whatever it is, the sooner that wave will wash over me, that wave of emotion. And I'm touching my chest a lot because I think that's really helpful. Matt, you had said touch. But for me, when I put my hand on my chest or my heart even, that's very soothing for me. Or even my stomach, if I'm feeling fear, I'll kind of rub my belly, I just ate kind of thing. And that has been really helpful for me. So notice the body, you know, aspect of it. Like, where are you feeling it in your body? And it. It helps locate it, if that makes any sense. And it helps turn this emotion from this vague monster into a concrete physical experience that I'm temporarily having right now. And all of a sudden it makes it a lot less of a scary monster. And then you can get into the intellectualizing of it once you. Once you do the bodywork and once you name it, then you can start understanding. Okay, where is this coming from? Or what. What stories am I telling myself here? Is this a clean pain that I want to sit with? Or are there false narratives here that I'm. That. That are making it actually worse. Right. And then separating that out. But I agree. You can't do that intellectual stuff first. You really have to regulate your. Your body first and then do the mindset work to reframe if there is reframing to do.
• 30:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I like that. There's a couple other things that I wanted to mention. What was it so needs. If you want to reduce the frequency of and the intensity of having negative emotions when you do have them and you name them. Like shame. Like, I'm feeling this. Yeah, shame's back again. And you get good at knowing what shame is calling for. Every emotion's calling for your attention, for something to meet a need. If you can start learning what that you can not. I'm not gonna say you can bypass the emotion, but you can really start to lower the intensity and the frequency of that emotion because you know what you need, right? It's like, oh, yeah, I'm feeling shame. Okay, well, I need to call a friend and talk about my shame with them because that's how shame regulates. And this conversation is. It's been a lot about self regulation, which I think is so important. It's the. It's the. It's the foundation of emotional processing. But the other part of it that is super critical is co regulation. Right. We're not meant to do this all on our own. Like, we need support, we need people, we need a hug. We need to reach out to somebody. So that's a. That's a major protective factor for emotional processing for people is learning how to reach out when you need help and to appropriate people who know how to hold space for your emotion. Right. And usually folks, holding space for emotion is just being still with the person. They don't want to be fixed or corrected or given advice. They just want somebody to be there with them while they're processing. So if you might be thinking, oh, my God, that would make me so scared if my friend reached out to me and they were crying and freaking out or whatever. All you got to do is just say, yeah, I understand what that must feel like, and just be with them. That's it. It's. It doesn't require a lot of skill to be able to be with someone in an emotion.
• 32:09
  Speaker B: The first step is not to fix the feeling. The first step is to stop fighting it. And once you. Once you stop that resistance and just sit with it, that in and of itself is a bit of a relief because now you're not fighting anymore. Now you're just dealing with an emotion and the emotion Won't kill you. Avoiding it will. Yeah, yeah. Feelings can't actually hurt you. They just feel bad, but they don't actually hurt you. They don't actually have a negative impact until you start avoiding them, repressing them, numbing them. That's what will hurt you.
• 32:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, true that.
• 32:37
  Speaker B: This is one of those moments where I think coaching or therapy can come in really handy. I'll speak to coaching, because that's what I do. But, you know, going back to what you're saying about understanding where they're from is I have a worksheet that I'll have people do for any kind of. I would call it activated emotion. And I have them name it. Just kind of like what we talked about here, name it. Where do they feel in their body, et cetera, and what it might be trying to tell them. And here's the thing. When you do, when you've done this worksheet enough times, eventually you don't need to do the worksheet anymore. And that's what the emotional maturity and emotional intelligence is. It's like, I've done this worksheet enough times. I know what disappointment means. I know what shame means. I don't need to write it down anymore. And then you can just go through life kind of having that script ready in your mind, like, okay, I know what I'm dealing with. The other great thing about having any third party, whether it's a coach, a therapist, a friend who knows what they're doing, is they're outside of the emotion in the story. So when you're inside of it, when you're inside the shame, the disappointment, everything feels very true. It's hard to separate fact from story when you're in it. And so a good coach or. Or someone else, a third party, an objective third party who knows what they're doing, can help you slow down going back to that point, solid point, and separate the facts from the story. The wounds, the old wounds that, oh, hey, this is perhaps maybe some old wounds from. From this thing that happened in your life here, the story around that, and then what the actual next move is. Because I think you're right. A lot of guys out there will want to do something like, okay, let me. Let me. Let me do something with this or about this that is not just processing it. And so having that person there can just help give you some perspective and objective that. That you might need. That's hard to access when you're in heavy emotion.
• 34:17
  Speaker A: Exactly. And it's nice to know that we're not alone.
• 34:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, right.
• 34:21
  Speaker A: That's why I wish. I love authentic relating because it allows us to express emotion and be authentic about it. Because I think a lot of us hide our emotion behind closed doors, and then we feel like when we're emotional, we're like some weird monster because it's like, we don't get to see much emotion in people. So be emotional, folks. Like, cry and get angry and, like, show your emotions. I think it's. It's healthy to express emotion.
• 34:43
  Speaker B: I love crying. I just had this conversation with a good friend of mine the other day who's going through a tough time, and he kept being like, oh, I have to cry. Like, I can't be here. And I'm like, just cry. Yeah, I will cry in public. I don't even care. I don't mind. I'll just be walking down the street crying. I'll be at the gym. And the right. The right song will come on. The wrong song, whatever, and I'll just start crying and whatever. Like, people cry. It's so interesting that we. We can laugh in public and no one bats an eye. And then when we cry, it's like, oh, no, we can't do that. Like, it's. It's still the expression of an emotion. One's. Yeah, one's joy and one is sadness. But we are okay with joy and not okay with sadness, which is kind of the whole point of this episode. We had to get much better at feeling bad.
• 35:27
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 35:28
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 35:28
  Speaker A: Amen.
• 35:29
  Speaker B: All right. Any last words?
• 35:31
  Speaker A: No, no. It's a good conversation.
• 35:33
  Speaker B: Great chat. Yeah. All right, thank you to our viewers and listeners for sticking with us on this one. If you're on YouTube, go ahead and tap that thanks button to support the Gay Men's Brotherhood and our podcast. Don't forget, you can also subscribe to early access on Apple to gain access to episodes before they are released to the public. All of your support helps us to continue making content and supporting our community. And by the way, don't forget to check out Gaiman's Brotherhood.com and go to our events section to check out our next connection circles. See you guys in two weeks.