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I listen to guided meditations sometimes whenever I feel like my brain is going too fast to meditate without somebody holding my hand. If you haven’t tried guided meditations, I think they’re awesome. There are hundreds of them on YouTube, with a bunch of good ones targeted at a specific topic—letting go of resentment, working through anxiety, the loss of a loved one, and on and on. You can pick one that is an hourlong or five minutes or 10 minutes or whatever you’re looking for.
A few days ago, I was listening to a guided meditation about anxiety that really got me thinking. The guide was talking about envisioning the issue that is giving you anxiety, and then to think about the story you’re telling yourself about that situation versus the truth. He said to keep a special eye out for where your story might be exaggerating any wrongdoing by somebody else, or where you might not be thinking clearly about your role in the situation. All pretty standard stuff.
But then he said something that I hadn’t thought about before. He said to now think about the same situation and your feelings, and then recognize that you are probably exaggerating your own feelings to yourself.
Whoa. Think about that for a second, because I realized that’s usually true. If somebody acts like an a*****e, I’m not mad. I AM MAD. If somebody hurts me feelings, I’m not upset. I AM UPSET. If I need to stand up for myself, I’m not going to bring it up. I AM GOING TO SEEK REVENGE.
I’ve focused for so long on the part of anxiety and resentment where I might be taking an angle on the story I tell myself, that I might be overhyping somebody’s supposed misdeed, or creating a motive that might not be there.
But I haven’t spent much time thinking about how I am also taking my own basic feeling—maybe I’m sad or mad or feeling disrespected—and capitalized it. I take that small slight and I spin it into a big slight, which then causes my small emotion to be a BIG EMOTION.
Again, whoa. That’s probably something most people already are in touch with. I haven’t been. It made me think about the great Pixar movie, Inside Out, where the main characters of the movie are the emotions in a little girl’s head—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. Each character is a distilled version of each emotion, and they have outsized reactions in her head. The Anger character, voiced by Lewis Black, is particularly funny to me because of how red-faced and explosive he gets. I feel that guy living inside me sometimes.
Years ago, I started trying to ask myself a series of questions when I am twisted up about something. A few of them are:
Is this as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be right now? In a month, will you remember it?
If the answer is yes, it’s a big deal and will be remembered… should it be remembered? Or should you start aggressively trying to let it go even though it sucks?
What was your role? Even if my side of the street is 1% of the problem, that’s still something to turn my attention to. And the dirty little secret of almost every single ugly situation I have encountered in the past 13 years of sobriety is closer to 50-50 than 100-0.
So what action can I take now when I think about my own emotions in the stories I tell myself? Here are a few questions I am going to try to ask myself about my feelings.
Is the level of emotion—mad, sad, disgusted, frustrated, ungrateful—overblown? The answer is probably yes.
If the answer is yes, what do I need to do right now—not two miserable hours from now, not after yelling at my kids for 10 minutes, NOW—to let the air out of it? It could be a few phone calls. It could be a 10-minute guided meditation. It could be to eat a freaking sandwich—H.A.L.T. (Hungry Angry Lonely Tired) is a real thing.
And in the occasional example where someone or something really did screw me over or break my heart, once I have lower-cased my emotions, what needs to happen next?
Do I need to follow up with somebody and let them know where my head is at in a calm, collected way? That does happen. Part of sobriety is not getting treated like crap, firing yourself up for a month about it, then having it happen again. It can mean standing up for yourself… but not with your fists balled up, ready to rumble.
Whew. That’s a lot to unpack, and I have the entire weekend to do just that!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
What’s the last thing a drunk says before he's hospitalized?
"Watch this!"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2005, by T.B. of Jacksonville, Florida)
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