Emotional Work: Part V – Avoid Loopy Narratives

One thing I wish I’d avoided with more diligence since doing emotional work is narratives. Narratives are safe, they keep the emotion at bay and thoughts running in circles. Obviously a large part of mindfulness is to switch off the incessant thinking, but when a story is fuelled by anger or fear it often seems completely true and legitimate.

Actually, it astonishes me how many times I have to learn this lesson: Avoid the narrative, focus on the emotion. You’d think that I’d be better at this by now, seeing as I’ve done it so many times before, but certain situations can be so triggering that it often trashes my entire sense of presence. Indeed, it is within these situations where presence is most needed, but there’s no doubt that it remains challenging.

Except that these stories feel true, there is also a sense of repetition to them. Why is this happening again? So, the frustration of that can sometimes add fuel to the fire. The best strategy here is to get curious about the emotion itself, and try to avoid loopy narratives.

A loopy narrative might go like this: I can’t believe this person said that again. This is unbelievably unfair. I don’t deserve this. I should have said that instead. Those are a few examples, but obviously loopy narratives can take on infinite forms.

Curiosity about the emotion might go like this: What’s the root of this? Where do I feel it? What’s the worst thing about this? What does this remind me of? Asking some of these questions doesn’t guarantee that we don’t go into some sort of story, so we need to be honest and vigilant. But by becoming curious, we’re at least moving from blame to exploration.

It’s sometimes helpful to remember that the story is familiar while the emotion is uncomfortable. So, we have to intentionally go towards the discomfort and leave what is familiar.

That said, sometimes we don’t even have enough awareness about our own loopy narratives. Journalling can be helpful to identify some of it. I’ve also found talk therapy helpful. To have someone point out your blind spots can be of immense value. But therapy and journalling can also just be an opportunity to go into narratives. Discomfort is a good indicator to see if we’re actually uprooting some wounding or just telling ourselves stories.

A helpful book regarding this is Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing. The book presents a technique for connecting with what Gendlin refers to as the “felt-sense” of a problem. In other words, the author distinguishes between analysing a problem (say a difficult relationship with a family member) and the felt-sense of that problem. The felt-sense is what the body feels when that problem (or person) is brought to your consciousness. Gendlin stresses that the felt-sense is often vague and unclear, while the story is the familiar analysis we often fall into when we discuss something that bothers us. The felt-sense is something that you have to tune in to and listen for, you have to give it time to form and not jump to conclusions. In other words, you should not let the mind override whatever the body wants to say.

The book discusses a detailed method for connecting with the felt-sense of a problem and also how to achieve a shift inside the body. Gendlin points out that this is where the real progress lies, once you can feel some shift in your body, even if it is just a slight relief, then you know that you’re on the right track.

My hope is that I’m doing an adequate job of summarising it here, but I’d recommend this book to anyone that’s interested in emotional work. This is also a good book to read if talk therapy hasn’t been particularly helpful to you. What I like about it is that it really does put the emphasis on what is felt inside the body. Language is used as a guide to get to the physical feelings and blocks but the focus is on what happens inside the body.

Emotional Work: Part VI – My experience with blocks and stuckness in the chakras