Critical Skills to Process Your Emotions, Pt. 1

Welcome to this episode - the first in a short series - on learning to process your emotions.

So how do you tend to manage emotional situations - those events that stir strong feelings?

Think for a moment about moments that can result in emotions that are hard to control.

From the more mundane but no less relevant interactions. A stranger being rude or a loved one appearing short or unavailable - across to life's steeper challenges. Relationship breakups, health issues, the passing of loved ones and troubling events at work. 

Bundled together, pretty much any encounter with life has the potential to evoke emotional reactions. Most of us tend to rely on limited coping skills when these occur.

When strong emotions arise, we might try to:

Talk it out, Avoid it, Try not to think about it, Get on and hope it goes away.  Or, eat something.

While these approaches to managing your emotions attempt to provide a strategy for addressing your feelings, they don't change how you feel. 

So we will take care of this over the next few episodes and position you to have a clear and practical understanding of how to process your emotions.

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Show timings:

• 0:00 Intro
• 5:40 - The APET model: Understanding how the brain receives and interprets information.
• 10:00 - A personal story
• 15:10 - Secondary Trauma
• 18:00 - Why do we avoid how we feel?
• 23:45 - First steps in processing emotions
• 28:15 - Things to avoid

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Acknowledgements

The APET model for understanding how the brain receives and interprets information is taken from the work of educators and psychotherapists: Ivan Tyrrell and Joe Griffin.

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Download

Emotion Wheel is available for download here.