How to Create Emotional Awareness and Acceptance

Creating emotional awareness and acceptance builds self-trust and creates opportunities to become more emotionally regulated. This in turn creates a healthier mind and body. Emotional awareness can be very challenging, especially if you’ve spent a lot of unconscious energy suppressing your emotions.

Many of us learned early on that our emotions are a problem, a nuisance, or even that they are wrong or bad. Many people feel that they did not learn how to create emotional awareness within themselves and were even rewarded for denying their emotions. While caretakers, teachers, or other people who influence our lives from a young age may not set out to cause harm, not being able to identify, sit with, express, and release our feelings ends up causing harm in some form at some point in our lives.

If you have gotten really good at denying, avoiding, numbing, or suppressing your feelings, I want you to know that it is possible to, with time and practice, create emotional awareness and acceptance. There are many feelings wheels out there that are very helpful; however, I recommend starting with the BLAST method. (BLAST stands for Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stress, Sad, or Tired). This is a simple way to practice getting in touch with your emotions by naming your feeling first.

When practicing the BLAST method, you first need to create time and space to encourage the process of going inward. This is where it is vital to learn how to pause. Having a consistent time to practice taking a pause can be helpful to make it a part of your routine. You can check in with yourself by pausing before starting your day, before eating, before opening up your phone to scroll, before sending that email… During the pause, ask yourself, “Am I Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stressed, Sad, or Tired?” This opens you up to emotional awareness and reflection. Again, there are a ton of other emotions and feeling states that exist, however, these few tend to touch on some common uncomfortable emotions that drive behavioral denying, avoiding, numbing, or suppression of emotions.

Once you name an emotion, you can begin to tame it. Once you allow yourself to feel the feeling, you can begin to heal and release the feeling. Practicing the BLAST method is where to begin with emotional awareness. Once you bring the feeling state into your awareness, you can now practice emotional acceptance. This can get tricky depending on your personal relationship with your internal emotional world. This can be helpful to do with a therapist if you’ve experienced emotional disconnect for a long time and if you’ve had invalidating experiences that reinforced the negative messaging that your emotions are wrong, bad, inconvenient, or problematic. Emotional acceptance is about validating that your feelings are real and determining how congruent your feelings are with your present experience. You can then determine how to manage and cope as effectively as possible.

Emotional acceptance is nonjudgemental; it allows the emotion to just be, to not be labeled as good or bad, positive or negative; it just is. All emotions provide valuable messages about our internal experience. Then you can explore why it is there in the first place. Practicing the BLAST method allows you to determine in a general way what you are feeling. Once you’ve identified it, you can get curious about why it’s there. If you feel that you can name your feeling state from any of the emotions from the BLAST method, (Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stressed, Sad, or Tired) ask, “Why am I feeling this way?” When getting going with this work of emotional awareness and emotional acceptance, it can be helpful to journal - like a lot. Journaling increases your awareness, the ability to practice emotional acceptance, as well as your ability to validate your own unique emotional experiences. Journaling is a very valuable process of releasing your emotions and is a helpful way to cope.

To fully release the feeling, it’s helpful to understand why the feeling is there, then to consider what it might need. Starting with naming it, and then exploring the why behind it. With journaling, practice, and consistency, you’ll begin to create more space for emotional acceptance. When you can accept a feeling state for what it is and understand why it’s there, you can then choose how to manage this emotion. I’ll be breaking down each of the emotions from the BLAST method within the next several blogs, so stay tuned. Until then, practice naming and getting curious about why it’s there in the first place - without judgement. This is where you can lean into emotional acceptance which promotes self-acceptance, self-worth, and self-love.

EMDR Therapy + Manifestation

The concept of manifestation is not new, however, the way it is practiced has changed significantly over the years. Information about the brain, consciousness, imagery, and self-worth, continues to be studied and researched, and there is great evidence to the science of manifestation. So much evidence has been offered to understand more logically how and why it actually works.

I remember hearing on the Oprah show years ago, and it struck me in a big way, “you don’t become what you want in life, you become what you believe.” This is the foundation of manifestation, and why some of the concepts that popularized it, and made it seem a little out-there of just picture it and it will happen, have not proven to be how or why manifestation actually works. What you are unconsciously creating in your life, is created directly out of your level of self-worth. If you believe you are not good enough, destined to fail, are unworthy, inadequate, unloveable, or even always in danger, then no matter how much you want something, most likely you will find yourself in patterns of subconsciously sabotaging any efforts to create it in your life.

This is where EMDR therapy can be a very powerful and useful technique to integrate with your manifestation, or self-worth improvement process. EMDR therapy (if you want to learn more about EMDR therapy, you can read previous blog posts HERE, HERE and HERE) works to reprocess the memories, experiences, and feeling states that have created or reinforced the negative internalized beliefs that hold you back from living your best life. These negative beliefs create unconscious blocks to moving forward in your life. I know this to be true from both as a certified EMDR therapist, as well as a client receiving EMDR therapy. I have experienced how it helped me unravel more than one negative cognition, or negative internalized limiting belief, which has allowed me to take more intentional and subconscious action towards what I want. EMDR therapy has helped me embody how it feels to be worthy of what I want.

If you are familiar with some of the concepts of manifestation and cast it off as woo-woo, I totally get it. However, there are more and more studies and books out there explaining the brain-based science of how it actually works. I have been doing the work of To Be Magnetic (interested? try it out here with a coupon code here: TBM) for a few years and have seen it work really well with EMDR therapy. The process is logical and there in no woo-woo belief required. What I like about TBM specifically is that she has partnered with a neuroscientist and an EMDR therapist to create the process, which is a wonderful compliment to EMDR therapy, or any therapeutic technique.

Once doing the manifestation work (or any self-development work) many find that they discover that they have one or more blocks related to self-worth. Working through these blocks with an EMDR (or any) therapist can not only speed up the work of manifesting (creating the life you desire) or feeling more grounded in your sense of self, but also create more ease, self-awareness, emotional tolerance, and overall improve your mental wellbeing on many levels. 

When you create a vision for what you want and know why you want what you want, you set in motion opportunities for your brain to subconsciously seek it out. When you incorporate how it will feel to have what you want, and align it with your personal values, the why you actually want it, and then practice being in that desired feeling state, you again, set in motion opportunities for your brain to subconsciously seek it out. When practiced repeatedly while simultaneously clearing out the past memories, traumas, and experiences that created the blocks in the first place, you open yourself up to living in alignment with your new internalized beliefs, such as: I am worthy, I am lovable, I am good enough, I deserve what I want, In this moment I am safe, I’m ok…

Curious about integrating EMDR therapy with other types of self-worth development work? Feel free to reach out and schedule a complimentary consultation. You are capable of creating the life you want, the life you desire. You deserve to feel worthy of what you want and to do the work to support your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual wellbeing.

Calming Your Inner Critic to Release Body Shame

When it comes to having a healthy relationship with your body, one of the most challenging obstacles to overcome is your relationship with your thoughts. Do you notice what goes through your mind when you look in the mirror, when you look at a picture of yourself, when you are trying on clothes in a dressing room? If you struggle with body-image, most likely there is an inner critic who has some less than kind things to say.

Body shaming often starts very young and is deeply engrained into the fabric of our culture. Commenting on other people’s bodies based on size and shape has happened forever in the media, and this is not likely to change. However, for many people who struggle with body-image, the shaming most likely began within familiar environments, such as at home or in school. Sometimes the body shaming could look like a parent commenting negatively about their own body, their child’s body, their partner’s body, their neighbors body, and so on. For many people, the body shaming happened in school, where kids are often bullied for how they look. Sometimes the shaming came directly from parent or caretaker to child, where the parent constantly commented on their child’s body, and even made decisions about food for their child based on how their child’s body looked. All of these experiences often leave a residue of shame, feeling not good enough, resulting in trauma, and the development of a very unkind inner critic.

When a child feels shame, they internalize the negative language said to them and then begin to say these unkind things to themselves. This happens as a protective measure in our psyche to help reduce the suffering of when it’s heard from an external source (especially a parent/caretaker). This is where the inner critic is born. This is where this part of ourselves develops and sinks its roots in deep. It begins as self-protection, this is a maladaptive coping mechanism that served a purpose for the child to reduce emotional discomfort. This then becomes the language of our own thoughts, creating opportunities to develop perfectionism as a way of managing inner fears and anxieties.

The inner critic starts as someone else’s voice, and then becomes our very own. The words it says are unkind, even cruel, and cause hurt, pain, suffering, and increased feelings of shame. Shame triggers the belief that there is something wrong with us, such as not feeling good enough, unworthy, or deeply inadequate, which causes tremendous psychological pain. This pain limits how much we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, open, to feel deep connections, and even limits our experience of finding joy.

When we can learn to see our inner critic as a part of ourselves, not our true self, we can begin to heal it. When we get to know this inner critic part, it often is a very young, child-like part of ourselves, and we can more easily begin to understand why it is there, how it came to be there, and what it’s trying to protect us from. With this information we can begin to develop the capacity to lean into healing and self-compassion by working with this part. We work to give this part a new job that is supportive, healthy, and useful.

To begin to get to know your inner critic more intimately, it requires listening, and then getting curious about why it says what it says. Curiosity becomes the anecdote and where the healing can truly unfold. The next time you hear a self-critical thought about your body— or anything else really—try going through this process:

• Acknowledge your inner critic, and see it as a part of you, not your true, authentic self.

• Get curious, ask it what it wants you to know? Does it have a specific message for you?

• Ask it how old it is, when it learned to speak in this way.

• Ask it if it would be willing to reframe and shift into more self-compassionate language, just to see what happens? If it’s willing, try it out and see, if it isn’t, ask it if you can try again later. Let it know you want to get to know it, to understand it, and to validate its fears and feelings.

• Ask it if it might consider a new task, as this one it has learned to do so well is no longer serving you, in fact, it’s causing significant harm. If it’s open to that, offer some suggestions, or get ideas from it. If it’s not, let it know that change is difficult and you will try again later.

• Thank it, let it know that it is worthy of being seen and loved unconditionally.

• Practice reframing, reframing is looking realistically at the fear based negative thought and using mindfulness to answer what is really true right now. (If you want a deeper dive into thought work you can read a blog I wrote about examining your thoughts here).

• Try this reframing example, if the inner critic said something like, “you look terrible today, you don’t deserve to be in the pictures” try reframing with, “although I am having a bad body-image day, I still deserve to have the memories of this event and to be in the pictures.” Or, “Even though I don’t feel my best, I am going to choose to be in the pictures to remember this event.”

Over time you will be able to create a new inner language with the assistance of your inner critic. The more you get to know your inner critic, understand its role, you will get better and better at reframing. This process of reframing will help your inner critic to find—and get just as good at—a new job internally. This new job will be non harming, supportive, and a job that most importantly increases your capacity for self-compassion, and self-love.

Through this work you can create a deeper appreciation for your body, just as it exists within this moment. Your body deserves this, this hurt protective part of you deserves this, you deserve this. You are worthy of creating a new language within, and shifting from inner criticism to inner kindness and inner peace. If you feel overwhelmed with where to begin or as though your inner critic is unmanageable, you may benefit from EMDR therapy, IFS therapy, or an EMDR intensive. With this work you can reprocess the traumatic memories that have created or reinforced the negative beliefs that have given your inner critic so much power. Healing is possible, you deserve to release the internalized shame and feel your best in mind, body, and spirit.