Life Coaching can help you go after the goals you were too afraid to go after. Even if you aren’t emotionally fit yet, take that leap of faith toward your goals. Nonetheless, you can start to take steps toward your best self with some help. If you find yourself worried about being anxious, stressed, or abandoned, then you can benefit from working with a life coach. The first step is typically to begin looking at the reason why it is you do what you do. I understand dealing with disturbing emotions is not easy. However, it needs to be addressed if you want to move forward with your life. In this week’s Life Coaching Blog, I want to teach you how to tear down any emotional inabilities that have formed in your life. You deserve to be free to free from self-doubt and anything less than your best self.

Emotional inability is the state of being unable to feel emotions. This is common when people feel empty after a loss or severe trauma. This feeling of detachment is created to protect your mind. However, it acts as a double edge sword that limits your potential. Emotions can be heavy and cause mental fatigue and emotional pain in your life. This is the scary part of emotions. You can love someone dearly, and they can betray that love/trust you gave them. How can someone get over these feelings without shutting down? I have found that you have to find the emotion that resonates the strongest with you to proceed to regain control of your life. Instead of refusing to feel any emotion at all, I want you to focus on your most intense feeling.

Determining your most intense emotion can be tricky if you are the type of person who is loving, happy, and cheerful. These are all great emotions to have and feel, but you may also tend to wear your feelings on your sleeve when you are this type of person. If someone says something negative to you or about someone else, it can cause you to feel “offended” by what was said. If someone says something negative to me, I let it pass as it should. Emotions should only be felt for 90 seconds. I feel it, plan, and let it go within a short time frame because I cannot afford to have someone else ruin my day. Learning how to not ruminate on negative emotions is one of the most challenging skills you will need to know.

When you are looking at your number one emotion, you can start to control it by limiting it. The simple act of limiting your strongest emotions will send a message to your brain that you are the one in charge of how much is given of that feeling.  At first, it will be difficult to coral and bring to submission, but it has to be done to gain control over how you want to feel in life. If you continue to allow your emotions to run wild, then you will be in a constant state of emptiness when your brain reaches that foggy state where you feel lazy and unmotivated. That type of burnout will lead to your emotional inability, and it can be avoided by limiting who gets what you put out.

The most troublesome emotion to get ahold of is love. I know many people who love so profoundly, which causes them much pain in their life. Love is one of those emotions that can be taken advantage of so quickly. If you find yourself a person whose strongest emotion is love, then it may be time to become selective in who deserves it right now. I understand you may want to continue to pass it out to everyone you care for, but choosing who you love is one of the best ways you can show how much you love yourself too. One exercise I do with many of my clients is to have them write down a list of all the people they love in their life. After they are done with the list, I ask them, “Why are you not on the list?”, Do not forget to love yourself.

Once you are at that point where you decide who to love and how to share it, you can start building your dam. Dams are used to control the gates that either release water(emotion/love) or keep it pooled up. At first, you want to close all the gates of love and then start to pick the gates (people) that need a constant love flow. If you are a parent, then the gates that will always be open are your children. That gate should flow at the appropriate level, but it should never dry up. Everyone else who comes after your children are optional. If you want them to have love, then test it out. If you give them love, what do they do with it? Do they take it and run, or do they receive and reciprocate? Find the people who appreciate the love you gave them because they understand that it is not something you are obligated to provide them with.

There are many more emotions that can be spoken about, but the idea is the same. The idea is that you want to grasp your strongest emotion and be able to control it. If you find that anger is your strongest emotion, you want to learn how to use it to your benefit. It does not have to include violence or hate. It can simply be using that emotion as the fuel that keeps you moving forward. It sounds weird to use a negative feeling like anger as a source of energy, but it gives you greater power than you have ever known when you control what you feel. The mindset of being in control of how you feel and what you want out of life will knock out any feelings of emotional inability.

After speaking about your most powerful emotion, we can start to begin work on what makes you emotionally unavailable. I find this common in relationships where one person is “checked out.” The person does not feel love in the relationship, and it feels like they are just roommates who share the bills. This is a dangerous place to be in if you are married. The following thoughts after that are why even bother with this relationship? The most common result of this thinking is that they get divorced and continue with their life. There may be some resentment towards the other person or the detachment of feelings for them, but what will remain is for each individual to work through what is going on in their mind.

Thinking about if someone does wrong to you is similar to checking yourself out of the relationship. Similar to how someone can detach themselves from someone, so can you detach from them. When someone puts an idea in their mind, then it is up to them to realize if that is factual truth or truth they reiterated in their mind enough to want to believe as their truth. I find this true in the western marriage system. A woman initiates about 80% of divorces. Looking at that statistic, you have to wonder if all the men are doing the wrong thing that would cause this to happen. I believe that more women initiate divorce because they failed to find the factual truth in their relationship.

Finding out the factual truth can save a marriage that is on the brink of collapse. I find that married couples who take time to find out what the other person is thinking/saying to themself is one of the critical components if the marriage can/will be saved. If you tell yourself something long enough, it is only a matter of time before you start to believe it. That is why not talking about your relationship woes will lead to a one-sided separation/divorce. That self-dialogue with no input from the other person will lead to a wrong choice. Now, just because you talk about your feelings/emotions does not guarantee everything will be great. What will come out of the conversation is that both people at least can express their feelings about the matter. If that mutual conversation does not happen then, a person may fall deeper into a state of emotional inability and find it difficult to express what they would like.

The fact that society is going down a path that tries to avoid emotions/feelings is what is causing this instability in their and others’ emotions. These people feel cut off because of habits and methods now used to deal with emotions. We are currently keeping things bottled up, and then when we have enough, we just vanish. The dating world calls this ghosting; I call this emotional inability. When it comes to marriage, I understand that there will always be three sides. One side is the truth, one side is the lies, and one side is the facts. Being able to find and differentiate those three will help ease any emotional inability you have for another person.

Understanding emotional inability is the first step to setting your mind free from the emptiness and negativity that can take over. I hope you do not find yourself in a pit of despair where you feel there is no hope. I have been there, and I know there is a way out. That way out is to experience and feel the emotions that need to come out. Holding onto them and hiding them away in a corner will not start the healing process. You have to be able to deal with those emotions and gain control over them. You should not be afraid to feel anything you want to feel. The life you want to live is at your fingertips. If you still do not know the first steps to find your way out, then reach out to me today and start to take your journey to a better you.

Until then,

Michael Rearden

CEO of Reven LLC.