Episode 317: Become Emotionally Strong
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[00:00:00] You are listening to episode 317 of the Peaceful Mind Podcast.
Welcome to the Peaceful Mind Podcast, a place for creating the peace of mind. You need to be the best mom you are created by God to be. If you want to bring more balance, more joy, and more peace to your motherhood, this is the place for you. I'm your host, certified life coach at Catholic Mom Danielle Thienel.
In the name of the Father of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Let's get started.
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Peaceful Mind Podcast, the place for busy moms who are ready to stop spinning and stress and start living with more calm, more control, more peace of mind.
And this is part two of our [00:01:00] five part strength series. In the last episode, we talked all about becoming mentally strong. How to retrain your brain, break unhelpful thought loops, and step into the version of yourself who is more again in control of their lives, their inner world, more aware and more resilient. And today we're gonna build on that by diving into something just as powerful, if not more. And that's becoming emotionally strong because emotional strength this is what allows you to experience life fully without being ruled by your feelings.
It's what gives you the ability to pause, process, and pivot instead of spiral or suppress or react. So let's talk about emotional strength, what it really is and how you can build it in your everyday life. It's so important when I have somebody who is interested in meeting me [00:02:00] and I have, just a few questions to get them know to know them better and that the first one I ask is, what are your top three feelings that are going on in your life?
Most of them are somewhere that were around my story, where it was overwhelm, guilt, stress, and then there's lots of times it's anxiety, right? It's worry. And so that is what I want you to see, and I hope at the end I want you to evaluate that for you at the beginning of this episode.
And then by the end, I want you to be able to pick what do you want your top three to be if someone were to ask you. Now, I know that your brain is gonna offer you some of like positives oh, I'm grateful, or I'm loving, and I definitely know that those are part of your life. But if you're someone who wants to become more emotionally strong, I just wanted to start out with just a little bit of awareness for you to stop.
Even if you have to pause the episode here [00:03:00] for a minute and just ask yourself, what would I say? And then just go ahead and add my negative. What are my top three negative feelings that I feel on a daily basis or a weekly basis? Just so you have a little bit of know, when I speak to you in this episode, what you're going to apply my words to so that you can by the end of the episode, I hope you have some clarity and maybe some loosening up or maybe some new rejuvenated focus on becoming stronger than perhaps where your baseline was at the beginning.
Okay, so let's start here. Emotionally strong moms are not cold or detached. They aren't quote, holding it all together with gritted teeth. Emotional strength is about having the capacity to feel any emotion, even the hard ones, especially the hard ones, without [00:04:00] letting it hijack your day. But without letting it hijack how you wanna show up as a parent, your mood, your identity, your self-worth. It's about being the kind of woman who can say, I feel sad and that's okay.
Or, this is hard and I can handle it. Or this discomfort that I'm going through and feeling right now, it just means I'm growing. The ability to respond to your life that way comes from what I teach in coaching, right? And mentioned on the last episode with awareness of your emotions to notice when you're emotionally triggered and become the person who that does set off this like alarm that they need to pay attention to. And then they will pause and maybe say to themselves that this feeling is coming from a thought. [00:05:00] And what is that thought? And is it useful? Is it kind, is it even true? And that's where your power lies, to be able to have that kind of awareness about your emotional system and what's going on in that particular day.
So let me paint a picture of where this breaks down for most of us, right? So we're already tired. You walk into the kitchen, it's a mess. Maybe your toddler is whining at the moment. Maybe you know that laundry is backed up. You snap, you lose your cool. You then spiral into guilt, which then has you shutting down.
Does even that one little example, does it sound familiar? Now the problem isn't the kitchen. It's not even the whining. It's that your emotional system, it's probably already tapped out and you [00:06:00] haven't been taught how to be with your emotions, let alone shift them. And this is where coaching steps in.
We teach emotional strength the way you teach a muscle to grow. Exactly the way we talked about last week with your brain being a muscle. I almost just want you to think about, I've got to get to know my emotional life, my emotion the types of emotions, how they show up for me, what triggers them.
Like again, gaining so much more awareness. Okay. Let's tie in some of the powerful truths that from some of the things you have already heard me share on episodes on this podcast, and just here to remind you and these. Just go along with somebody who is more emotionally strong. They know [00:07:00] these things. They practice these things. They live out these things.
I am gonna start with, you are not supposed to feel happy all the time. Those who aren't emotionally strong, they believe that is the goal. The goal is to feel happy all the time, but emotional strength actually means you stop judging yourself for your feelings and mostly judging for you not being happy.
It's just part of this human life. Another like key concept to really strengthen your emotional life is to know without a doubt that you can experience any emotion and survive it. And this is the foundation actually, of confidence, right? You are strong enough to feel fear, sadness, shame, and not let it derail your day.
Like [00:08:00] literally, your brain will tell you that if you have to feel this feeling that you'll die from it. But really there is no feeling that we will die from, even if, when we think about our worst case life scenario, the only thing that why we wouldn't want to experience is because we don't wanna experience of how that particular emotion would feel and vibrate in our body, but you would survive it.
The other kind of concept behind those that are emotionally strong is that they know that they are carrying around manuals for how others should behave. Okay? And I am gonna speak to this a little later, but emotional strength means that we drop the idea that other people need to change for us to feel better.
Okay? What if you didn't need the kitchen to be [00:09:00] cleaned before you were calm? What if your emotional peace came from the inside? Because here is a total truth bomb: it does. Nothing outside of you, any of your circumstances, the things that your senses see, feel, touch right here, those aren't what dictate whether you are emotionally strong.
And those that have, who have built an emotional system that we would say is strong, they can sometimes, or a lot of the times, more of the times, see that discomfort is a gift. It is trying to show you where you are capable of more or change. Where something needs to change, where your next [00:10:00] level is waiting discomfort is that signal. And those that have this emotional tolerance and they're strong there, then they're like, oh, okay, I'm not liking this. I'm not feeling good. All right. What is this trying to tell me? What do I wanna learn and extract from this?
So let's start by clearing something up. Again, being emotionally strong does not mean that you have to be happy all the time. Calm all the time. It does not mean definitely doesn't mean like suppressing your emotions or pretending that you're fine.
I know a lot of you out there. Am I calling on you today or you are pretending to be fine? Emotional strength, becoming emotionally strong requires self responsibility. We want awareness of our emotions and what's going on there, [00:11:00] but we definitely want self responsibility. It means you're willing to experience any emotion, sadness, fear, disappointment, anger, grief without blaming, reacting, avoiding, or numbing.
And as I'm saying, those blaming was actually my number one. I blamed everyone else for the way I was feeling, and that was the reason why I was acting not so great. It was just because other people, if they would just stop doing the thing, if they would just start doing. The the whatever it is that I thought that they should be doing, then I wouldn't have to be so grumpy or nagging.
Yeah. I just was giving away all of my self responsibility. And this matters deeply for moms that you understand that discomfort. [00:12:00] Not avoiding it is the price we pay for growth because motherhood will constantly bring you emotions that you didn't ask for or you didn't want. That's why we wanna become more emotionally strong.
So one of the most important distinctions I teach is if we're talking about tools, concepts, strategies that can help us in our everyday life become more emotional strong. One of them I wanna start with is knowing the difference between emotional childhood versus emotional adulthood. This is huge for moms, and so this is what emotional childhood looks like.
This is what I mean. That would be blaming others for how you feel. Remember just said it. This was me. I was totally an emotional childhood all the time because I blamed others for how I felt. He made me feel this way, [00:13:00] right? I would react instead of respond. When you are an emotional childhood, you are in indulging in overwhelm, confusion, and victimhood all the time.
And the reason why I can so easily and so strongly say these is because this was me, y'all. I know it. I couldn't see it at the time. Again, it was a coach that helped me recognize, but until I took self responsibility, as I mentioned earlier, right? I did. I expected the world. My kids, my partner, my parents, my boss, the workers on my home, I wanted them to change because when, if they did, then I thought I could then feel better. But most of us, and that was me included, because they don't teach this in school, most of us never, were taught how to like emotionally mature. And this is not a failure thing. It's like [00:14:00] it's a conditioning.
We weren't conditioned to become like more adult-like with our emotions. But this is what stepping into emotional adulthood looks like. Therefore, when you step into emotional adulthood, therefore you will become emotionally stronger.
And what it looks like is taking responsibility for your own feelings and your own reactions 100% of the time. It looks like pausing instead of exploding or shutting down, whichever your kind of go-to is. Being an emotional adult means feeling your emotions fully without acting them out. Sometimes it's responding intentionally. Even when your like body is triggered. It's like really vibrating in that negative emotion and it's just owning your internal world.
No matter what's [00:15:00] going on in your life, it's owning it. This is emotional strength. And yes, like most things, it takes practice. Another core skill of emotional strength that I have talked a lot about because of its importance recently on previous podcasts is to allow and process your emotions.
One of the most powerful truths from this emotional work is to know that emotions are literally just vibrations in your body caused by thoughts. They're not emergencies. They're not dangerous. They will not last forever. But again, what most moms do is we either resist them like, I shouldn't feel this way. We avoid them maybe through scrolling, snacking, staying busy, or we react to them, snapping, yelling, shutting down.
[00:16:00] And emotionally strong moms, they do something different. They allow these emotions to be there. Again, the process that I've talked about in recent podcasts is we wanna name the feeling, we locate it in our body. We let it be there without judgment. We breathe through it. We let the wave of the negative emotion pass, and when you stop fighting emotions, they will move through you much faster.
And this is the emotional strength that we're after in action. Another tool where freedom comes in is accepting this 50 50 emotional life concept, and that is that life is actually meant to be 50% positive and 50% negative. That's not a [00:17:00] flaw. It's by design. And when we believe we're supposed to feel happy, calm, grateful, and content all the time, we will start judging ourselves when we don't.
And that judgment is actually creating more suffering for ourselves. So emotionally strong women, they understand that sadness doesn't mean something has gone wrong. That fear doesn't mean that you are weak. That discomfort doesn't mean that you're failing. All it means is that you are living the 50 50 emotional life, that you're putting yourself out there, that you are actually taking action and trying to move towards different results.
And it means you are growing. It just means you're human. If that at its very baseline brings you relief. If we were happy all the time, we wouldn't [00:18:00] be challenging ourselves, pushing ourselves. We wouldn't be taking on things that lead to more amazing things.
The other sort of tool or concept that I wanted to, bring up that will help you become stronger. And that is when you have a distinction between types of emotions, in particular the ones that I label indulgent and the ones that we can label useful. And that is to know that there are just a handful of emotions that really don't serve any purpose and that we do wanna have these in our life as least as possible.
And those indulgent emotions are called confusion, overwhelm, worry, doubt, and guilt. And if we collectively can put a name over [00:19:00] these types, this type of, this kind of category. I'm calling indulgent emotions and these particular singular emotions. Again, confusion, overwhelm, worry, doubt, guilt. We could label them as victimhood.
Okay? They all serve a little bit of we see ourselves as the victim when we choose these emotions. And these emotions also make us feel busy, right? But what they don't do is they don't move us forward at all. They keep us stuck and so this is why to become emotionally stronger you have to first know this about these emotions.
You have to understand this concept. You have to be onto yourself because how many of you out there can say that you feel confused, overwhelm, worry, doubt, and guilt a lot of the times. This shows that you have room here to become emotionally stronger. [00:20:00] And when you understand this, indulgent emotions versus useful emotions.
So for example useful would be sadness, fear, disappointment, even anger, right? Those are useful, can be very useful emotions in our life, right? When they're felt fully, they can give you results That lead to clarity, growth, strength. And so emotionally strong moms, they stop indulging in emotions that keep them spinning and stuck, and they learn how to process the emotions that actually move them forward.
And then, like I mentioned earlier, and I said I would come back to when we understand that we all carry around. These like books that we label manuals, an instruction book that comes with, when you buy an appliance or something. [00:21:00] And those women who become emotionally strong, they know about manuals, they're aware of manuals, they're onto themselves when they are using their manuals and they learn to put 'em down.
Okay? Because this is where so many moms lose their peace. And this is what a manual is. It's an unspoken rule book. It sounds like this. My partner should help without being asked. My kids should listen the first time I ask them to do something. People should treat me kind. Notice how I put an emphasis on the main words that tell you if you are living out of a manual, and that's the word should.
Okay? But here's the truth manuals, and these should beliefs. They make you emotionally weak. Why? Because when people don't follow your manual, then you, yourself suffer [00:22:00] and you give your emotional power away. So emotionally strong women drop the manual. They don't stop having preferences for their spouses and their kids, but they stop needing other people to have to behave a certain way in order for you to feel okay, because you can't control other people, but you can control how you respond to them.
Again, that's emotional adulthood. So see how when you're someone who is living from the manual, then you're most likely in that emotional childhood. But when you are someone who doesn't work from the rule book or the shoulds or the, controlling of the people and you put it down, that is when you step into emotional adulthood, that's when you, not emotionally weak, you're emotionally strong.
And then the last. Concept I wanna bring [00:23:00] into this is unconditional love. This means loving without trying to control. This means caring without attaching your worth to someone else's behavior. This is you offering compassion while you still create and uphold boundaries around your peace. So emotionally strong moms, they love deeply without self abandonment, and they take responsibility for their own emotional world.
So if you are mom listening and thinking. Yeah, this is me. Some of those things I react, I get overwhelmed. I feel everything deeply and I don't know what to do with it. I want you to hear this clearly like you haven't failed, you aren't broken, you just haven't been taught the [00:24:00] skills yet that require you to be become emotionally strong.
Emotional strength can be learned. I didn't know it. I needed to learn it to get to the places of satisfaction that I am in my life right now, and I'm so glad I did. Yes, it took time. It took investment. It took me focusing on myself, but just like becoming mentally strong, you are so worth it to put your time and attention to become emotionally strong.
Real life example. You're trying to get the kids out the door. Everyone's melting down. You feel the tightness in your chest. You snap, you feel shame. An emotionally strong mom doesn't say I failed again. She says, wow, that was a hard moment. I reacted, but I can learn from that. I can pause. I can offer myself [00:25:00] self-compassion right here in this moment.
Just like I said about going to the mental gym, we wanna go to the emotional strength gym too. And that example that I just gave you, that was a rep, right? And we just want another rep, and another rep and another practice. Okay. And for this particular subject today, I want to reiterate just like the first one, you don't have to do this alone.
Okay. You're not supposed to know how to manage your mind and your emotions naturally, and if you didn't grow up learning how to process your feelings or question your thoughts or create peace internally for yourself, that's okay. It's also what coaching is for. It's exactly what we do in coaching. We slow things down.
We teach you how to process emotions instead of being run by them. We help you step out of emotional childhood and into emotional adulthood. We build [00:26:00] real emotional strength and not by pretending life is easy, but by giving you the tools to handle what your life situation is right now.
So if you listen to this and it resonates or somebody else who you think it would resonate, please pass it on. But whenever you're ready to stop reacting and start responding more, if you want more peace without needing anyone else to change, if you wanna feel strong on the inside, no matter what's happening on the outside, then I invite you to book a Peaceful Mom Strategy Call with me.
Let's talk about what emotional strength would look like for you, like in your marriage, in your motherhood, and your life of course. All right everyone. Thank you so much for this joining me for this part of our Strength series. And I will see you again next week for another one, and until then, may peace be with you always.
Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of the Peaceful [00:27:00] Mind Podcast. If you found value in today's episode, I'd be so grateful if you could subscribe and leave a review. It not only supports the podcast, but ensures you don't miss out on future episodes packed with insights and tools. To create peace of mind in your busy mom life.
And if you're of the Catholic faith, like me or any Christian mom seeking to feel better in any area of your life and to show up more calm, connected, and confident, I can help. Become an empowered mom who knows how to bring about the changes you desire, no matter the circumstances. Whether you need one-on-one guidance to get there, prefer a group coaching program with like-minded women, or a self-study course I've got you covered. Explore my private one-on-one packages. Join my Busy to Balanced group life coaching program or delve into my signature course. Divine time. To find out which path is right for you, let's meet and see what's the best fit. Schedule a [00:28:00] free call with me at daniellethienel.com or send me a direct message on Facebook or Instagram @daniellethienelcoaching.
And also don't forget to get your copy of my book, The Cyclone Mom Method: How to Call On Your God-Given Power To Remain Calm, In Control, and Confident as a Busy Mom. Dive into the digital and bonus audio version when you go to book.daniellethienel.com/new-book. You'll find all the details in the show notes too.
Until next time, peace be with you always.
