Once I asked a woman how her first date with someone went. She said "I never want to see him again." I asked why not, and she said, "Well, I felt very uncomfortable when kissed me after only one hour of talking. He didn't see that I was uncomfortable, though, and he kissed me again later in the evening. I felt even more uncomfortable, even a little disgusted by it. I couldn't tell him that, though. I just left, and if he calls me again I won't go out with him."

The ironic thing about this was that this was a psychology student in her final year of studies. I wondered how she could have gone through an entire psychology program without learning how to verbally express her feelings and without developing the self-confidence to do so.

Learning to say "I feel uncomfortable"

Once I was chatting with a 14 year old. Like usual, I was asking questions like "Does your mother slap you?" I find most adolescents have no problem answering such questions, since normally they are very open. This person, though, told me that felt uncomfortable with my questions. I said, "Ok" and then apologized. She said that it was okay and that she always tells people when she feels uncomfortable with something.

I don't know where or how she learned to do this but I was definitely impressed. I wished that someone had taught me how to do that when I was 14. I might have been able to prevent getting sexually assaulted by my university professor when I was 18, among many other painful experiences after that.

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This week in our Parenting Workshops we are focusing on uncomfortable feelings. And so many of the parents are feeling very uncomfortable trying to cope with their uncomfortable feelings. It doesn’t seem to make sense that being able to feel uncomfortable feelings can help us solve problems. But being able to experience uncomfortable feelings can act as a warning or danger signal for us.

If we were driving on a highway at 100 miles an hour and could not experience fear we might get in big trouble. The fear tells us to slow down before we get hurt. It’s the same with pain. If we put our hand over a burning candle and couldn’t feel pain we would not take our hand away. And then we would do severe damage to our hand.

One of the toughest uncomfortable feelings for us to deal with is anger. In our workshops we call this anger wrath. I don’t think anger is a primary feeling we feel. I think anger is a reaction to a primary feeling we felt but did not deal effectively with. Some of the primary feelings that cause anger are:

• frustration
• embarrassment
• disappointment
• rejection
• jealousy
• fear
• loneliness
• confusion
• boredom 
• sadness

If you feel 30 pounds of disappointment at 9:00 in the morning and deal effectively with that issue, most of the 30 pounds of disappointment will go away. And then the 30 pounds of disappointment will not turn to anger.

But if you don’t deal effectively with the 30 pounds of disappointment, this feeling of disappointment will continue as disappointment for a while. But later the feeling of disappointment will begin to turn into anger.

And this new anger will join the other unresolved anger you have in your system. And when anger has been in your system for a long time you are very aware of feeling the general feeling of anger. But it’s hard to deal with this general feeling of anger because it has become mixed in with all the other unresolved feelings.

I worked in a weight loss clinic for a while. And I remember talking with a client about her week of focusing on her healthy eating style. She told me she did very well for 6 days but Saturday was a disaster. She said that she had plans to socialize on Saturday morning but her friends called to say they had to cancel out.

Then she called another friend who said that she would like to go with her. Then at the last minute the friend called back to say she was not going to be available.

Then the client told me she began to feel really hungry. And before she knew it she had made herself a huge, unhealthy meal and ruined her week of eating healthy.

Her story didn’t make much sense to me to we went back over it. We tried to find out what feelings she was really experiencing. As we went over her day she began to see she was feeling frustrated about not being able to go out with her friends. Then she was able to be even more specific by saying she was feeling very disappointed that her friends didn’t keep their word about going out.

And then she was able to see that she was really feeling disappointment and not hunger. And the food was not going to help her deal with her feeling of disappointment.

We talked about the importance of naming the specific feeling we are feeling if we are going to deal with the uncomfortable feeling effectively. Because she was feeling disappointment not hunger, no amount of food was going to make the disappointment go away.

At the weight loss clinic it was so common for the clients to say they were feeling hunger when they were really experiencing:

• frustration
• embarrassment
• disappointment
• rejection
• jealousy
• fear
• loneliness
• confusion
• boredom 
• sadness

And it was so sad to see these people covering up these uncomfortable feelings with food to try to make the uncomfortable feelings go away.

A key issue in dealing effectively with uncomfortable feelings is to recognize the specific uncomfortable feeling that you are feeling. And when you name that specific feeling you can begin to develop a plan to deal with the specific feeling.

In the parenting workshops this is the plan we use to deal with uncomfortable feelings:

1. Feel the feeling. It is healthy to feel uncomfortable feelings.
2. Acknowledge the feeling: "I am upset!"
3. Name the specific feeling: "I feel disappointed."
4. Validate the feeling: "It is OK to feel disappointed. I have a right to feel disappointed."
5. Deal with the feeling effectively:
1. Verbally: Talk it out.
2. Doing: Do something about it.
3. Forgive, Forget and then move on

Young kids seem to have a very effective method of dealing with uncomfortable feelings. Just look at them after they fall asleep at night. They usually "sleep like a baby."

Young kids go to bed with their books balanced and their uncomfortable feelings resolved. They don’t twist and turn all night trying to wrestle with unresolved, uncomfortable feelings like adults do.

Young kids are:

1. HONEST: They tell you how they feel. "I am mad at you."
2. SPONTANEOUS: They don’t wait. When they feel it they say it.
3. DIRECT: They don’t beat around the bush. They get right to the point.
4. LOUD: They don’t worry about who will hear them. They want to make sure you hear them. And they don’t want to be "shooshed."
5. ALL OF IT; They keep going until they get all of it out.
6. FORGIVE, FORGET AND THEN MOVE ON

If you’ve been twisting and turning at night wrestling with unresolved uncomfortable feelings you might want to take a tip from our young kids about dealing more effectively with uncomfortable feelings.

Sometimes our kids can learn from us. Sometimes we can learn from our kids.

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