Stop repressing what you feel by learning how to better process your emotions.
Do you struggle to feel emotions?
This last year has helped me realize that I repress emotions—even more than I realized. I started working to “feel” but realized that tapping into emotions is hard. (Super hard!)
Repressing emotion creates physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences in your life. I’m sure you are dealing with those, just like me!
So, how can you stop out-running, out-producing, or out-numbing your hard emotions? How can you get better at FEELING your feelings? (Especially if you’re naturally more of a “thinker” than a “feeler.”)
This week, I talked with Jill Freestone about tools you can use to feel your emotions. She explained that there are so many tools to work on personal growth, but you can only move forward when you learn to process your emotions.
(And, this doesn’t mean you just have to be happy all the time!)
You’re not broken if you feel like mindset tools aren’t working for your situation.
Jill wants to help you create your own individualized emotion-work toolbox. This toolbox will have unique tools that work FOR YOU to process emotions so you can move forward, instead of having your life hijacked by those darn suppressed feelings.
Your mind, body, and spirit will thank you for listening to this episode because it’s time to really feel how you feel.
About a few other things…
Reclaim your creative power and rediscover who you actually are! If you’re ready to come back home to yourself, to be able to say that you know who you are and what matters to you, take my foundation course, “Finding Me.” It’s OK that you’ve lost parts of yourself along the way; but as you learn to anchor back into who you are and align your life to what matters to you, you’ll find that you have more strength, more fulfilment, and more creativity to bring to your important roles and responsibilities.
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SHOW NOTES
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Songs Credit: Pleasant Pictures Music Club
TRANSCRIPT
Monica Packer: Jill Freestone, welcome to About Progress.
Jill Freestone: Thank you, Monica.
Monica Packer: So good to finally have you on, you’ve been on my shortlist for forever and you taught a masterclass for the Strive Hive last fall. That was so amazing. And that’s one that helped me in incredible ways, and my other Strive Hive members that I was hoping we could talk about some of the things we brought up there. You are an expert on how to deal with hard emotions, which you’re like, oh man, wish I wasn’t.
But I wanted to hear a little bit of a setup on how you became an expert on heart emotions.
Jill Freestone: Okay. So I was not always good at this, but I was really good at repressing. And so it looks, it looks like I was good at managing my emotions. So many people think we are, if we are like happy all the time, right? Oh, that’s what I was good at, you know, perfectionism, overachievement, that kind of thing. But then of course, that led to my health breaking down physically and mentally.
And that led to some extensive mindfulness training that I did about 15 years ago. That really helped me learn to get into the body and really connect with my mind, my body, everything that’s going on in that. You know, helped me create that space between stimulus and response and actually healed some of the chronic health problems or helped me to, to move forward with that.
Monica Packer: Wow.
Jill Freestone: Yeah, it was, it was life changing. I got to work with a really cool Buddhist teacher in person that was amazing. And, you know, some like all day silent retreats and things, but,
Monica Packer: So, so with this, let me clarify. So you repressed the emotions so much that your body manifested the stress. So you had to deal better with your emotions to help your body.
Jill Freestone: Which is Would you be funny because I was going through all the chronic or the specialists at the doctor and all the, you know, you go through every possible test to figure out what’s wrong with me and they can’t find anything. And so like, I get to the top of the chain and every specialist with all these body problems I was having and they’re just like, I don’t know.
And so then I just came across this, on my own and yeah, it was back down to acceptance and being with the body.
So then I went into a lot of anxiety training because I was having nausea all day long and nobody even thought of anxiety, all the doctors I was going to, and even the therapists, but so then I know anxiety was part of it. And I had had postpartum depression. So a lot of anxiety training really learned how to work with anxiety instead of resist it. After several years with life coaching, I actually was able to find a deeper healing for myself because when you just try to change your thoughts about something and it wasn’t working, then I found out that.
“why isn’t this working? Why isn’t this working?” And I was so persistent to try and figure this out and I was looking at it and the way I ended up finding that I had scrupulosity OCD and sensory processing disorder. But the reason that happened is like I found trauma from the past. And, and also OCD requires a whole different kind of treatment than thought work.
But it was because I got so good at all these other things and something just wasn’t fixing. And so that’s something else that I’ve found. If you’re trying all these methods and it’s not working, same thing with the doctors I was going to, you know, there’s always, there’s somewhere else to look.
Monica Packer: Ooh, and this is exactly what I was going to bring up. It’s hilarious that we’re like on the same brainwave here, but I was going to talk about how you and I have had so many discussions about what’s the balance with thought work and other kind of work, whether that’s emotion work or working with your body, like learning how to do more mindfulness, like it’s a balance. And you are a life coach so you have a lot of mindset tools and they are so vital, but there are many women who are listening to you right now, Jill, and they’re thinking, “So I’m not broken because I have these tools and they’re not fixing me?” Oh, that’s going to be. Yeah. exactly. That’s going to be a big moment for them. So yes. Thoughts are so important. Let’s talk about this. Emotion processing. Why is that a tool that people should be considering alongside all these others?
Jill Freestone: Yeah. So kind of like when the medical work couldn’t figure out my body and we needed to use bodywork, you know, like when mental, thought processes and just trying to think your way through it, isn’t working, let’s look into the body again. And the part of the reason is that emotions are in the body.
And so if we’re trying to, we can’t think our way out of a feeling, like feelings are in the body. So you can’t solve a feeling problem with a thinking solution, especially if you think feelings are problems. And so there’s a lot to do with really believing feelings aren’t problems, and then realizing that feelings are in the body.
So like we talked about, like, when you’re flooded with a big emotion, you’re thinking in your, your thinking mind isn’t even accessible. So that’s part of the reason thought work isn’t helpful in that moment. Like you can do all your thought work and then suddenly you’re there. And you’re like, try to do thought work right now, but your thinking mind isn’t accessible right there in that moment.
So then. We just tend to repress emotions that are always talking about, then it explodes in bigger emotions. Like for example, I had a teen client that represses her emotions all the time and she got pulled over and then she cried for three hours and she came to me like what happened? And I was like, congratulations, like you’ve tapped into it.
Monica Packer: You had a good breakthrough. Yeah.
Jill Freestone: Yeah. So what we have to do is show the body, not tell the body that it’s safe to feel the feeling. And so that’s when like understanding that the body speaks the somatic language, not the spoken language. So it requires us to actually connect with the body so that it can shift instead of just telling it to shift.
Monica Packer: What’s somatic language?
Jill Freestone: Anything that has to do with a body. So like it might be movement swaying, tapping, breathing, getting the five senses of getting present, or, you know, any kind of multi-tenant way, like a bunch of tools and exercises we can talk about.
Monica Packer: Well, I feel like I’m just sitting here and my mind is being opened up to a whole new universe. Like I’ve, I’ve known for years. And I thought I was working on this. I thought I was working on better processing my emotions. But now I’m realizing there’s a whole other level to this that I have not tapped into at all.
And I think a lot of women listening are feeling the same. So can you describe just what it can look like to use somatic language, whether it’s, you know, it’s some kind of movement with your body to process a hard emotion, like maybe anxiety since that was one that you’ve dealt with with a lot.
Jill Freestone: Yeah. I mean, there’s some tools that people will think are hokey. Like some people think like tapping, you know, like the different, like some people think that’s weird, but then there’s other things that’s just literally humming and swaying your body as if you were rocking yourself, like a mother rocking a baby and even like holding your arms as if you have a child.
And you’re reparenting yourself in that moment because generally a big emotion not always is when you got triggered when you were young and your body learned to then continue to react that same way when you felt unsafe as a child. So right in this moment, you take little three year old Jill or five-year-old Jill or eight year old Jill, that was unsafe in that moment.
And you bring her into your lap and you rock her and you love her. You stroke. You know, it’s, it’s rubbing your arms, it’s rubbing your hands till they’re warm and putting them on your cheek and this motion or on your eyes and this safety. This deep breathing. It’s getting grounded in, in like, can I fill the chair under me?
Can I feel the earth under me? You know what that is that sounding familiar?
Monica Packer: Absolutely. So someone who is dealing with anxious thoughts, and they’re trying to slow down that tape record going on in their mind and it’s not working. And they do like go to a quiet room and just rock back and forth a little bit or hug their body or
Jill Freestone: I do it right in the middle of any crazy place. I am. It doesn’t matter where I am. I’m just doing that. If I feel like I need more than I’ll go outside and you know, and I’ll even move my body really big and swing my arms over and I’d start pumping and running. But yes. Yeah. So we like, I helped them create a toolbox of the things that they try and try and try and practice and see what works for you in the moment and what works for you on a daily, weekly basis that lowers the overall anxiety.
But then there’s the difference between overall in general. And then in the moment.
Monica Packer: Okay. And we’re actually going to be talking about that in pertaining to one thing that usually can bring up these hard emotions. But, but first I’m just thinking about with my last child. I have four kids. I’m just saying this for people who don’t know. My first two were natural childbirth. My second was epidural. My last was natural. Was, I could traumatized for my natural birth. They weren’t really on purpose. Although I thought I wanted them, but then they were just so quick. And I’m in my head. I’m a head person. I’m cerebral
Jill Freestone: Me too, big time, big time
Monica Packer: Yeah. Always been a big thing here.
Jill Freestone: me.
Monica Packer: I did hypno child birthing, like in preparation for my first. And I literally like threw the, the headphones in my ear across the room, because as like now, and I can’t, you know, I couldn’t do it, but with my fourth, I had worked a lot more with meditation leading up to it. And mindfulness and I also got laughing gas, which helped me think less, even though the pain was just the same and something weird happened, Jill, I was like dancing while I gave labor.
Jill Freestone: I love it.
Monica Packer: I was rocking back and forth, back and forth and, and I was doing things I had not prepared. Like it was so strange. It, so the way you’re describing.
Jill Freestone: yourself like you truly became connected to yourself.
Monica Packer: Yeah. And even my amazing OB who was like four foot 11, she’s just like the tiniest human. She was just like, this is amazing. This is amazing. And I was like, oh, me too.
This is amazing. And it was such a different experience, but I maybe I’ll even take this whole part out, but it’s just helping me
Jill Freestone: No,
Monica Packer: to one moment where I can say, I know what that means. You can slow down.
Jill Freestone: It’s really beautiful that you really tapped in because really all anxiety is separation anxiety, which is separation from ourselves. And it’s, it’s like, I love your face. The thought
Monica Packer: my face is crazy right now. Like what.
Jill Freestone: the thoughts purpose is to distract you from the discomfort or the pain in the body, or to change it instead of accept it. So the solution is to connect with and be with the body. And so your anxiety is coming because you are not with yourself in the cerebral part that we’re both so good at that separates us from our self and often our true selves, our inner self, our inner wisdom, that sovereignty of who we really are, who we want to be because we’re spending so much more time in the brain. So that’s my strength. That becomes a weakness for me when I’m spending too much time up here and I’ve had to learn to bring it down.
And it started when I was three years old, like I had a traumatic experience when I was three that taught me to use my brain to keep myself safe, to keep my parents happy and everyone around me happy. And I learned to over-function and be perfectionistic and, and just do what’s right. Be a good girl.
And we have those little moments and some, and that was just one little thing. But then later in my life, there were other moments that weren’t big traumas. They were just like, you know, get fear of getting yelled at or being in trouble or not having a traumatic experience. Nursing, you know, with my first child and postpartum, like there’s these little moments that are just little trauma, you know, little tiny things that, because I’m a hypersensitive, hyper thinking person become trauma to me and they get, and they get stuck and I’m stuck back at those little ages, but taking.
Younger Jill, and reparenting her and taking those parts of myself and bringing them back into me and loving me instead of my parts are all separated. And I’m just up here trying to think my way through it, because really I love how Jill Bolte Taylor says we are feeling creatures who think
Monica Packer: Hm.
Jill Freestone: think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, but it’s the opposite. And so it’s just this connection to self. And really honoring cause like as a young child, we tend to learn to separate from ourself by not honoring what we really want and what feels right. And to just keep, because it feels unsafe to do that because the people around us kind of freak out. If we say no to our parents, or if we refuse to do something, we get in trouble.
So we just do what’s right. And that separates us from ourselves. And then we feel that anxiousness and this untrue not being true to ourselves.
Monica Packer: Oh, my goodness. You are seriously blowing my mind. And they’re also helping me make sense of like my entire life and these last few minutes. And this episode isn’t even supposed to about me. So I apologize, but
Jill Freestone: well, we do have a lot of common as we’ve found through the years, we have
Monica Packer: have a lot in common
Jill Freestone: and patterns of thought, like as like, if we’re not allowed to be authentic, we don’t connect to our caregivers when we’re young. And so then we give up authenticity to be connected and safe.
Monica Packer: Wow. Cause we’re trying to find it outside of ourselves.
Jill Freestone: Yeah. So that’s where the trauma comes. It’s the disconnection from self. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Gabor Matay and his, his trauma work, but that’s just where it doesn’t matter how hard the situation is. Like it could be something simple, like being told, “no,” that becomes a imprinted trauma for you.
And so then this alarm in the body keeps freaking out and it prevents us from doing that. So, so yeah, it’s just coming back to the nervous system and teaching and reparenting helping it to feel safe. Is the first step. So like, that’s why I was glad where I learned mindfulness first, but then it was through the years of gradually starting to put all the pieces together and have it actually make sense.
And that’s the thing is we all learn it when already, like you weren’t ready for the hypnobirthing when you first tried it
Monica Packer: No.
Jill Freestone: it’s just layer upon layer. Right. And so nothing has gone wrong here. That truly it’s okay. When you’re ready, you’re ready.
Monica Packer: Wow. All right. Now I feel ready. Like I want to know all the things that you know and I’m sure everyone else does too, but let’s start this out simply. I want people to imagine that you have a toolbox, like Jill said, and you’re going to put in that toolbox different ways to connect with your body.
Like you said, to calm yourself down, but I want them now to learn how to apply that in ways that are practical, because that might be the best way for them to start is to just. Trying one of our models here in our community to do something.
So we are going to do something with what you taught us already today and apply it with things that come up for us often. And this might seem like a stretch for people, but it won’t once you hear Jill talking about it, because she and I have talked about this a lot behind the scenes and it’s transitions.
It’s things like you’re working on washing your dishes and a child comes in who’s really angry. And you have to task switch and emotion, switch it’s things like another transition in your schedule, right?
Any other examples of day-to-day transitions, you can think of Jill so they can put themselves in that place.
Jill Freestone: Even just one task to the next, you know, like maybe you’re working and then you’re at home or your making dinner, and then you get everyone in the car and go somewhere. Like it could be like physical location. Or, and just being alone in the shower by yourself and then you have to go face the kids outside the door.
Monica Packer: All kinds of transitions. And with those surprising emotions come up and we can tend to suppress them or just let them just go right to anxiety. Right. So what can they do to start practicing and trying out things in their toolbox with these day-to-day transitions?
Jill Freestone: I would just give a quick analogy to get you in the mindset. We had a flood It was actually in the room. My daughter is out of the country right now. And so we didn’t notice there was a slow leak coming through the ceiling.
Monica Packer: ohhhhh.
Hello.
Jill Freestone: I know we find out and that there was up in the attic, the, the heating system, they had fixed it.
They said. But it didn’t fix it while enough that it was, you know, everything soggy up there and it’s finally leaking through. So the guy came when I called him to repair it and he went up inside and he said he fixed it. I asked him to take a picture of what he did and he just wanted to like paint over it.
And it was already darkened. Like there was dark stuff like it was getting moldy and stuff and.
Monica Packer: Oh, no.
Jill Freestone: You can’t just paint over that. Like there’s mold up there. There’s soggy insulation and wood and it, so this is what I want you to realize that, that in our life, like in our human body, like ours, there are things.
That are deeper that have, you know, either emotional wounds or just these emotions that are begging for attention. And these they’re just saying gel, gel, drip, drip. And sometimes it’s a raging kid that’s screaming at you, but to be able to just listen to that, instead of just think a different thought and move on.
like,
Monica Packer: paint over it.
Jill Freestone: let’s just like painting over it. Like, let’s get up in there. We had someone else come and dig the whole thing out and redo the ceiling and everything. But like, we know what to do when we’re hungry, we feed our body. We don’t think something’s gone wrong. Like, my stomach’s hurting. Like I’m shaking, like that’s hunger. And so then we get to listen to this emotion and, oh, okay. I’ve been running too fast. Let me slow down and listen to this.
So let the emotion be an instructor and let it truly help you figure out who you are and what’s going on. Because when that happened, like I truly became sovereign, that I know myself and I act from inner wisdom and that’s the most beautiful moment to feel aligned from authenticity.
You’re not just repeating that thought work. So the practical side of that is that we’re not allowing that to happen. So first is just be willing to pause.
Like the deep breath that you talk about, like, like just stop and admit, this is a transition. So one thing I teach people is like before you walk through a doorway, just pause and assess, just scan down the body. Where am I at? It doesn’t have to take very long, just a few seconds. So just. Where am I at right now in my body?
Oh, there’s tension right here. Like I can, I can feel it in my throat. The heart is actually beating or there’s this heaviness on my shoulder. It’s and just be with your body use some of the somatic tools, just so you’re starting with the body instead of with, I’m going to try and think positive thoughts about that crazy kid.
That’s screaming on the other side of the door and make sure that I respond well. Like start with the feeling process where you’re already at, and then just ask yourself, are there any lingering thoughts that I’d like to deal with? Do I have time right now? Or do you want to write, write that down and deal with that later?
Like I teach my anxiety clients about worry time and worry vacation and how you put it on a shelf, but you commit to come back to it. It’s the same story you’re like, okay. You know, right now I’m hiding in the bathroom for a minute, but I got to go face that kid. And I’m going to set that aside and literally make a note about it.
But right now I’m going to wait for this feeling to move through me when you practice it a lot, it can happen in 30 seconds. There’s bigger ones that can take longer, of course, but just like letting that . . . Can you imagine just like letting your stomach like completely relax instead of holding it tight, like you can do that in just a moment or letting your jaw just completely drop
just for a second. What do I want to feel right now? Because I’ve let it process through. You know, curiosity and compassion is what, like my top go-to. And just do that for a minute, but it’s not like 24, 7.
I’m completely in the moment with all my children. Like, that’s not, it it’s just for this next moment. I’m going to choose that. And then I get in there and suddenly they’re reacting. And I’m feeling triggered because like, I still haven’t learned to manage my anger trigger. And so I was like, oh, okay.
There’s a child or teenager, who’s yelling at me or whatever. Like, and I just start talking to that loud. And so I admit to them and I teach you how to process out loud. Like. I am feeling angry right now. This is what I’m going to do. And you list your strategies that I call your emotion zone. Like you can do it right there in front of someone, or you go somewhere else to be in your emotions.
And like, wow, I even prepared myself, but that was a doozy. You know what you just said to me? And, you know, I hate you or whatever, and I’m like, I’m feeling anger. And so then I drop into allowing that anger. Okay. It’s normal for me to be angry when someone just says they hate me, I accept that. I allow myself to feel it.
Does that. Does that make sense? How you can do that? And that’s a little transition of allowing, processing, clearing, being intentional and then accepting in the moment when you get triggered. And you can either stay with the person and, and do it, but you talk them through it. So my, my family is used to me saying like, I’m feeling, this is what it feels like in my body.
Okay. For me to build this, or I’m crying right in front of them, or I say, Hey, this is huge. I want to go in my room so I can rage and, you know, throw and hit, or I’m going to walk or run or something, but they know that I’m using tools. Not, not that I’m perfect. They know that I’m processing and that’s normal and natural.
So then they can feel safe to do that.
Monica Packer: So everything in the toolbox, its purpose is to help you process the emotion and other words to actually feel it. And for people like me and you and other thinkers that is super scary and hard to do, it’s almost like. How?? You know, I just, you just, how you just choose to feel it, how do I choose to feel it?
And so you’re saying it’s just those, those kinds of things, moving your body, allowing yourself to rage. Yeah.
Jill Freestone: Well, there’s a thinking side of it, of letting yourself transform your relationship with the emotion that has to happen first. Because if you feel like it’s bad to be angry, you’re not going to let yourself flow with this. You’re then going to go to shame and judgment and resistance. Or reacting in your anger and start raging at your kid instead of, oh, this is a normal sensation. Here I am feeling this. It’s not a problem to feel this right now.
Monica Packer: It’s interesting, you and I both have, my three values are the three CS, two curiosity, compassion and courage. But man practicing it on yourself is another level. And this is when I’m realizing that I can do, I can hang on to this. When I know hard emotion, what do I do? I go to curiosity and I’m just trying to get curious and drop into my body.
Am I going to drop in my body with one of these tools that I’m ready to try? Whether it’s moving or dancing or explaining it or opening my shoulders or deep breathing, there are so many different ways. Which I think really hopeful because that means they’re going to find some ways that work for you. This is helping me understand why exercise has been so important for me.
Jill Freestone: me too. You were doing it. You were actually processing and you’re providing that tool. Yeah. A good example is if you’ve seen a bird hit a window or a cat, get hit by a car and they lay there and play dead for awhile. And like, you think they’re dead, but what they’re doing is that’s their Prama response to that just to go into freeze for awhile.
And then when they realize everything is safe and they’re okay, then the lights start to switch a little bit and then they’ll start to completely shake. You know, like an antelope will do this as well. Like shake it out really hard. Then they stand up and kind of look around. And what they’re doing is their brain is relearning that “I’ve released all of this. And I don’t have to create a trauma response with this window or this car I can say windows are okay. And I can totally let it go.”
And so animals are way better at this than us, that, that we get up and just try to think and move on. And, and we don’t allow it to really shake it out then, like, so literally shake and your whole body, you know, I do that after calls a lot.
Monica Packer: Okay, this is also helping me see why. Piano is really calming K things like that. Music dancing movement, shaking, jumping, like there’s so many different ways. I’m getting it. So I am thinking about a specific transition in the middle of the day. Let’s say that you or someone is picking up carpool and you’re in that long line and maybe you have a child that’s really just not being very nice.
Not being nice to you. Not being nice to the siblings, just a general piece of work, you know, as soon as they get in the car and I’m pretending this is not me, but , this is an example. What would you do, Jill, how would you help a person who was just learning this.
Jill Freestone: Yeah. There’s so many factors to go into this, you know, like what did you do for yourself that day? Because like, literally, if you haven’t connected with yourself that day, I would give you a bypass because you wouldn’t have the ability to, to access these schools,
Monica Packer: That’s where fulfillment comes in. Right. Which is a big part of what we do in this community.
Jill Freestone: Like the self care, like if you literally been running ragged, you know, for days and you hadn’t slept and you hadn’t been eating, like you don’t have the accessibility to remember the tools.
So. There’s compassion for you as mothers. Like for me to tell you to do this in a moment and let it work. And, you know, you’re like, know, right, right. And so self-care for sure is first. But then in that moment, of course, curiosity and compassion kid is freaking out. They’re getting into a big emotion.
So literally that’s when I want to get into their space, you know, down on their level next to them, touch physical touch. So use my body to connect with their body. If it’s possible. Sometimes that’s not possible to like stop the car. But I have a lot of moms who were telling me, like I got out of the carpool lane, I pulled the car over on the freeway even.
And I’m like realizing that the connection between me and my body and me and my kid and these emotions are more important than anything because that’s, what’s tearing relationships apart. And that’s, what’s tearing ourselves apart because we’re not connecting to ourselves and honoring ourselves. So that’s where it’s like, valuing that most of all.
And so like, okay, how can I respect this child first? And how can I respect myself so first, like if I’m not in a place, like I may say, and just give them something to satisfy them, because I’m like, I’m not in this.
Monica Packer: You’re painting.
Jill Freestone: And so I got a regulate ne so can I turn on a song that maybe would regulate all of us?
Can we all start literally dancing to the song in the car right now to help us all regulate together? Or can I get that kid to come sit on my lap and hug me? Like, can we all park the car and run laps from the car for a second? Like, what are the ways that we can connect? But first of all, it would be respect. Like, Hey kid, I see.
Right now, how can you see them? Like, this is really hard to be in this car right now. Can you remember what was before then for them? What’s triggering them. Can you any idea if you don’t just validate, validate, validate, because if you just try to fix them, you are not seeing them you’re separating from them.
Monica Packer: Yep.
Jill Freestone: That’s the biggest issue we work on is validating and making it safe to feel emotions, instead of just like looking at the way they’re manifesting their emotion and trying to fix that, like their windingness and their rudeness. Like it’s always coming underneath it. It’s like, yeah. It’s like fixing the transition.
Doesn’t work if we’re not coming down to this inner. So they’re hurting and calling out in some way. So how can I connect and help them regulate without shaming them or just telling them they’re bad, they need to fix it and stop it. So it’s, it’s a bigger process than normal. Like it’s easier to just say, you know, knock it off and give them a sucker or something.
But there are times when we need to do those things, because we, we aren’t in a place to help them. Or there literally isn’t time. Like we’ve got to catch a plane or something like
Monica Packer: Yeah. Yeah. And that that’s going to come up and, and, and to me, I was thinking about what do I do as a mom to prepare myself for that upcoming shift. But I liked that you went there with the kid because whatever you would do with that kid, you need to deal with yourself, right?
Jill Freestone: That’s what I was saying too. Like if I’m not regulated, can I turn on a song that we help all of us? Cause we’re all in the car together.
Monica Packer: I love that you did that. So a thread I’m seeing in everything you’ve said today is that we want to spend more time connecting so we can spend less time reacting. A big part of hard emotions is you’re just reacting. You’re reacting to the circumstance, the transition, the shift, the change, the person, the trauma.
Jill Freestone: It’s a separation from yourself. Again, like we’re continuing to do that. And so we’re creating this and we’re just staying here, but coming back in.
Monica Packer: K. And to reconnect, it’s using these tool sets to work through your body to feel, to feel in your body.
Jill Freestone: I mean, so there’s like several different tools. I teach like the mindfulness bench. I taught your group of how to like, use something external, you know, or the ways of the ocean, like a visual. And like, so we work to find something for you that works, that you can imagine being in a setting that you can imagine a way to pause it either it’s a physical or an imagined thing.
You imagine yourself just riding the wave. And so that’s where my confidence comes in to just sit with it.
Monica Packer: Okay, this is the good kind of discomfort that we have to learn. It’s a good kind of hard. There’s something I do in my coaching program called the discomfort zone of being willing to stretch yourself into the discomfort that will help you move forward. And this to me is like my next Everest, this to me is the next discomfort zone. I need to learn a lot more about.
I have one question. One last question that is still just on my mind. And it’s where do thoughts come in? I’ve heard you say this a few times of different parts where thought work can come in. You are a seasoned life coach.
There are tools that help with this cognitive therapy saved my life. Like we’re not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Jill Freestone: No,
Monica Packer: So, where does that work come in to this kind of emotion work?
Jill Freestone: So it kind of comes in at the beginning and then after. So like what I said before for you to actually believe youare n’t your thoughts for you to have separation from that? And to believe you can change your thoughts, that your thoughts don’t control you. So that’s at the beginning and starting to believe like you have personal separation between stimulus and response that you can choose, you have choice, right?
Then we come back and find out what’s going on in the body and work there for a long time and work with our thoughts about the body and our thoughts about the emotions. And so then on a daily basis, when you you’re, I mean, it takes a while to transform your relationship with the emotions themselves. And with your perceptions of them and your, your willingness to be uncomfortable. Like we worked through all of that.
But then in like, when you’re calm is when you do the thought work, when you decide, like before I walked through a doorway, I’m using my brain. And my thoughts, like, if I think this way, I know what’s going to happen and, and so you, you intentionally plan ahead and then you freak out and then you come back and reevaluate because when you’re in that heightened state, you can’t use cognitive work anyway. So come to the body, come back. And then you reevaluate later.
So like when your kid is freaking out, it does no good to try and tell them what to do or rationalize with them. Right? Like you understand that concept. So that’s where, when your kid is in that car that we described, the kid was acting horribly it’s regulation, you know, your self-regulation and co-regulation, and then later reflect, you know, usually hours later. You know, Hey in that car, what was going on with us. And that’s where the thought work comes in and the processing the communication, because that allows you to connect.
So that’s where it can come back. And again, it’s the emotion that you want to feel while you’re using the thought work. So it’s still for me, always underneath.
Monica Packer: It is, it’s like, it’s the root, it’s the root all of it. And it’s also make sense. I keep saying that throughout this whole episode, but it’s helping me understand why I could only work on my thoughts once I learned to calm my body, like when I was recovering from eating disorders, I remember having to like run to a bathroom during a panic attack and just try to breathe, you know, until I could then step in and then work on the thoughts.
So, so much of this makes sense. But so much of it is new, where can people learn more through you? Because I feel like, you know it all, so where can they go to learn more from you?
Jill Freestone: Well, I mean, like I work with people one-on-one right now. And so just my website, jillfreestone.com and I’m on Instagram, Jill Freestone coaching. I think, I think for like people to really believe like that it can work for them. Like I have a 60 year old man I’ve been working with for a long time and his anger was out of control and he didn’t te couldn’t tap into emotions, and finally accessed it. And it’s like, you know, feeling and crying and feeling tender and like little shifts like that, or like, Like a little nine-year-old who’s scared of dying and was willing to feel so uncomfortable on the phone call with me to face his fear literally and walked through the whole thing. And then to come back to me, the next session is like, my fear went from a 10 to zero. Cause I figured it all out and we talked it all through and I felt horrible. And then I realized I can handle it.
So like just little things at a time. Like, like teenagers that are unwilling to feel uncomfortable. And so they start self-harming or feel anxious and depressed all the time, but they just don’t know what to do with this sensation in their body.
That there is hope for that.
Monica Packer: Hmm. And that’s the stuff that life is made of, I really think. We’ve been able to move through these things. Jill, thank you very much for being on the show.
Jill Freestone: You’re welcome.
