Imagine that you sit down with a therapist who is smart, and kind, and attentive and they ask you how you feel. At first you're not really sure how to answer that, but the therapist is clearly determined to help you get there. In fact, you notice that they're really staying right with, and tracking, and helping you to track, exactly what is happening inside you in the moment.
Even if that is feeling disconnected from your emotions, or feeling anxious that you don't have the answer, they keep drawing your awareness inward just to help you notice your experience and approach it with non-judgment. Now imagine that this is a little weird for you because you're used to the kind of therapy where you just talk about your week, but that's not happening here. What's happening is this back and forth exchange, exploring and putting words to what is actually happening inside, with time just to notice how that feels.
And in truth, it feels a lot of ways, uncomfortable and new, but also kind of exciting and hopeful, like maybe something might actually happen here, because the storytelling therapy hasn't really worked for you. Plus, it isn't like the therapist is pushing you. They're really being kind and patient and helping you understand why it might be difficult to know what you feel.
That being said, they don't seem like they're going to give up so easily either, and their persistence while a bit uncomfortable, also helps you to trust them. Like maybe they really want to know. They really want to know about your true experience, and suddenly it occurs to you, why shouldn't they?
In fact, the fact that that kind of genuine curiosity about your inner world feels so unfamiliar, suddenly strikes you as sad. It even brings up just a little wave of grief, and as it does, the therapist stays with you and helps you embody and make space for what you're feeling. You find yourself having some tears which isn't your norm, but it doesn't feel overwhelming.
It just feels true, and right, and meaningful. Now imagine that within a few moments the wave of sadness softens back, but not because you pushed it back, it just feels kind of complete. And now, instead of feeling the sadness in your chest, you just feel open and relaxed.
You explore with your therapist what this new place, this place on the other side of emotion feels like, and that conversation is also very rich and unhurried. Imagine that you notice that your therapist seems genuinely moved by the work you did together. Now as the session closes and you're gathering your things and saying goodbye and preparing to walk out the door, just imagine how you feel.
[Music] Hi, I'm DrTori Olds and in this video I'd like to talk to you about how it feels to feel. Now in a moment we will tie this to a particular form of therapy called AEDP, but before we get there I just generally want to talk about how it feels to feel, both in the moment of the emotion, as well as just afterward. Now, if you're thinking, "I know how it feels to feel.
If anything, I'm overly emotional! " well, the reason I want to talk about how it feels to feel is that I think most of us only rarely experience pure emotion. What we experience instead is emotion plus.
It's like every time we have emotion all these other pieces come along as well. You know how a ship can have barnacles attached to it? I think for many of us, the experience of emotion has these extra, negative elements attached to it.
What kind of elements? Well, most commonly unconscious beliefs like, "to feel is to be weak," or "if I feel, I will be rejected, or overwhelmed, or I'll be out of control like my raging father. " When emotions are tied to those kinds of unconscious beliefs or associations, then they bring along with them what are called secondary emotions, or our feelings in response to our feelings.
The two most common being shame and anxiety. Now, shame and anxiety feel horrible. We will do almost anything to get out of them.
We might even throw ourselves towards safer emotions, just as a defense. For instance, if we're ashamed of feeling sad, we might generate anger instead. Or if we're scared of feeling angry we might suddenly get weepy or even fully shut down into depression.
The truth is we'd probably be just fine to have our primary emotions but when shame or anxiety come along for the ride, not to mention all the internal maneuvers we now have to do to avoid that shame or anxiety, now we are in a much more disregulated, or at the very least stuck, kind of state. Those kind of secondary emotions are what I mean by the barnacles on the ship of our emotional experience, you know, that sort of make it hard to move forward. So hopefully that makes some sense.
We've learned that emotions are unsafe. Then they bring with them all these negative associations and sort of desperate maneuvers that just make us feel bad. On top of all those pieces, emotion can at times trigger what I call an emotional flashback, where a current emotion is reminding us of how it felt in the past to experience that emotion.
In other words, we're not only feeling our current day sadness but reliving how it felt to be sad as a child. That is not an empowering experience of sadness, because it isn't just feeling sad, it's feeling sad plus small, powerless, alone, overwhelmed, right? By the way, I do have more on emotional flashbacks and the science of that in my IFS video called Healing Trauma Through Unblending from Exiles, but the bottom line is that it is possible for emotion to bring along other elements that aren't part and parcel of the emotion itself.
They are pieces that are coming from memory. In other words, pieces from the past, whether learned expectations that emotion is bad and I need to get tense in the face of it, or in terms of reliving how it felt to have that particular motion as a child. Those pieces from the past can really work to muddy our experience of emotion, often without us even realizing it.
And we think we're just having emotions and that this is just what it's like to have our feelings, but really, we're having emotion plus memory. This is why it can be so helpful to have a therapist who knows how to slow the process down, detangle us from some of the memory pieces, so that we can see what it is like just simply to feel without extra suffering being piled on top. When that happens, when we can experience pure untarnished emotion, it's an incredible experience.
We almost don't have words in our daily lexicon for how this feels because we're so used to organizing things into positive or negative emotions, but obviously that delineation is way too simplistic. In fact, as we will be exploring, we can have a positive experience of a quote "negative" emotion. While we don't have tons of shared language around this, let me give you words my clients tend to use to describe what it's like when they finally allow themselves to deepen into core emotion.
They describe it as feeling right, as feeling true. I've even heard the words wholesome or cleansing be used. In the case of sadness, people often describe feeling relieved, or touched, or tender, or in the case of anger, they often describe feeling energized or powerful, you know, clear, strong.
So why am I describing all of this in a series that is about AEDP, which by the way, if you didn't watch the first video, stands for Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, well because an AEDP session is not only designed to help you access your emotions, it is designed in such a way that the experience will be unequivocally positive. Remember Diana Fosha who developed AEDP says we want our clients to have a new experience, and for that experience to be good. Now, there's a lot to say about why that goodness can be so transformative but first I'd like to more fully explore the goodness itself.
Like why do core emotions feel right, and wholesome, and relieving in the first place? Think of it like this, our core emotions serve a purpose. They are meant to help orient our mind toward a piece of important work.
That work might look like problem solving, it might look like answering a deep question, it might look like grief work, which happens when our brain is trying to integrate you know the difficult parts of our life into an overall sense of okayness, and connection, and meaning, which is really important for resiliency. There's a lot of important work for our mind and body to do in this life and emotion is always the thing that brings that need into our awareness. It orients us towards what matters and needs our attention, so that we know where to put our focus, and if necessary, so that we can act.
Now, because emotion is there to serve a purpose, which is basically to get our attention, once it has our attention and feels heard, it just softens back. It isn't there to stick around. It's designed to move through and that whole flowing process from beginning to end is so adaptive and helpful to our survival that it just feels incredibly good to our brain.
It's a funny thing because even if we've never in the past experienced this kind of natural flow of emotion, it's like so endogenous to us, like such a central part of our evolutionary packaging, that the brain will recognize when it is happening and mark it as good. In fact, if it sees healthy emotion moving through, in a way that's actually feeling safe, and ideally connecting, it will give us a burst of energy in order to support that process. That's what Diana Fosha calls Transformance, that our system knows that internal flow state, wants to return to it, and will help us to get there.
And when emotion helps us to connect deeply with ourselves and be seen by another, our brain will reward us for that, you know, literally through flooding us with rewarding neurochemicals. In some ways, you can think of this as secondary emotion again, it's just instead of negative secondary emotions, we are suddenly having positive secondary emotions. We are happy that we are feeling.
Think of it like this, as the arc of emotion is moving through, and I do think of it like an arc because it sort of peaks and then softens, and as that arc is happening, assuming that that is all going as intended, in other words, the emotion is simply doing its job of connecting us more deeply to ourselves and another person, then along that whole arc, as potentially painful in some ways as it might feel, on some other level it is recognized as positive. In other words, as we're having the emotion itself, we are simultaneously feeling the sense of that being right and good. But here's the thing, even after emotion settles, which is what they do, the right and good feelings remain.
These right and good feelings, Diana Fosha calls the transformational affects. It's like after the negative emotion gets processed, now we just feel unburdened, and excited, and alive. We might feel a sense of gratitude or tenderness or feel moved.
Sometimes we have what are called the mastery affects, like joy and pride. Now, I will say that sometimes the beauty of the experience does bring up another round of sadness, because it's like we're realizing how amazing it can feel to be emotionally connecting to ourselves and another and that actually can stimulate a second round of grief. But that's also totally natural and very healing as well.
But in general, the transformational affects are characterized by feelings of pleasure. And during her work, Diana Fosha realized that those feelings of pleasure are important too. Now there have been a lot of therapies that try to help people move through their emotion, but as the emotion has passed through and the person feels better, that's where the process stops.
But not in AEDP, which is perhaps its most unique and important contribution to our field. In AEDP, these transformational affects are explored just as deeply as the core affects that preceded them. It's like they're really given time to have their own arc as well.
This might look like a client really feeling relief at finally expressing their emotions, and then noticing, you know, warmth in their chest, and then as they stay with that, there's a greater sense of openness, maybe even opening to pride or compassion or even just the impulse to engage in a different way. Now you might think it ends there, but no, once we process through our transformational affects, they too take us somewhere different. They move us on to what is called core state.
Core state emerges after both waves of emotion, the original painful emotion and now even the transformational affects that followed, when all of that has settled, where we are left is a state that is hard to describe without using the word spiritual. In other words we feel open, connected, calm. If you've watched my videos on IFS, you can think of the eight C's, you know, compassion, clarity, but also awe and truth.
This isn't about big emotions necessarily, it's just a state of being fully present, in the moment, from the deepest, purest place inside of us. So if we add what I just described, to what I talked about in the first video, you might notice there are truly four states the client is helped to move through during the work. State one is the one the client shows up in.
For instance, where their system is quick to go to shame or anxiety or defenses, perhaps. Through regulating those secondary emotions, the client is supported in moving down into state two, where they can access the core emotions underneath. When that has been processed through, their system naturally moves into state three, which is the transformational affects.
And when those are processed, again, there's a natural move down into state four, which is core state, where we are just more deeply present and aligned with our true self than we've perhaps ever been. Now, there are many reasons that moving through all four states is so incredibly healing and leads to transformation, and in the next video we will talk about the science of that, namely through the lens of memory reconsolidation. But this video has really been more about what it can feel like to have our emotions.
How it feels to truly feel. I hope something in this video surprised you. Like if you're used to having negative emotions take you somewhere scary or stuck, I'd like to offer that it doesn't have to be that way.
That is a workable piece. There are therapies, like AEDP, designed to help you move past that stuck place so that the natural arc of emotion can unfold. And while it might seem almost impossible to imagine, that arc does feel good.
You know, healing and therapy and even trauma work does not have to be torture. To describe it as fun or easy would be too flippant, because it can be challenging work, but even in the face of the most challenging moments, the experience can and should be beautiful. And the beauty of it is actually part of what is healing.
But, if you'd like to explore the science of why, stay with me for the next video. I'm DrTori Olds and I so appreciate your watching. [Music] Thanks so much for watching, if you're enjoying my content and would like to support my efforts to make videos on a more regular basis, I'm excited to announce that I just created a Patreon page, which I will link to below.
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