We All Have ESP!

Hi Everyone,

Today I’d like to talk about the 4 Steps for using ESP. No, not that ESP. The ESP I’m referring to is something I call “Emotional Sensory Perception”. The 4 steps for Emotional Sensory Perception are:

1. Identify how you are feeling.

2. Validate how you are feeling.

3. Sit with the feeling.

4. Then choose how you want to act.

Many of my clients struggle to identify emotions or say how they are feeling. I struggle too! In our society it’s important to move past our feelings and “buck up buttercup”! We are not to have negative emotions, as they get in the way. We are told that emotions hold us back and keep us from meeting our goals. When we ignore and move past our feelings, we think we are using what researchers have identified as emotional intelligence. I have seen that in our society, we often misinterpret emotional intelligence by rewarding behaviors that ignore feelings and focus on getting the work done.

In reality, emotional intelligence is knowing about, identifying, understanding and processing human emotions. Intelligence is about wisdom, smarts, awareness, intuition, and understanding. Emotional intelligence is about accepting feelings, sitting with them, having compassion for them, not being afraid of them, owning them, forgiving them, and understanding where they come from. Emotional intelligence is not about ignoring feelings, stuffing them, avoiding them, talking over them, and rationalizing them away. When we take action to avoid feelings, we might engage in unhealthy behaviors. Emotions are so powerful that we often need to resort to intensified behaviors to squelch them. These behaviors may include using anger to mask sadness and hurt. We may try soothing feelings away with food, medications, marijuana, alcohol, illegal substances, sex, gambling, pornography, abuse, meanness, judgements, self-righteousness, canceling others, trying to change others, trying to control what we can’t control, and sometimes just giving up and numbing our feelings about things.

I believe we can use Emotional Sensory Perception to improve our lives and the world we live in. Remember, that ESP can help you to change only yourself, not others. That’s super important. You cannot change others; you can try and force them to change and maybe you’ll see change but it often has underlying rage and anger, which is not healthy.

Many researchers identify anger as a secondary emotion and I have seen that to be true in my work with my clients. A secondary emotion means that there is actually another feeling underneath the anger. Anger is so much easier to feel than sadness, hurt, betrayal, powerlessness, doubt, confusion, envy, disillusionment, despair, fear, loss, and rejection. When you are angry, ask yourself what else you are feeling. No one wants to feel negative emotions. We don’t like to feel uncomfortable, and sadness, hurt, and rejection feel horrible so we’d rather avoid them. The problem is, if we avoid negative emotions or use substances to push them down, they don’t go away. They are there, stored under the surface and they boil up at the most inconvenient times. We wonder why we suddenly get triggered, why we can become so enraged about the careless driver, the person who ignored us, the boss who forgot to thank us, the teacher who gave a pop quiz, the sibling who forgot our birthday, the spouse who left a mess in the kitchen, or the friend who didn’t text us back. I believe that when we stuff feelings on a regular basis our emotions come out in ways that can be out of proportion to the situation.

Ok so how can we use the 4 Steps of Emotional Sensory Perception, or ESP, to help ourselves? To review, the steps are

1. Identify how you are feeling.

2. Validate how you are feeling.

3. Sit with the feeling.

4. Then choose how you want to act.

So, for example, today I noticed I was feeling very annoyed and I wasn’t sure why. I would call it feeling out of sorts. My mom used to say I “got up on the wrong side of the bed”. My first reaction to feeling annoyed is to want the feeling to go away, to disappear and leave me alone. The quickest way for me to do that is to eat something. Something yummy and soothing that’s high in fat, such as chocolate. In fact, chocolate must be present in the house at all times for just such emergencies. So, 3 chocolate truffles later, I am back doing what needs to be done and all is well. Except that now I feel an uneasiness in my gut. I get acid reflux; there’s a sense of churning. My body knows that I’m still annoyed and is telling me, Hey fix this!” So, I take an antacid and I am back doing what needs to be done and all is well. Except that now the uneasiness bubbles up again so I need more chocolate and more antacid.

So how about I try using ESP? Ok step one. I am feeling annoyed. What is annoyed? Um, anger, frustration? Ok what’s underneath those? Ugh, do I have to do this? Eating chocolate would be so much more fun. No, I’m going to stick with step one. Ok, actually I’m feeling sad and confused. Why? Well, a friend can’t go with me to an event I really wanted to attend and I don’t want to go by myself.

Usually, my friend wants to go to that event but it turns out my friend is going somewhere with one of their friends. Well, they could have invited me. Yuck, I feel hurt. I feel rejected. I feel confused. I feel left out. I feel unimportant.

Ok ready for step 2. Validate how I’m feeling. Hmm, well ok I feel left out. I’m not going to rationalize and say I shouldn’t feel this way. I need to feel loved, accepted, included, and cared about and it hurts when I don’t.

Hmm. Step 3. Sit with these feelings. I want chocolate and potato chips now!! Breathe Mary. Stay with the feeling. Ride the wave of feeling sad and left out. Feel your need to be loved. Wow, the wave came back down. I feel less uneasy. No wait I feel hurt. Ok riding the wave again. Oh, it came back down. I understand my feelings. These feelings won’t harm me. They’re just feelings and they tell me what I need.

Groovy. Let’s do Step 4. What do I want to do about this? I have a bunch of options. I could send my friend an angry text but I don’t feel angry at my friend anymore; I know this is about me and that is ok. I could go to the event by myself. I could find another friend to go with. I could eat chocolate but, gosh I’m not craving it like I did a few minutes ago. I could find something else to do. I could go for a walk, journal, read, sew, work on a fun project, breathe, meditate, cook something healthy, or listen to a comedy skit. Wow, I could soothe myself in so many healthy ways. I could also identify that I’ve been feeling left out and unloved, and that this current situation caused all the times I’ve felt that way in my life to bubble up, and then my feelings were able to get way out of proportion to the situation. Ok what can I do about that? Well I could restart the 4 steps again. I might realize I’ve been avoiding social situations since COVID and not meeting as many people and telling myself I should not burden others by asking them to support me and be there for me. Instead, I can choose to have more interactions with kind people and find ways to show love and kindness to myself?

One of the other problems with stuffing negative emotions is that we stuff all emotions, including the good ones. We learn not to feel too deeply. We stop feeling happiness, joy, optimism, hope, freedom, awe, and amazement. We struggle to have fun, to be silly, to be childlike, to explore, to dream, and to smile.

If we don’t stuff our negative emotions, we dwell on them. As humans, we have evolved to savor and remember negative events. That’s helped us survive as a species. If we were just strolling through the grasslands, smelling the flowers, we’d have been lunch for a lion. We have to work at savoring the good things in our lives because it’s not natural for all of us. We tend to savor the bad events. I can retell in detail all of the bad things that have happened in my life but struggle to recall the amazing moments I had for example, when I traveled to Ireland.

You can use ESP with positive emotions too. Try this the next time you go for a walk. The first step is to identify your feelings. Look around and use your 5 senses to really be present with what you are experiencing on your walk. Oh, I am beginning to feel happy, I feel free, I’m in awe at how beautiful it is around me.

Step 2. Validate how you are feeling. Remember that you have felt joy at other times when you’ve been out in nature, looking around at the scenery.

Step 3. Stay with the feelings. Breathe. Resist the urge to grab your phone or worry about your to-do list. See, smell, touch, and hear the world around you. Savor what you are feeling.

Step 4. How do you want to act? Hmm, I think I’ll walk another quarter mile. I want to go over to that bed of flowers and really look at them. I am going to whistle back at the cardinals. I’m going to imagine flying like that flock of geese. I think I’ll take a walk every day. Wow, I didn’t think about or crave chocolate for a whole 30 minutes!

Let’s start a national ESP movement. Emotional Sensory Perception! Encourage other to try it. Practice it daily. Have fun with it! Next time, we’ll explore other ways in which we could use ESP to help manage stressful situations, such as in the workplace.