How To Process Back to School Emotions [episode 101]

Kelsey  0:00

You are listening to episode number 101 of wife, teacher, mommy the podcast, how to process back to school emotions. Whether you’re feeling anxious dread, excitement, nervousness or anything else. Today I’m going to share how you can move through any emotion productively as you embark on this new school year.

Welcome to wife, teacher mommy the podcast. I’m Kelsey Sorenson, a former elementary teacher and current homeschool mom. And even though I’ve been a resource creator since 2014, I’ve realized that printables alone aren’t all you need in order to thrive as a teacher or homeschool parent. That’s why I also created this show and got certified as a life coach to help you finally kick burnout to the curb and feel competent with whatever challenges come your way. But the right mindset strategies and new teaching inspiration, you’re going to be well on your way to your best teacher life. Now, let’s go.

Hello, my friend, whether you’ve been here on the podcast before, or this is your first time here, I’m so happy that you have joined me here today. And I have a question for you. How are you feeling today, because that is what we are talking about. And now a lot of times people are like, Oh, this isn’t an important thing to focus on, I need to focus on what’s going on, I have too much to do to focus on my feelings, and you just move through it. So many of us are stuck in our heads. And we don’t really take the time to feel what’s going on in our bodies like we think we just don’t have time for that. Now, I’m here to bust that myth today and teach you so much about our feelings and how important they truly are. But before I do that, I want to read a quick review that just came in on the podcast because these totally make my day. And I appreciate them so much reviews helped me as a podcaster. To one know that what I’m doing but you’re out there listening and appreciate the work that is going into it. You know, of course they see like people downloading the podcast and listening and everything. But it’s great to get feedback on how it’s resonating with you, or even what episodes are your favorite? What topics do you like to hear about. So I make sure that we do more of what you want to hear. Now this topic we’re doing today is actually because they did a poll in our wife, teacher, mommy Z night Facebook group to find out what topics you wanted to hear about. And this one was the top one by far, so I’m recording it first. So that is another great way to get feedback to be in that Facebook group. But here is that review. And this one came in from you. GDHFF was the username on Apple. So thank you to whoever that is. And what they said is real talk for educators. This is an amazing podcast to remind us that we can do this. The topics are geared towards educators who may need a boost in their day, or reminders of how to balance their teacher and mommy life. And I love this because that is my goal with this show. So thank you so much for leaving that review. And if you’ve been listening to the show for a bit, and you haven’t left a review yet, if you could just take a few moments to do that, because it totally makes my day when I see a new review pop up on Apple podcasts. Now, as far as I know, Apple podcasts is the main platform that will let you leave review Spotify will not but if you’re listening on Apple, please leave a review it would make my day and it helps other listeners to know if it’s the right show for them. So it helps me but it also helps other teachers out there who might be like thinking about pressing play helps them to know what they’re getting. So if you could like write a review, and even if you want to make it like a little more detailed, if you would like and tell them like what it is you like about the show how it helps you which types of episodes are your favorite, that gives me great feedback as well. So again, thank you. Okay, so before I dive into the teaching, I kind of want to share a story and my own experience very recently, actually, the plan this episode last week after it was voted the top one and this isn’t actually just happened beginning of last week. So I went to see Kelly Clarkson in Las Vegas. I love her so much. He’s like one of my favorite singers along with Taylor Swift. When I came back, I was just kind of feeling on that Sunday night and I work one on one with a life coach I and so we get to do Voxer where it’s like a walkie talkie app or I get to just box her about things. And when I was sending her a message, she was just like, okay, kind of tell me what’s going on because I was just telling her I was feeling a lot of dread about coming back to reality. Like, you know, back from the trip. I was like, Oh, it was so great. And I’m just coming back to reality. And how many of you think about this when you even think of going back to school that like, oh great back to reality, like, that’s a thought we’re having, right. And it was a thought I was having, again, I’m a life coach, but I’m also a human with a brain that is serving me all of these thoughts. Now, what she said, and this is what I gave her like a big like, you know, thought download is what we do. And like, usually I write these down, but for her like, because I have her as my coach. And this is what I do with our members of wife, teacher mommy club, to they’re just able to kind of let it all out, just say it all. So I like sent her a few minutes of a message and everything. And the thought that she pulled out was like back to reality. And when she’s embody that, when you were thinking back to reality, you’re thinking back to low vibrations that you forgot to not choose again. And we don’t define our reality. And so I was making that my reality. But before I can even get there and realize this and change my thought about what back to reality was, I was feeling so much dread, because I was just stressed with. And it wasn’t just with my work life, it was also things in my personal life, just things that I was like, I’m just not ready to go back to all this, I’m not ready to feel all these emotions is really what was going on. So what I needed was to really sit down and process those emotions. Now once we process our emotions, and again, this is what I’m getting into. That’s why I’m not explaining all right. Now, once we do this, and we’re able to kind of simmer down, that’s when we can start looking into why we feel this way in the first place. But often, we can’t just be like, Okay, I’m just going to change my thought. Like, it doesn’t always work that way immediately. Sometimes we really need to process that emotion. And the model comes in after we do that. So we’re not just looking at our thoughts and saying Does this service but my favorite place honestly to pay attention to in the model is that feeling line? Because you know, the thoughts are what cause our feelings, but the feelings are where we are experiencing life. That is the part in the model that we’re experiencing. It’s the part that honestly, everything we want in our lives is because of how we think it’s going to make us feel like every single part of it. So when we think about it that way, it’s like, oh, like, what if I could feel that way right now. So that really is my favorite place to pay attention the model, because the actions and results in our lives take care of themselves. When we look at that feeling, analyze what’s going on process that feeling? And then question, okay, why was I feeling this way in the first place. And that’s when we can kind of get into the thought work. And we talk a lot about the thought work on the podcast. Today, we’re going to talk a lot about the feeling work. So let’s start kind of with feelings one on one. So what are our feelings? Now I’m going to differentiate between two types. So there are emotions. And I am going to use emotions and feelings interchangeably. And I talked a little bit about this on a call with my members recently with wife, teacher, mommy club members, we did a full call on processing or back to school motions, we went much more depth on that call than we’re able to do on the podcast today. So if you’re a member, be sure to also check out that replay. But we’re going to differentiate between emotions and feelings. Again, I use those interchangeably and the sensations. So an emotion or a feeling is a vibration in your body that is caused by a thought on your mind. So it starts in our mind and makes its way into our body. So we think something like back to reality, for example, we start to feel dread, it started in our brain with our thoughts. And then our brain sent the signals to our body to feel this way. Now a sensation works the opposite way. It is a feeling in our body that is involuntary, like natural processes that start in the body and travelled to the mind such as you know, when you’re sick, like it’s not our thoughts that are making us like have the flu or something, right? I mean, it might lead us to like, not take as good care of ourselves. Like there are ways that like, you know, our mental does impact our bodies and our health. But in general, it is a feeling in our body that works its way up to our head. And then we realize the sensation. Another example is hunger when we’re feeling hunger because we haven’t had enough food that is starting in our body and going up to our mind. The interesting thing is we can create hunger with our mind though, like have you noticed that sometimes when you’re feeling anxious or dread, all of a sudden you feel hungry when you might not need to. So again, it’s kind of like, is this emotional hunger? Or is this like physical sensation of hunger because I haven’t eaten all day or something. So hunger can be a sensation, also hot or cold. Those are sensations, it’s the temperature around us, our body feels it and then it comes out to our mind like Oh, I’m cold, I’m hot. fullness, like oh, I ate a lot of food, you’re feeling really full that again is in your body moves its way up to your head. So that should make sense to all of you there. Okay, so that is the difference between our emotions and sensations in our body, our feelings and our sensations. Now, a lot of times we think our feelings if it’s caused by like, by definition, like I said, it is a vibration in your body caused by a thought in your mind. So you might think, Oh, well, if I’m so powerful. If my mind is so powerful, then why can’t I just think my way into feeling good feelings all the time. And a lot of us think that that is what the model is for like the Wii, this self coaching model that I’ve taught on the podcasts that your thoughts create your feelings is that big part of it? We think that once we learned that we should just feel good all the time. Now. I really don’t think that’s true, like Honestly, Life is 5050. And we are supposed to feel the full spectrum of human emotions. The model is just an awareness tool that helps us realize why certain things are happening. Like, we tend to think we should have it better than we do. Right now we have this idealized version of our future, like, I’ll be happy when fill in the blank. But the reality is, it’s not better here than there. That’s just you know how it works, right? There’s so much freedom and accepting that our emotions will always be 5050. Like, we’re not going to get to this magical point where we no longer feel negative emotion, we’re always going to feel that, I would say, again, half the time, and it’s supposed to be that way. So what we’re doing today is we’re not judging our emotions, we’re embracing them, we’re just learning how to better handle them as they come up, because they will. So we need to feel all of the emotions, a lot of what we actually want to get in our life, like if we want to, you know, teach requires feeling that full spectrum of human emotion. And we want to because, you know, there are times where we want to feel sad, like if a student is going through a really hard thing in their home, we want to feel sad about that, because we care about them. Again, like we could argue that we could use thought work to get out of these feelings. Reality is if you want to change all your thoughts before taking action, you’ll be waiting a long time, because our brains are wired to protect us. So it thinks that a lot of these situations that come up, we don’t want to deal with those, our brain is wired to protect us. So a lot of times we are going to automatically think thoughts that make us feel anxious, or dread and everything. So we just remind ourselves, of course, my brain is telling me this and willing to experience that feel that and move forward. But that is not what we always do. A lot of times, we might think we’re feeling our emotions, but what we’re doing is something else. So what I’m going to do right now is break down the different things that we do with our emotions. So the first thing that we tend to do, we tend to do one of these three things rather than allowing or processing our motion. So I want to tell you each of these three things, and when I do, I want you to think about which one you think you might do the most. Okay, so the first one that a lot of us do is resist our emotions. Now, when we resist our emotions, many of us think we are feeling them when we are resisting, because we feel it in our bodies. Like when you’re resisting an emotion, you feel it, you’re feeling that emotion. But the key that makes it different between it being resisting the emotion and processing the motion is that we when you resist it, there’s no relief. So resisting is the difference between opening the door to an emotion and you know, allowing it feeling it through your body processing it, or trying to hold it shut, like Oh, I’m feeling so anxious, and you’re just kind of pushing up against that. And anxiety is building up causing more tension or whatever feeling is anxiety, Dread, frustration, sadness, excitement, whatever it is, you’re resisting that emotion, it kind of compounds feels like there’s this pressure of the emotion, that is when you’re resisting, the next thing we tend to do is react to our emotions, we might yell, scream, have a meltdown, have a very physical reaction, but you might not be actually processing it. Like sometimes you might cry when you’re processing an emotion. But also, if you’re just like, you know, having this major meltdown, or you’re yelling at your spouse, or your punch bag, or whatever it is that you’re doing just reacting to it, you might not actually be processing that emotion. Because when you’re processing, nothing physical is required. And we’ll go into that. So reacting is we’re just kind of, you know, instead of like allowing it, we are having this outward reaction to it. Okay, next, let’s talk about avoiding. And we also call this buffering. So this is when we do things to avoid feeling negative emotion, anything that you’re doing, whether it’s overeating, over drinking, overworking, scrolling our devices mindlessly these are really common ways that we avoid or Buffer away our emotions. Like I feel like my big one is scrolling my phone is the big one for me, also sometimes go into the pantry when it’s like, oh, I’m stressed, I just need like sugar fix or whatever, which is something I’m working on now that I’m like, trying to not eat sugar, right. But a lot of these things that we do, we’re doing them because we want that dopamine hit. We want to avoid feeling that negative emotion. We’re trying to do anything to avoid that. And it doesn’t have to be one of these things. In fact buffering is anything that we’re doing to avoid negative emotion. It could even feel productive like maybe you are working out to avoid that negative emotion. Maybe you are cleaning to avoid that negative emotion and just trying to do anything to get your mind off it. Try to distract yourself. Anything you’re doing to try to avoid feeling the negative emotion is buffering. I’m interrupting this episode for just a moment to share an experience from one of our newest incredible members of wife, teacher mommy club. Her name is Ashley and I just love having her as a member of the club. Here’s what she’s had to say so far.

Speaker 2  14:40

I joined wife teacher mommy cub, because there are just so many resources available to club members, classroom resources and the personal side with the coaching. That was a huge resource that I did not have prior to joining the club. And it’s been really great getting an outside perspective on problems. certain issues that I might be facing and it really helps me to see them from another perspective for me wife, teacher, mommy Club offers more than just the resources. It has that coaching component and it has the Facebook group and community component. It also has, you know, that professional development component that educate, rejuvenate series. And all those things together, I think helped me in my job as a teacher, it’s not just a one off thing, all of that together really helps make the whole package I want all of the things and wife teacher mommy gives that to me.

Kelsey  15:37

To learn more about wife, teacher, mommy club, go to wife, teacher mommy.com/club To request an invite for the next time that we open the doors, I hope to see you inside the club soon. Okay, now the final thing we do with our emotions, and again, those three are the three that we tend to do that or the less productive with our emotions. So think about it. Think about which one do you usually see yourself doing? Do you see yourself doing all three most of us do all three at times. Now the final one is to allow and process our emotions. This is when we allow ourselves to feel and completely lean into the emotion. We’re like, Okay, I am feeling anxiety right now. Generally, you stop what you are doing to allow yourselves to feel this emotion and lean into it. You observe it with compassion, like I am feeling anxiety right? Now, you might need to take a moment and you might not have a lot of time. Maybe you take two minutes to feel the dread to feel the anxiety to feel the nervousness, like oh, wow, yeah, I’m feeling this right now. And kind of do a body scan. Here’s some questions you can ask yourself, but But start with a body scan, you can kind of go through your body and think through where are you feeling this emotion in your body? And then here are some questions you can ask yourself as you’re doing that. What are you feeling now? Where is this feeling in your body? What color? Is this feeling? Is it feeling hard or soft? Is it feeling fast or slow? And how does this feeling make you want to react? And again, we’re kind of thinking about how it might make you want to react. But again, we’re processing and we’re like, oh, this is what is going on. And then you can do that you can kind of take those few moments to process it. And then you can even be like, Hey, okay, I feel you I see you dread, I can feel you simmering down can still kind of feel you there, I’m going to take you with me today, we’re just gonna feel some anxiety. And that’s okay. And you’re just allowing that emotion. Now, if you are in wife, teacher, mommy club, I just did a call with all of our members. And I shared everything I shared here in that session. But also in that we got to go even deeper together. I had some additional questions, we did the exercise all together, we processed our motions, and lots of insights they don’t have time to get into today on the podcast. But if you are a member, I recommend watching to it or listening to it on the members only private podcast. Now part of what we did on that call was diving into the nuances of different emotions. We talked about that and realize well all together that like you know, what’s the difference between like feeling crabby and feeling cranky? Like, what’s the difference between that or what’s the difference between feeling nervous and feeling dread, like kind of talking about the nuances between these things. And we really dove into this book by Brene Brown Atlas of the heart that dives into different places we go, I highly recommend that book. But if you’re in the cloud, definitely check out that replay or listen to on the private podcast. And we have that we’re going to do an upcoming call in September, I’m going to add it to the calendar to dive in more to the nuances between different emotions. Now if you’re not in the club, I would love for you to learn more about it and see if it’s right for you. Maybe you can join us. As I’m recording, we’re in the process of moving things around. So I don’t have a direct link I’m going to share with you right now. But if you just go to the homepage of our website, or the show notes, you’ll get more information about if you can join right now or get on the waitlist or whatever is going on right now. I want to make sure that you have support in some way this school year. The club is an amazing way to get that or even if Now’s not the time subscribing to this podcast to make sure that you tune in each week to help reset. Okay, so I’m gonna recap a little bit about what we just talked about. So first, we talked about the feeling part of the model, our thoughts create our feelings. But the feeling part of the model is where we experience our life and everything we want in our life is because of how we think it wants to make us feel if we can just accept that we can feel that way right now. But we can also feel the full range of human emotions so that it’s always going to be 5050 then we can have some more acceptance of our feelings. We talked about the difference between an emotion and a sensation. So our emotions or feelings are vibrations in our body caused by thought in our mind that traveled to our body. And then a sensation starts in our body and travels to our mind. The next thing we talked about are the different things that we do with our emotions we tend to resist which is when we might think we’re processing the emotional we might think we’re feeling it but instead we are just kind of pushing against it. We’re trying not to feel it. We’re adding additional pressure and the way we know we’re doing that rather than feeling is the emotion might get stronger. Rather than simmering down we might react to our emotions which involves like a physical reaction like yelling, screaming, having a meltdown. I could like watch you and see that you are having a reaction to this emotion might even be like looks on your face are things like that. The other thing we tend to do is avoiding or buffering, which is anything that we do when we are trying to avoid feeling what we consider to that emotion, negative emotion, we’re overeating, over drinking, overworking, scrolling devices, cleaning, working out anything where it’s like, I’m doing this to try to distract myself from this emotion that is buffering. And then the final thing, which is what we’re talking about today is allowing and processing our emotions fully leaning into them, observing them with compassion, allowing ourselves to feel the feeling, asking ourselves questions such as What are you feeling? Now? Where’s this feeling in your body? What color? Is this feeling? Is it hard or soft? Is it fast or slow? How does it make you want to react? Okay, so that is what we talked about today. And what I want you to remember is the most important thing as you head back to school more important than your textbooks, or your supplies or your TPT resources. And yes, I’m saying that as somebody who’s had a TPT store since 2014, are decorating your classroom more important than any of that is your mental and emotional well being one because you matter, you are a whole human being, you are worth it, you are worth everything, there is nobody out there who is another, you, you are unique, you matter, you deserve it. Like if you were looking at your picture of yourself as a little girl, you’re a little boy, whatever you are, if you were to look at a picture of your younger self, you would just say that they matter. Right? You would say that they deserve self care, their mental and emotional health matters. And you’re still that same person, you still matter. So I mean, that is the end all be all reason, honestly. But another reason is because research says that a child’s adjustment is most highly correlated to their mom’s mental health. So if you’re a homeschool mom, then yeah, you are that person. And also, if you’re a teacher, you still have impact on that child, you were there with them so much of the time during the day. So what is the care that teachers and parents put into their mental health? What have you saw that as the most important thing that you bring to the classroom this year, legitimately more important than the lesson plans, like those will come. But the vibes that you bring in with you to the classroom or to your home school, or whatever the vibes that you bring in, are going to impact how you’re able to teach how you’re able to impact them. And honestly, the lesson is that you show a model to them on how their own mental and emotional health because there’s a ripple effect when you do this work. Your students, your kids, your spouse, whoever the energy that you show up with in your life, the higher vibrations, everybody can feel it, and you model it. And once you really know it, you can teach it to and that’s really exciting thing to we’re going to be helping all of you I’m going to do an episode here on the podcast. It’s scheduled for October to help you learn how to teach this to kids as well how to take what you’re learning on this podcast for yourself, I really believe I want you to understand it for yourself, you’d apply it to your own life. But then now that you’ve been listening for, like, you know, over 100 episodes, and for those of you who are in the club, you’ve been getting the coaching as well. I want to share how you can continue that ripple effect make it last even more like it already by doing it yourself it is but how you can teach it as well. So we’re coming up with resources for those of you who are in the club as well that you’ll be able to use to teach the first one already came out Club exclusive. So if you’re a member, be sure to go download that. Okay, but that is it for today. Please head over to the wife teacher mommy unite Facebook group for the weekly discussion thread for the podcast. Right now if you’re listening live right now the plan is to keep this up have a discussion thread in the Facebook group each week to discuss the weekly episode. And we’ll have a giveaway for wife teacher mommy club credit every week. So make sure you were in that free Facebook group where we can discuss and learn and grow together. And stay tuned for next week where we’ll be talking about a requested topic of vision boards and how they can help you set your intentions for the school year and keep them top of mind. This was requested because I made a little mention of them in my educate and rejuvenate session which I did air on the podcast on your teacher winds was one of the things that I mentioned and somebody asked when I presented that live actually show for teachers. They’re like, Do you have a podcast episode about this? And then some people online have asked to and I’m like, you know I don’t I don’t know how I made 100 episodes without that. So that is our next episode next week. And again, we’re back to weekly episodes rather than bi weekly. We are moving to Tuesdays because you all requested Tuesday instead of Fridays. So it’s coming soon. So we’ll talk then make sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.