You are not your thoughts + feelings

In all my years of trying to heal my nervous system, I think the most powerful shift was learning how to separate myself from my thoughts and feelings.

And this can feel impossible at first. We feel like we ARE our thoughts and feelings. When I have thoughts of, “What if I’m dying?” “What if our house burns down?” “I don’t think they really like me.” “I think I’m just annoying them." “I’m such a failure.” That all feels like me. Even if I know it’s irrational. Even if I don’t fully agree with what I’m thinking, it still feels like me.

But the reality is that your thoughts and feelings are not YOU. The thoughts and feelings that we have are most often reactions of the subconscious. They are often stories we developed at some point to help us to make sense of the world and our place in it. 

Your thoughts are learned responses to stimuli. 

When you’re stuck in a dysregulated state, you often feel like your body is your enemy. You can’t control your reactions. You want to feel better and be calm but you instead feel completely out of control.

You start to judge yourself as wrong. Your thoughts are wrong, your feelings are wrong, your reactions are wrong.

This is most often because you understand logically that your thoughts, feelings, and reactions aren’t always appropriate, but you still can’t control them.

And the reason why learning to separate yourself from your thoughts and emotions is so important, is because as long as you’re judging your thoughts and feelings as wrong OR you’re just letting them take over and run wild; then you never feel safe. 

What do I mean by safe?

Your nervous system is constantly on the alert for threats to your safety. It’s a smoke detector but instead of detecting smoke, it’s detecting threats. 

If you are struggling with anxious thoughts and you’re letting those thoughts and emotions to run freely in your mind, your nervous system pings those things as a threat. 

Your nervous system doesn’t know that your thoughts aren’t real. Your nervous system cannot reason. All it can do is react to your reactions. It’s the same reason your heart will race and your palms get sweaty when watching a scary movie. Your nervous system doesn’t know that what you’re watching isn’t real, it’s just reacting to your reactions. 

If we cling to every thought and feeling that stem from a place of fear, then our nervous system is going to respond by putting us into our protect mode: Fight/Flight/Freeze. 

This is one of the ways we can get stuck. And the way to get unstuck is by understanding that your thoughts and feelings are not YOU. 

Think of it this way: Your arm starts to hurt but you’re not sure why. That pain is very real. But the pain is not you, it’s just information. And if you read my blog last week, then you know that pain is also based on perception. So the more you focus on the pain, it could actually increase, or even decrease depending on what nervous system state you were in. 

Our thoughts and feelings are the same. They’re just information. They are not reality, they are not always truth. They’re not even right or wrong. It’s just information that you can choose to do something with or not. 

But I recognize that it is a very difficult to differentiate. 

There is a self coaching model that I use personally and with the women I mentor in my business group that is just called The Model. It was created by Master Certified Coach Brooke Castillo, and she actually created it to coach herself. It helps you to separate your thoughts and your feelings from your circumstances. 

Before you can recognize that your thoughts and feelings are not you, you need to be able to see them as something separate from reality. We often confuse our perception of things with what’s real. 

For instance: Say you run into an old friend at the grocery store. They seem awkward and like they couldn’t get away from you fast enough. You were hurt and starting thinking that you must have done something to upset them, but you can’t figure out what it was. 

Your reality at that moment is that your friend is mad at you. That feels like a fact. 

But is that really the reality? Could you prove in court that your friend was mad at you? Did she say directly that she was mad at you? Did she say that she was upset? Or could it have been something else entirely? Could she have had something else on her mind and was just distracted?

The circumstance was that you ran into your friend at the grocery store. You could prove that in court. You could get video of the two of you talking. 

But her being upset and the reason why is just a thought. It was your subconscious trying to make sense of the interaction.

This is what this model teaches you to do. By separating out what is truly fact from our thoughts and feelings about it, it helps you to be able to separate yourself from those thoughts and feelings. 

You can read more about The Model below and even download a guide for free that walks you through how to do it. 

Let me know if you try it! It’s definitely been a helpful tool for me!