Welcome to Running to Myself. I’m Trisha Stanton. Life and mindset coach, running coach and host of Running to Myself.
16 years ago I ran my first marathon. The process of training for that first race changed my life. This podcast is my opportunity to share some of the lessons I have learned through the many ups and downs of life during my almost 2 decades of running and learning more about who I am. It is my hope that through my stories maybe you will see a bit of yourself as well and find a nugget of truth and inspiration to take with you. Let’s get started.
A few weeks ago I was out for a run and I tripped and fell. I fell hard. This is not all that unusual for me. Occasionally I take my eyes and mind off the trail in front of me and falling is the inevitable result. There was less blood involved this time than there sometimes is, but it had been quite awhile since I had taken a fall that I couldn’t catch myself from before hitting the ground and the impact really took me by surprise. I knew immediately that I wasn’t “emergency room” injured, but man did it hurt! And my very first thought was, “I need to go home!”
Now, I have never ended a run due to a fall, but this is always, without fail, my first thought. This probably says something about home being my safe place, because in that moment, when I want to escape the pain, home is what I think of. I even let myself wallow for a moment and consider calling my husband, Dave, to drive to the trailhead and pick me up. I have never done this either, but my brain does go there every time.
Instead of acting on those first reaction thoughts of escape, I picked myself up off the ground, looked to see how much blood was involved (not much), picked the gravel out of the scraps on my palms and arm and started pulling the leaves off myself. I was covered in leaves.
As I turned to look back, I saw the reason for my fall. Beneath the leaves, somewhat camouflaged, was a root sticking up just enough for my foot to slide in under it and get caught, causing my sudden and very unpleasant landing. I have fallen in places most people don’t fall, for reasons most people don’t fall, and running isn’t always the catalyst. Some of my worst falls have been while walking, but this well camouflaged deathtrap could have taken anyone one out. I let myself take some comfort in that for a moment. As I continued to pull the leaves off of my body, I started carefully walking down the trail. This is how I convinced myself that going home isn’t necessary. I made a deal with myself that if I still want to go home after a few minutes, I can, but for now let’s just walk to relieve the stiffness from the impact of the fall. Within a couple of minutes I was running again and was able to complete my run. It’s funny how my first instinct upon feeling the pain of impact is to go home. It’s as if my brain thinks that going home means getting away from the pain.
Since my fall, I’ve been thinking about that reaction. Often my first response to nonphysical pain is similar. I want to get away from the pain as quickly as possible. I want to withdraw from the situation, to go inward. But that might not be the best response. To be clear, I’m not referring to pain from situations or relationships that are unhealthy and need to be ended. I’m not talking about situations that you would be better off and healthier disconnecting from and eliminating from your life.
I’m talking about the regular, hard hitting pain that comes from being a human on this Earth.
Such as…
A complicated relationship with a loved one
The adjustment that comes as our children grow up and have lives of their own and make their own decisions that we might see will have hard consequences for them down the road
Watching a loved one make choices you cannot save them from,
a diagnosis no one wants and all the pain that follows,
an unexpected job loss
a financial blow
An unplanned move
A relationship that ends even though you wish it hadn’t. This doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship. I have heard it said more than once by women in midlife that their most painful loss of a relationship was not a romantic one, but the loss of a female friendship.
You get the idea. What I’m talking about is all the hard and complicated pain that comes along with regular life. Not one of us gets to bypass it. But what we choose to do in those situations determines how much pain we experience and to some degree for how long.
After my recent physical fall, the best way to work through the pain and make sure that I was just in pain and not injured was to walk through it to work out the stiffness and assess the situation. This led me to see that I was okay and could go ahead as planned. I didn’t need to give up my run and doing so would not have made the pain go away anyway.
Often the same is true in painful life situations. The shortest and healthiest way through the pain is to process it, not to hide from it.
You may be thinking, that’s great, but how do I do that? How do I process my pain in a healthy way? You’re in luck because that is exactly what we are going to be talking about today.
First, you need to recognize and acknowledge your pain. This may sound obvious, but if you aren’t in the habit of processing your emotions and are more likely to stuff them down and ignore them, pain will often show up as something else like anger. Many of us find it easier to feel anger than pain. Anger might feel less vulnerable, but that’s a sneaky way for your brain to avoid facing the pain. And it can be easy to get stuck in a cycle of anger as a way to protect yourself from some of the more vulnerable emotions that are there. To begin to process this emotion, you need to acknowledge it. This can be as simple as, saying to yourself, this situation is painful. I really don’t like it and I wish I was not facing this right now. Is your pain from sadness? Maybe the pain comes from shame? Maybe you are experiencing fear?
Next, it is time to identify exactly what is causing the pain. At first, this might take some digging to get down to what is really going on for you. You will have a story about your situation. Part of your story will be based in the facts of what is happening. The other part will be what you are making that mean to you. You will need to separate out the facts of what happened from your story about the facts.
You are going to have both. Facts are neutral, your story about them is not. Learning to identify and separate the two is one of the most powerful tools of personal development that exists. This is where so many breakthroughs in the coaching process come from.
It’s so easy to get lost in our story, but that almost always leads to additional pain. This is often what leads people to seek coaching in the beginning. They feel stuck and can’t seem to get themselves unstuck and moving again.
Back to differentiating between the facts and your story about them. How can you know the difference?
To begin with, facts can be proven. Stories are opinions, no matter how true they seem, no matter how much you believe yours. Two different people can have very different versions of a story. Getting stuck in your story, as many so often do, will keep you in pain longer. The more quickly you can sift through and separate the story from the facts, the better you are able to process your pain without adding additional layers of pain on top of it. People who aren’t in the habit of processing their emotions, tend to feel like they need to give themselves a lot of reasons to justify why they feel the way they do before they let themselves face the emotion. Without knowing it, they believe they have to have a really big story about their pain to justify it. This tends to get very messy. This is also where the additional layers of pain that are unuseful get added in. You don’t need the extra layers of the big story to justify your pain. It is enough to say, this situation (just the facts of it) hurts. Or makes me sad, or I feel shame about this, whatever specific name you may have for the pain. You don’t have to justify that it is there. Just accept that it is without judgement.
When you get to the place where you can openly accept your pain without layering additional stories onto it to justify it and without judging yourself for it , you have opened the door to being able to process your emotions. You can now work through your pain and release it.
Notice where you feel it in your body. Does your chest feel tight? Does it feel like there is a weight on your chest? Does it feel like there is a rock in your stomach? Does your body feel weighed down, like you are trying to walk through thick, sticky mud? Does your body feel unusually heavy and slow? Does the pain make you feel unusually physically tired like you need to sleep right now? There are many different ways that emotional pain will show up physically. Identifying where you feel the emotion in your body will help you decide what to do next. I’m going to share a few things that work for me. You don’t need to do what I do, you can use my ideas to come up with your own.
We all know that sometimes a good cry is exactly what we need to release the emotion from the body. If you need to cry it out, go right ahead. I love to think of those tears as washing away the negative and making room for getting back to a positive and hopeful mindset.
When the emotion is showing up as nervous, unsettled energy, it helps me to work through it by doing simple tasks around the house that give an immediate result like laundry, dishes, tidying up around the house, completing a small organizational project. Nothing too mentally demanding, just enough physical movement to work through the fluttery, nervous energy that is present. You may find it surprising (I do) that running is NOT a way I work through really hard emotions. I actually find it very difficult to run when I am processing big emotions. During that time, my runs turn into very slow walks. This used to really bother me. Now I just accept that it won’t last forever and I don’t make myself wrong for it.
Sometimes it really helps to just verbalize the emotion I am feeling to myself. The key here is to fix the attention on the emotion, not the story causing more of the emotion. I just remind myself this is what sadness (or whatever the painful emotion is) feels like in my body right now. It’s painful, but it won’t last forever. You would be surprised by how calming this can be. I don’t need any additional story to support the feeling. I name it, acknowledge that it is there right now and let myself feel it. You might be wondering, won’t this cause me to get stuck in the painful emotion? I used to think this as well, but allowing ourselves to feel the emotion so that we can process it is not what gets us stuck. It’s our STORY about what is causing the emotion that keeps us stuck. If you notice yourself retelling your story over and over with lots of emotion each time, you are likely stuck on your STORY rather than processing your emotions. When you do this, the story reinforces the emotion and you find yourself stuck spinning around in the middle of it rather than working through it.
When I am actively processing an emotion my statements to myself describing what is happening are pretty factual and neutral. It might sound something like: I feel sad because ____ happened and I think that means ______. I feel this sadness in my chest. It’s okay for it to be there. It won’t last forever. This is what sadness feels like for me right now. I’m going to be okay.
The sadness doesn’t automatically disappear, but acknowledging, identifying where I feel it in my body and reminding myself that it won’t be there forever allows me to process that emotion without adding additional pain to it.
I have learned that giving myself a time limit can be very helpful as well if I’m concerned about getting stuck. 24 hours is my time limit for most big emotions that feel overwhelming or threaten to derail regular life. It is rare that I need a full 24 hours to get back to regular life, but I have found that telling myself I have a full 24 hours has helped me process some really uncomfortable emotions. Again, this is my personal timeline, yours might be different. I think that part of what makes these ideas effective is being intentional about processing emotions rather than thinking it just happens naturally and then finding yourself stuck in a miserable, painful story six months later that has taken on a life of its own all because you didn’t know how to be intentional about processing your emotions.
Let’s review quickly before we wrap up for today. What I want for you to walk away with today is the courage to face your painful emotions and the tools to work through them rather than getting stuck IN them.
Here are your actionable steps:
First, you need to recognize and acknowledge your pain.
Second, name the emotion.
Third, identify what is causing the pain.
Fourth, separate the facts from your story about the facts. DO NOT let yourself off the hook from this step. Your STORY has the power to keep you stuck if you let it!
Fifth, notice where in your body you are feeling the emotion and identify if there is anything physical (crying, exercise, a nap, gentle movement, a walk) that would help you work through this part.
Finally, allow the painful emotion to exist on its own, recognizing that it will not be there in this exact form forever. The key to this last step is to keep your STORY about it out of the picture. Only facts are accepted here.
If you have never done this, it can feel like a lot at first. Developing your ability to process your emotions is a powerful tool in your personal development journey. If you would like help in developing this super power for yourself, message me and we can set up a consultation for you.
That’s all I have for you today, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Running to Myself. You can find previous episodes on apple podcasts and spotify or on my website www.trishastanton.com. New episodes are released each Monday. You can subscribe on Apple or Spotify to automatically receive each new episode as it comes out.
If you know someone who you think would enjoy this podcast, please share it with them! I will be back next week to share a little more about my journey on the road to discovering my truest self.
In the meantime, if you want to know more about my coaching program or have questions about one-on-one coaching or life coaching in general, please visit my website at www.trishastanton.com or my Facebook Group The Simple Truth Coaching. I would love to hear from you!
Have a great week and remember, Mindset Matters!
