What a rollercoaster of emotions I have experienced in the last week. The very tragic passing of Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes raised absolute sadness at the loss of a fine young man. I had never met Hughes, yet I felt so deeply sad, touched and moved by his death. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, I shed tears of pride and joy watching my step-daughter represent her state in Athletics. I also felt frustrated at my son for ignoring my advice to not play a social indoor soccer game one week before he also runs for his state in Athletics; only to pull his groin. I’ve felt deep love for my amazing husband while just observing his genuine and consistent kindness and care for others. I’ve regularly felt overwhelmingly grateful for the amazing life that I have and all that I get to see and do.

This got me reflecting on the huge range of emotions there are and the importance of allowing yourself to be present with all of them – the good, the bad and the ugly. If you want to fully experience positive emotions, it’s not possible to avoid feeling the negative ones. To be able to fully feel and experience joy, love and excitement; one also needs to be able to feel angry, sad and anxious.

None of us like to feel sad; it’s easy to prefer to push it away, distract yourself with work, or use more harmful escapes such as drugs and alcohol. However, sadness is a very normal emotion and avoiding it denies us the ability to fully experience all the range of emotions. There is a way to feel and experience emotion without being afraid of them. Rather than judging your response to an emotion, such as sadness - “I’m weak because I cry” or “I’m a failure” – try simply sit alongside the emotion and not judge it or avoid it or try to fix it – just sit with it, acknowledge it and let it be. It will pass, in the same way laughter and joy don’t last. It’s another emotion to experience and not avoid.

The same applies to positive emotions, such as joy, pleasure, excitement and pride. These also pass so if we can be very present with them, it ripens the experience. This is about being mindful and present in the current moment so that you get to fully experience your emotions.

Sitting with the sadness I have felt in the past few days since the passing of Phillip Hughes has left me feeling quite drained and tired – sadness can be a draining emotion. Yet I felt a sense of purpose from experiencing the feeling. It heightened the appreciation of my own children, and it reminded me to live each day to its fullest.

Fully embracing the excitement and joy in watching my step-daughter run a personal best time at Nationals allowed me to share her experience in a really meaningful way, connecting us even closer together.

When we try to avoid, squash, hide or mask any negative emotion, we only serve to give it more power and importance in our minds.

I encourage you to embrace all of your emotions. It helps to learn a much wider vocabulary for your emotions so that you can express and understand what you are feeling. For example are you happy or is it more like pleased, excited, joyful, amused or delighted? Are you sad or is it more lonely, hopeless, hurt, discouraged or disappointed? Feel it, name it, sit with it (no judgments) and it will pass.

What emotions have you experienced lately? Please share your stories here too, I’d love to hear them.

Did you know that we have a natural bias to notice what’s wrong? We also tend to magnify or ‘catastrophise’ what has gone wrong and make it seem even worse in our heads than it really is. The more we notice the bad and the more we magnify what is wrong, it can lead to feeling flat, depressed or hopeless.
The great news is that there is a free, simple and effective technique you can use to shift your perspective to one that is much more helpful. It is a tool to help anyone learn more optimistic thinking. It was developed by Dr Martin Seligman, who built on the original work by psychologist Albert Ellis. It’s called the ABCDE technique, and I have found it to be very useful for shifting unhelpful and often unrealistic perceptions about bad events.

Here’s how it works:
A = Adversity
This is an adverse event that has happened to you – big or small. Let’s use an example: say you were walking along the street and someone from your child’s school walks past you. You see them and smile and they ignore you completely and keep walking. That’s your adversity - you’ve just been snubbed.

B = Belief
This is the very first thought and belief that immediately pops into your head after the adversity has occurred. Continuing with the example above: after being ignored by this person your very first thought might be wondering why they don’t like you and why you’re not good enough for them to even acknowledge you. You’ve tried hard to be friendly yet they obviously don’t like you anyway (that’s the automatic belief kicking in…… I’m not good enough).

C = Consequences
This is the physical and emotional consequences that automatically follow the belief/thought that you just had about the adversity. In our example this could be that you then feel a bit sad, unworthy and flat. Your blood pressure may have gone up a little and you may want to withdraw from other interactions for fear of being ignored again.

D = Disputation
Here is where the real power lies to create a much more helpful perspective. To explain how to use the ‘D’, we need to go back to A and B. Obviously there is nothing that we can do to control the adversity, bad things will happen to us. We also don’t control the very first belief/thought that pops into our head. Here’s the golden moment – immediately following the very first thought, we then have a choice as to the next thought and action we take. The moment that it’s come into the conscious realm is the moment we become empowered to choose the next thing that happens. We do that using disputation; we dispute with ourselves the first belief that we had – Is it absolutely true what I thought? Could there be any other reason for the adversity, other than my first interpretation of it? Let’s go back to the example to demonstrate ‘disputation’ - the person ignores our smile, we believe they don’t like us and we’re not good enough to acknowledge – before we allow that thought to continue its dark pathway, we immediately dispute the thought. We could say to ourselves, why else might they have ignored me? Perhaps they genuinely didn’t see me. How do I know that they didn’t just receive some bad news and were anxious and focussed on that? These are the types of questions we could ask ourselves. Do you get the idea here? 

You help yourself to see that it was your own interpretation of what you saw and everything is an assumption on your part. Your assumption might be right but it might not. Rigidly believing the worst case serves you no good purpose, other than to feel bad. By challenging your negative interpretation with something more realistic it can immediately reduce the flow-on consequences of your beliefs. Rather than being left feeling sad and wounded because you felt ignored, you are more likely to get on with the day feeling okay.

E = Energisation
This last piece is about celebrating (acknowledging) that you used the disputation intervention and now you still feel emotionally intact. When we pause and acknowledge our successes we are more likely to repeat them. The more often that you repeat this process, the more you will automatically do it, sparing yourself a downwards mood shift.

You can use this tool over and over, every day for all your negative assumptions, big or small. Every time you catch yourself assuming the worst in any situation, immediately step in to dispute the assumption and come up with other reasons it may have happened.  

One last example, when a car pulled out in front of me this morning, my very first thought was that the driver was arrogant and pushy and I started to feel angry and frustrated at them. As soon as I noticed this judgement and response on my part, I looked for reasons as to why else they may have pulled out. I wondered if they had a sick child lying in the back of the car that they were rushing to hospital……not very likely, I thought, but it still threw that little shadow of doubt over my first assumption. Maybe they simply didn’t see me, I know I’ve accidently pulled out in front of someone and I felt terrible for doing it. Maybe they feel terrible now too? My thoughts went on.......even if they are arrogant, so what?! At the end of the day, I’m about 5 metres further back than I was and I didn’t hit them, what does it really matter anyway?? As I did this disputing in my head I felt my anger subside and even my compassion build for this person. So it worked, my mood was still the same and I didn’t waste unnecessary negative energy on something that wasn’t in my control.

I encourage you to try this technique a few times. Like anything new, it takes a bit of practice. I can tell you from my own personal experience, and from what my clients report back to me, that this can be a very empowering and liberating tool to have in your armoury! Good luck.