The Deep Dive takes you out of your thoughts and helps create a healthier relationship with your emotions.
Follow each prompt and write to your heart’s content. Many questions are listed in each prompt; you may choose the one that speaks most to you, or answer them all if they resonate with your experience.
When you write with your hand, you use more brain activity and create more brain connections than by typing. Since it is your brain you are about to rewire, might as well try to make it stick.
- What are you feeling? Where do you feel it? What does it feel like?
This helps you put a name to your emotion, but this is not always easy. Therefore, if you don’t know right away, or are overwhelmed, you can describe it instead.
A lot of people hold stress between their shoulder blades and their spine. Trapezius muscles can be partially contracted a lot of the time. Some people feel stress in their face, around the eyes, or between their eyebrows. Fear can crawl up the arms or revolve right below the naval. Panic can make your chest feel empty, and rage can fill your face and eyes with electric energy.
Describing the feeling, where it is and how you experience it, often precedes giving it a name. Reactions and emotions came eons before words, so why should we be any different? The right way to order these questions is the way that works best for you. - What do you remember?
While writing out the first prompt, something will come to you, like a thought, feeling, idea, word, or memory. If it is distressing, consider writing it out with the CBT worksheet provided in the resources. When you are writing this prompt, include every detail you can remember. Describe each emotion as thoroughly as you can. - When do you remember having this feeling? How old were you? What was happening? What should have happened? Who was there? Who should have been there? What thought did you have?
This is a critical box for recognizing the source of your emotional experience and related behavior, distress, or trauma. Remember you are writing about someone you care about (you). - Does this feeling protect you from anything? Why is it necessary or “true”? How does it change you? Who do you become when you have this feeling? How do you manage it?
This may provide good insight into your codependent coping or control strategies. How do you react when faced with uncertainty, stress, or insult? Are there two of you? Are there more than two? If you are a codependent, you probably have a scared, wounded part of you deep inside. It is young, and it is terrified of being left alone. Contact this part of you, give it your honest compassion, and it can change your life.
- How is your previous experience with this feeling different from today? How is it the same?
What’s the real difference between the memory and now? Were you a child who is now an adult? Were you working at a worse job? How have you changed? How has the world changed?
Today, you are an adult with the ability to take charge of your own life. If you don’t think so, contact me and I will prove you wrong. - Who are you without this feeling? How would you see the world without it? How would the world see you?
This is a miracle question. What would the world look like if you had control over your codependent impulses? Who would you be without codependency? How would the world see you? How would you see yourself? - If your best friend was having this experience, what would you tell them?
This is straight out of the CBT playbook. It is an outstanding question, especially for codependents. You are the fiercest defender of your friends, family, pets, and anyone else to whom you have given your loyalty.
If you had to testify in court on their behalf, you would give an ardent, complete, and emotional defense, and ask the judge to let you take their place. Now it’s your turn to do that for yourself. You are training yourself to be your own best friend. Write thoughtfully, and after you have completed the exercise about ten times, compare this column to the others and see if there doesn’t appear to be two totally different authors. - What is the reality, and how will you live with it?
The first step to resolving unbearable emotions is accepting reality, followed by realizing that feelings don’t last forever. You can break this question down into smaller parts:
What is the reality behind this feeling?
Maybe that life is unfair?
How do you accept it and regain control?
That is always up to you, and you always have a choice.
How is the feeling different from you?
You are not your thoughts, and you are not your feelings. So, who or what is observing them? Can you see depression, loneliness, and codependency as an experience rather than an identity? You are not these things, you only experience them. So, between you and your emotions, what’s the difference?