Episode 10 – Emotional Adulthood

-Simply stated, emotional adulthood is when we take responsibility for how we feel. Learn about the opposite of emotional adulthood, which is emotional childhood, to get a better understanding of what it looks like to operate from emotional adulthood. When we learn how to be responsible for our own happiness and unhappiness (it turns out we’re the best ones), we are empowered to be the person that we want to be in the world.

-example of solution from lower brain vs solution from higher brain: getting out of pool – kids drape towel around body and shiver soaking wet, grown ups use the towel to dry off.

-emotional childhood (lower brain): when we do not take responsibility for how we feel, trained from when we’re young that other people hurt our feelings, trained to think in our marriage that we meet our partner’s needs, if someone else is in charge of how we feel then we feel like we need to control them to affect how we feel, waiting for other people to make us feel better, super aware of people treating you “poorly,” easily offended, feel entitled to something you haven’t earned, blaming circumstances for how you feel (skip the T line).
-emotional adulthood (higher brain): when we take responsibility for how we feel, make choices for how I want to feel, empowered place to operate from, get to be the person we want to be, we’re the best one to meet our own needs (then we can just have fun with other people), responsible for my happiness and unhappiness, responsible for thoughts/feelings/actions/results, treat people nicely because we want to not because we’re responsible for how they feel, feel responsible to ourselves for our behavior, still make mistakes and feel lots of negative and indulgent emotions just doesn’t blame them on other people or on circumstances.

-Do not use these tools to point out these problems in other people (very tempting, rarely appropriate or successful).  Just use this information to work on yourself.
-emotional childhood feels easier, but emotional adulthood is better
-Important to know that we don’t ever totally graduate from emotional childhood, we will always have moments where we visit emotional childhood, but we apologize, use it as an opportunity to create awareness, and we try to spend the majority of our time in emotional adulthood.

-Battle Buddy Moment: FB review from Kristene
-In the trenches moment: gentle email from listener
-Hot Mess Moment:  secret hickey story
-Mission for the episode: explore this in your life, answer these questions (1- name a person or circumstance that you believe is causing you a negative feeling.  2- Describe how they are making you feel. 3-Why do you think they have the power to make you feel this way. 4-what actually is the thought that is making you feel that way 5- why is this good news? 6-how might you take responsibility for your feelings in your future?), write down a few examples.