Summary
Joe describes four toxic symptoms of holding back emotions: judgment, indecision, guilt, and dissociation. Each symptom disconnects us from ourselves and others, and each is resolved by feeling the underlying emotion we’re avoiding.
He explains that joy is the “matriarch of a family of emotions” and won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome—meaning if we suppress difficult emotions, we lose access to joy as well. The video walks through each symptom, showing how judgment cuts off connection and wisdom, indecision reveals unfelt fear about consequences, guilt replaces genuine compassion with obligation, and dissociation removes our ability to read our own signals.
The remedy for all four is a practice called “emotional inquiry”—a guided process of discovering what emotions you’re avoiding and feeling them with wonder and curiosity, neither being swept away nor managing them.
Key Concepts
- Joy won’t come where other emotions aren’t welcome
- Judgment blocks the emotion underneath
- Indecision signals unfelt emotions about consequences
- Guilt replaces genuine compassion with obligation
- Dissociation removes your body’s learning signals
Key Quotes
“Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome.”
“Every time that we’re feeling a sense of judgment towards another person, what’s happening is that we are not allowing ourselves to feel the underlying emotion.”
“If you fully allow yourself to feel the thing that you’re scared to feel and the consequence of a decision, the decision becomes really clear.”
“Acting out of guilt is actually not acting from compassion.”
“If you feel a difficult emotion every day, it’ll change your life so rapidly.”
“Nothing I am going to do or say is going to change your life. What changes your life is actually doing the experiment.”
Transcript
If you’re watching this video, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that you know that your emotions are being held back in such a way that it doesn’t feel good and that it’s not serving your life. The bad news is that you don’t quite know how to get out of it. And that is a really, really common thing for many people. So, this video is going to be all about the four ways that we can see we’re holding back emotions and the toxic effects of them. And then we’re going to talk about how to feel the emotions in such a way that we’re not holding them back and managing them, but we’re not being swept away by them. There’s this thing about emotions that most people don’t fully comprehend, but when they hear it, they know it’s right. And the way I express this is Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome. That somehow we know that if we push back these emotions, we can’t feel the joy that life has to offer us. And it’s a really easy thing to explain just somatically. So, right now, do me a favor and try to stop feeling all of your emotions, right? Don’t let any emotion be felt. And what you’ll notice is muscles have to contract for that. You have to tighten up. And joy can’t be felt if you’re not feeling anything else. Right? So we tighten up to stop feeling the emotions. Our muscles get tight and then we don’t feel the joy because you can’t feel joy if you’re not feeling anything. You can’t feel anything if you’re not feeling anything. So that’s the big trick is just knowing that allowing all the emotions in creates a life of joy. And so as we go through these four things, every single one of them and we’re going to start with judgment. Every single one of the four things that are really toxic, they also take away your joy. Every time that we’re feeling a sense of judgment towards another person, what’s happening is that we are not allowing ourselves to feel the underlying emotion. We’re blocking that emotion through the judgment. So what the judgment does on a toxic level is that it disconnects us from each other. If I judge you, I stop listening to you. I stop connecting with you. And if I stop listening to you, it means that I can’t get the wisdom that you have to offer. It doesn’t mean I have to agree with you to get the wisdom. It just means I can’t cut you off to get the wisdom. So, I remember visiting a friend’s house for Thanksgiving. And it was really clear that most of the people on the table believed in one side of the political aisle and some of the people on the other side of the table believed in the other side of the political aisle. And you could just see they wanted to not have the conversation, but when they had the conversation, which was inevitable because they were all itching, they just shut each other out. And so here was this family that clearly loved each other on so many levels and they would just stop the connection. It’s really devastating when you think about how many homes have their connection cut off from each other because they have this judgment of you don’t understand if you only got it right, if you could see my point of view. But instead of feeling the hurt of that disconnection, instead of feeling the helplessness that often comes with politics, what they did instead was they judged one another. They got hard. They tightened up. They even yelling at one another. And you could tell that they all cared. They all cared about the country. They all cared about politics. They all cared about one another. But to feel all that stuff would create so much grief and so much heartbreak that they chose instead to just stop and go, “No, I’m going for judgment.” And so it cut off that connection, but it also cut off them hearing one another and hearing the wisdom that either side had to offer, even though maybe it’s not something that you believe in. It was something that there was a point of view that you could learn from. So that’s the toxicity that really comes along with being judgmental. And it all goes away if you say, “Oh, what am I being judgmental of? And what am I trying not to feel by holding that judgment?” And every time you find yourself being judgmental, every time you see yourself being judgmental, you can go, “Oh, what is it that I don’t want to feel?” And if you feel it, you’ll notice. I mean, you can do it right now. Think of something that you felt judgmental about. And then ask yourself, what was it in that moment you didn’t want to feel? Maybe it was grief. Maybe it was sadness. Maybe it was hopelessness. And then allow yourself to feel it. And notice what happens to the judgment. A second possible symptom of not feeling your emotions is indecision. And what we know neurologically speaking is that the emotional center of our brain is what makes the decisions. Meaning that if we have the emotional center of our brain damaged, we can maintain our IQ. We can solve the same kind of problems, but we can’t decide where to eat without a long time passing. And as a matter of fact, I believe there’s a book called Descartes’ Error by a neurologist who talks about people who had that part of their brain damaged and it would take them a half an hour to decide what color pen to use. So their whole lives would fall apart even though their IQ was the same. And so typically what that means is that we are making decisions based on how we’re going to feel. We might use logic to decide how we’re going to feel, but we’re making the decision based on how we’re going to feel. And the way that you can know this in your system is in the following way. How many decisions have you made to feel good or to not feel like a loser or to feel joy or to not feel abandoned? Right? So we do all this stuff to feel certain ways. We pick careers to feel certain ways. We get married to feel certain ways. In fact, there’s this great story. I had somebody come to me in one of the rapid coaching sessions and she was talking about how she was considering a divorce and I said, “How long have you been considering this divorce?” And she said it was over two years, maybe three years or something to that effect. I said, “All right, so what would you have to feel if you were going to get a divorce? And what would you have to feel if you stayed in the relationship and it didn’t change?” And so she went off and she was feeling this and at some point later I got a hold of her again and I said, “Well, what did you discover?” And she said, “Well, I discovered that I would have to grieve the loss of my marriage and letting my kids down if I got a divorce because I feel like my job is to stay married for the children. But I also realized that if I stayed married in the same situation, I would have to grieve the fact that I was giving this example of living a half life to my children. And what I realized in it was that oh, if I’m not scared of either of these things because I felt it and I felt the grief, then the decision is really clear. The decision is I am going to be exactly myself in this marriage and if divorce happens that’s great, but I’m not going to be a half self in my marriage. I’m going to be my full self in the marriage. And if that means the marriage doesn’t survive, it doesn’t survive.” And so, as it turns out, which happens, I think about like 80% of the time when I hear somebody say this, is that the marriage actually worked out and things changed. But it only changed because they showed up being themselves. And they could only be themselves because they had the grief. They felt the thing they were scared to feel. So, that’s how it works as far as indecision goes. And so if you fully allow yourself to feel the thing that you’re scared to feel and the consequence of a decision, the decision becomes really clear as to what you should do becomes really apparent what you should do because most of the lack of clarity, the indecision that comes with it, the toxic analysis paralysis that comes with it is because you don’t want to feel a certain way. So it’s a great way to locate, oh, here’s another way. I’m in indecision. It means that I’m not feeling the thing that I need to feel or that I want to feel or that I’m scared to feel. So, a third possible symptom of not allowing yourself to feel all the emotions that are arising in you is an experience of guilt. And so, what guilt does is it cuts you off from your natural compassion. That’s what makes it toxic. It makes doing something for somebody else an obligation rather than actually coming from your heart, actually coming from a place of care. And I remember this moment that it all hit me. You know, I would be guilted as a kid. And I would always hear it as my mom, who was the person who guilted me often. Sometimes my dad did, too. And the way that it would work was that they would say, “Oh, you’re hurting me.” And I would buy that. I’d be like, “Oh, yeah. I’m hurting you. I shouldn’t be hurting you. I have to stop doing that.” And then that would immediately have me stop listening to myself. And so one day, I was watching this television show, a reality television show and there were these moms in it that were being interviewed and they were all bragging about how good they were at guilting their kids. They were, “Oh, I’m the best guilt person. No, I’m the better guilt person and I can get my kids to do whatever I want by guilting them.” And there was a series of moms who were actually bragging about how they were cajoling their children to not listen to themselves and to do what they said through guilt. And it dawned on me, guilt isn’t poor me. If you’re listening to somebody’s guilt and doing it, it’s not like they’re frail. It’s that they’re actually getting you to do something. It’s like a force. It’s like an aggression. And then I realized, oh well, let’s think about it as if I’m going to a party and I don’t want to go, but I’m going because I feel guilty if I don’t. And now imagine if I go to the person holding the party and just say, hey, I’m here because I feel obligated, not because I want to be here. Whoa. Really dawned on me like I don’t ever want that. I don’t want anybody to say, “Oh, I’m doing this thing because I feel obligated.” I would much rather find a way that we can do something that feels good for both of us. And so that dawned on me that oh wow, acting out of guilt is actually not acting from compassion. And more than that, it stops me from feeling my compassion. There’s this natural thing in us that wants to be helpful to people. Just ask any 5-year-old, “Hey, can you help me?” You can see they get excited. We want to do it. It’s part of how we are. Now, maybe if we’re under stress, we don’t, but generally that’s how we want to be. But as soon as you get guilted, you lose connection with it and you help somebody not because you want to help them. You help them because you feel like you have to. So, it’s a great way to really recognize, hey, I am pushing down my emotion. I’m pushing down my desire to help. I’m pushing down my desire to not go to the party. I’m pushing down an emotional experience if I’m acting out of guilt. It literally makes me tighten down to feel guilt and act out of guilt. And if you say to yourself again something to the effect of what do I have to feel if I couldn’t feel guilty, then you can get in touch with what’s really going on there. So the final possible symptom of not feeling your emotions is dissociation, which means that you have left yourself because you think you’re overwhelmed by the emotional process. And so there’s lots of ways of doing that. There’s a way of just transing out or you can just intellectualize and try to figure it all out in your head. There’s lots of ways of doing it. And the thing about it is that it really slows down a process of transformation. It really slows down how quickly you can figure something out because in dissociation, you’re not reading the signals in your body. It’s like imagine trying to play tennis and not read the signals in your body. It’d be really hard to learn how to play tennis. And a great story about this is that in a very early retreat that we were doing, we had somebody and we would talk every evening about each of the participants in the retreat and make sure that they were being cared for and loved and we kept on forgetting one of the people. We kept on wait, 12th person, who’s who? And then eventually we would discover it. And after three days of this, I realized, oh, this person has dissociated so much they’ve disappeared from the group. They’re the ones that nobody can remember, very quiet person, very just not there in a lot of ways. And what we also realized is that they were making the least amount of progress of everybody else in the group. And it was because they were literally leaving their body. So they didn’t get the signals of this is uncomfortable, this is good, this works for me, this is a lesson to be learned. All of those signals were not getting processed because they weren’t actually feeling their body. And what was amazing was while we were working with this person, we kept on pointing back to the body. Oh, how does that feel in your body? How does that feel in your stomach? What does that feel like in your chest? Would keep on pointing back and the progress that this person made was just so extreme immediately once they started feeling their body because they could instead of just go oh I’m being guilty or oh I’m scared or oh I’m angry they could feel the anger they could feel the discomfort of it they could feel the drive of it they could feel what was happening in their body and that’s often how we learn. There’s lots of ways to know that you’re scared but the quickest way is you feel it in your body. The slowest way is to discover it through thought. And so to really understand your system and how it responds helps you transform very rapidly. So there’s an exercise that can help you with all of this stuff. If you do it, it will help you with judgment. It’ll help you with indecision. It’ll help you with guilt. It’ll help you with dissociation. And it is just to feel the emotions, especially the emotions that you discover that you don’t want to feel. So if you notice, write down the 10 times you were judgmental. If you feel the judgment then you say oh what would I have to feel if I couldn’t be judging myself or if I couldn’t be judging this person? Or you say if I’m indecisive what are the things that I’m scared to feel in the consequence of my decision? Or if you are feeling guilty or acting from guilt, say, “Oh, if I couldn’t feel guilt, what would I have to feel?” Or if you’re dissociating, just get into your body and go, “Oh, what is this emotion that I’m feeling that apparently is overwhelming?” So that’s the first step is to list out all the emotions that you’re avoiding. And then the second step is to do something we call emotional inquiry. And it is a guided meditation or visualization of really teaching you how to deeply feel your emotions and how to do it in such a way that you’re full of wonder and so that it’s actually something that’s exciting to do. And so if you feel a difficult emotion every day, it’ll change your life so rapidly. We have had literally 500 people at this point commit to doing this every day for a month and to watch the way that their lives change is just amazing. The cool part about all this, like the added benefit is that all of a sudden your ability to take offense at other people is going to go way down. And the way this works is so cool. So, for instance, so many people are like, “Oh my gosh, somebody might be judging me. I can’t do that because somebody might be judging me.” But when you go through this process, you can go, “Oh, they’re not actually judging me. What they’re doing is just scared of feeling an emotion.” Or if somebody’s guilt tripping you, you can say, “Oh, right. Yeah, they’re just scared of an emotion. They’re trying to make me scared of that emotion.” Like, no harm, no foul. It’s just fear happening of an emotion. I don’t have to feel guilty. Indecision. Oh, right. They’re indecisive. That’s really bothersome. But really, what it is is they’re just scared to feel an emotion. And allows you to have so much more compassion for the people that might trigger you when they’re judgmental or indecisive or dissociating. So that’s just like a little added benefit. It’s a really cool experiment. Obviously, nothing I am going to do or say is going to change your life, right? What changes your life is actually doing the experiment, bringing the awareness into it, and finding out for yourself what happens when you don’t allow yourself to feel the emotions. And when I say feel the emotions, remember at the top of the video, I’m not talking about being taken away. I’m not talking about compartmentalizing and managing. I’m talking about just having a wonder, curious, explorative mind with the emotional experience.