Art of Feeling | helenebrenner.com

Embracing the Fear: 4 Tools for Soothing Anxiety

Larry Letich — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 16:20:11 +0000

Everybody talks about anxiety these days. But what exactly is anxiety? While there are many ways to define it, we like to use a single, simple definition: It’s the feeling of feeling unsafe. When we talk about fear, or feeling afraid, it’s almost always a fear of something specific and tangible. You’re afraid of the dark, for example, or public speaking, or death, or spiders. But anxiety is a…

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Four Tips for Creating an Emotional Safety Net Around You

Larry Letich — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 16:17:59 +0000

The best way to feel safe, secure, and “whole”—capable of facing whatever challenges life may bring you—is to have emotionally safe people in your life. That’s a basic part of our blueprint as human beings. Emotionally safe people are people whom you can turn to when you feel vulnerable, and with whom you don’t feel afraid to be yourself. Unfortunately, when people feel chronically emotionally…

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Lower the Emotional Temperature this Thanksgiving in Six Steps

Larry Letich — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 23:00:06 +0000

Thanksgiving is this week and many of us are planning trips to be with our extended families. And with all the tensions that tend to arise within many family gatherings, you may be thinking, “Please just let me survive this.” After the last two years of the pandemic and the rising polarization in our country, it’s easy to feel estranged from our family members. Our emotions are raw…

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Emotional Safety: What it is and Why it is so Important

Larry Letich — Thu, 10 Nov 2022 21:57:58 +0000

“Emotional safety?” exclaimed George, one of our clients. “What are you talking about? No one’s got a knife here. No one’s carrying a gun. No one’s about to fall off a ledge. You can’t walk around worrying about getting your feelings hurt all the time. That’s not the way life is!” George has a point. Emotional safety does sound rather “soft.” Life isn’t easy, people aren’t always nice…

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What Fuses, Washing Machines & Cars Can Teach us About Emotional Resilience

Helene Brenner — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 13:58:43 +0000

We’ve talked a lot in this blog about how to understand feelings (your own and other people’s), and how to deal with feelings and work with them when they get difficult or overwhelming. Some of what we’ve written may have come across as a bit “dense” or technical. So this week I’d like to keep it simple and introduce to you my three theories on how to become more emotionally resilient. They are…

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Taming the Dragon – What to Do When Your Anxious Partner Lashes Out

Larry Letich — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 15:09:07 +0000

Has something like this ever happened to you? You’re having what you thought was a casual conversation about possibly buying a house in the suburbs in a year or two when your husband suddenly hisses, “Oh, why are we even married?” Or. . . You’re running late to a wedding. As you pull out of the driveway, your wife says, “Did you have to talk so long on the phone with your mother?

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The 7 Habits of Emotionally Successful People

Larry Letich — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 20:39:58 +0000

What does “emotionally successful” sound like to you? Is it the ability to maintain grace under pressure? To walk into all kinds of social situations calmly and confidently? To find and keep a really healthy, loving relationship? To have emotional balance through all the ups and downs of life? These all sound like great ways to be. Who wouldn’t want to be like this? But how do you get there?

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How to Raise Your Emotional Awareness in Five Minutes or Less—Interoceptively

Larry Letich — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 05:01:25 +0000

“He’s really in touch with himself.” “She’s comfortable in her skin.” “He’s all in his head.” Everyday phrases like these show that we all sense intuitively that some people are more connected to themselves than others. But connected to what? The phrases give us a clue: The first two suggest that the people must be feeling something, touching something in their body, while the last phrase…

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Emotional Triggers: Why They’re Hard to Spot, and What You Can Do About Them

Helene Brenner — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 16:00:10 +0000

“What are you doing?” shouts your current partner from another room. “Why, don’t you trust me?” A moment before you were perfectly happy with your new beau. But suddenly your back has tensed, your breath is caught and your mind’s racing with thoughts about how this is turning out to be just one more horrible, awful relationship. What’s going on when your reaction to something that’s happened is…

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It’s Good to Share Your Emotional Reactions (Even When They’re Irrational). Here’s How

Helene Brenner — Tue, 10 May 2022 05:00:50 +0000

There I was, sitting in a parked car with Larry along a dark street at night Googling something on my phone, when a hand came out of nowhere and pounded on my window, and I screamed. Larry and I were on a weekend getaway in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. While driving through town after dinner, we remembered something we needed to get, so we stopped the car for a short time to look for a pharmacy…

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