Gemma Spake

Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spake and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast.

It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s.

Today, let's talk about something I think many of us believe we are doing, but probably aren't doing very well, which is processing our emotions.

This is something that I've come to find.

If you are a very self-aware, smart individual of whom I know many of you are,

and you cry occasionally, and you get sad occasionally, and you're happy occasionally, and you have every word under the sun to explain what it is you're feeling and why, you probably believe that you are someone who processes your emotions well, or who finds that their emotions have a very nice beginning, middle, and end.

You definitely see yourself as somebody who is very emotionally adjusted.

Maybe you are.

But I'm very guilty of this.

Just knowing the words for your emotions or just knowing how you think you should be feeling and knowing why you should feel that isn't the same as A, actually allowing yourself to feel those emotions fully, even in their ugliest form.

And B, is not the same as being able to move through those emotions and move through the discomfort.

I think more and more of us, thanks to social media, thanks to just the reduction of stigma, thanks to just education, like we have the language for our emotions without actually having the tools and without actually being able to fully express them.

That's meaning we're still kind of feeling emotionally stunted, even though we're very informed.

That means that without realizing it, we can become somebody who can't connect with their emotions in a deep way, who can't connect with their emotions without feeling debilitated by them, even though we feel like we should and we do have a good hand over what we're feeling.

So that is what we're going to break down today.

Kind of a guide to the research on why and how we avoid our emotions without consciously realizing it.

What that actually looks like in our behavior and in our reactions to things.

And some of the greatest tools and studies on what to actually do.

Like what does it mean to process an emotion?