Thanks for listening to Take Out Therapy, where you can improve your mental health, emotional stability, and life skills in less than 20 minutes a week. Simple, straightforward, authentic advice and education, right from a private practice therapist and anxiety expert. I'm Rebecca Hunter, and this is better mental health, delivered.
Visit TakeOutTherapy. com for lots more resources to help you thrive.
Oh, hello. There I am so happy. You decided to join me for this episode. Which I was just kind of reading over my notes and it does sound like a little bit of a middle school problem, but I promise you. Sometimes we have middle school problems as adults and today's episode is to help you out with one of those. You know how sometimes it feels like someone's mad at us.
Have you ever had this experience like. There's just a vibe in the air and you're trying to figure out what's going on. Like, is this person mad at me or not? And. That is so stressful. Isn't it? So today I'm going to help you figure out what the heck. To do with that. Because it is stressful and it does impact our mental health.
That's what we're going to get into in today's episode, right after this.
Are you feeling stressed or overwhelmed? Maybe just plain stuck. Take out therapy club can help. My therapeutic membership program offers workshops, coaching sessions, and a really supportive community to help you overcome anxiety, stress, and other emotional challenges, or even roadblocks. I created a takeout therapy club to be affordable and accessible.
Visit takeout therapy.com. To learn more and start your free trial today. When you use code listen, 24 at the checkout. I'm here for you friend.
Okay. So here's the setup. There's a vibe in the air. We feel like somebody is mad at us and we start getting really stressed out about it. It causes anxiety. Doesn't it. When we think somebody's mad at us, but we don't have any information about it. Like, how do we even cope with the feeling that something is off?
And I'm only talking about before we approach it. There's already something off. We already have made an assumption about the situation we're already coping with how that feels for us, which I think is always really fascinating. Every time I go through this, because of course we all go through this. Sometimes we fight. Right.
We start picking fights. Sometimes we get really kind of fluffy and we start trying to make everything really, really great because when we think somebody is mad at us, that's what we do sometimes. Right. And then sometimes we just avoid the person all together because we think they might be mad at us.
Again, I'm talking about before there's ever any communication and I laugh. Because this is what I mean about middle school problems. So step one. Is get yourself together, friend, both of us. We will breathe. Meaning, this kind of situation impacts our nervous system. We have to get. Nervous system regulated. Emotionally regulated before we can go back into relationship and actually deal with the situation. So always first, just take a few deep breaths.
Just try to get your body to understand that you're are not in any danger. You're just having an emotionally based situation right now. That you can totally deal with. And once you get regulated, that's when I want you to start doing a little bit at insight work. Because the problems happen when we get the vibe and then we start behaving as though the vibe is true. Oh, no, no, no.
We don't want to do that. Been there. I done that that always causes more problems. Because the most important and hard question that we need to back up and ask ourself in this situation is, has this person communicated to me directly? That their vibe is about me. Like, is this person mad at me? . Have I gone to this person? And talked with them. And said, gosh, it seems like you might be irritated.
Is there anything you want to talk about? . We have to use our best. Personal growth. Tools to ask ourselves hard questions before we go in for an interaction. And so if you've communicated with somebody. And they say, no, you know, I'm not, I'm not upset with you. And you still feel like they're upset with you.
This is full on torture mode. Isn't it?
And so. It gets hard right here. And I thought that this would be a good place to just kind of talk about some important things that we need to remind ourselves in the middle of these situations. Because right here. When we've communicated, the other person has communicated and there's literally no nothing happening.
And yet we still believe that something is happening. We are now creating our own suffering.
Because sometimes people choose not to bring about any unnecessary conflict, which doesn't mean they don't have feelings that you might be able to feel. It means that they're making a choice to not go there. Like maybe it's not very important. This can actually be a pretty mature choice. And while sometimes this makes me want to hunt somebody down and shake them and say, what is happening right now? Right. I think that it's better to go inward, to look at ourselves. To not focus on the other person in their choice to not bring about any conversation about whatever's going on with them, because frankly,
I hate to say it, but it's just not our business sometimes.
What other people have going on?
And honestly, I don't need to know every single time somebody is upset with me. I guess north, do I tell them every single time that they've annoyed me.
Do you?? So sometimes we keep some stuff to ourself, but we might be hurting.
And then other people will maybe feel that. Right. Or we might feel that from somebody else. And so what we really want to do is look inwards and say, what happens to you? When you feel when you believe you're the cause of someone else's negative emotion.
Because this right here. Is where the work happens. I think it's really interesting, like this happened, this does happen to me from time to time. And I always, I work myself out of it eventually, but it's just a funny place to be. It's like I got a vibe and I decided what the vibe was about. And now I'm kind of bringing on my own misery.
And that's really important to get a look at. We want other people to be happy with us. And so sometimes what that means is unfortunately, We kind of go to these extents emotionally.
This is where the work happens. Because instead of making it all about the other person, we have the opportunity to make it about us, not them because they never even brought it to us.
Anyway. They never even had said, Hey. I'm really irritated with you about this thing you did. No, no. Nope. This is entirely self-created. And guess what. If things are self-created, we can do away with them. In the, in the club this month, we've been talking about people pleasing. And oh, what is compelling topic to dig into?
Because people pleasing is this need to not make anyone dislike or disconnect from us. Oh, we will try so hard. Even when it's not appropriate to get people to stay. Connected to us, . So some of us have these traits. I'll raise my hand on that one. I can definitely go on the side of people pleasing.
I don't like people to disconnect for me. I don't like people to get mad at me. Of course.
And then on the other side of things is like, sometimes people can't do conflict. And sometimes they just don't have the emotional maturity. To talk about things. That are bothering them. . So we all have a little maturing to do whatever. The question then becomes, can you let go? Of this. Vibe, like, let it go release it, knowing that you're not responsible for investigating the motion of other adults were kids really. So that you don't go around feeling this really triggered fight or flight feeling. Because a lot of emotionally deep stuff happens to us. When we feel we're the cause of someone else's negative emotions. And if you want to come into club and learn all about that, that's what I'm digging into.
It's a lot to go into right here. But this is really good, important, deep work to do.
Because yeah, other people are really triggering, but we're never going to get other people not to trigger us. We can trigger ourselves. And then we can work. Ourselves out of it. I've got a couple of episodes on that. If you go to my website and you search. Under the podcast for trigger, they'll all pop up for you.
And then you could just hang out with me all day long. One thing I like to recommend to people that really struggle with this situation of like, I got a vibe. I'm all upset about it. I can't let it go. My person says the vibe is totally off, which, you know, I'm talking about like emotionally mature people that aren't like gaslighting each other and try to get people to believe things that aren't true because here's the deal. If we're emotionally mature and we're kind of hacked off at somebody and we're acting hacked off when they say like, Hey, is something going on?
We can say. You know, I'm a little irritated, but I, we don't need to get into it. I'll work through it and I'll let you know if I want to talk, that's emotional maturity. It's not like, no nothing's going on because that creates emotional unsafety, right? Like it's not emotionally safe right there. You know, something's wrong.
Somebody is telling you something's not going on. Not helpful. Right. So creating a little mom tra for yourself. And having some agreements and boundaries and relationships around, like it's okay. Just let me know when you get irritated with me. . We can work through these things and then creating a mantra for yourself that. Remind yourself that you're in a relationship in which you have an agreement. That your person will let you know. If they want to work through an issue with you. So it's like, um, you know, maybe something like my love will always let me know if they want to solve an issue. For now I choose to feel at peace.
That's kind of long. For me, I wouldn't focus on the other person. I would just say, I choose to feel at peace. I go with short, simple mom, trust that. , just shore me up quickly. while, I'm getting my act together and breathing. Remember your nervous system responds to some of these moments as though they're survival threats and you have to remind it about what's going on and what is most certainly not. Going on. . Always, always, always setting boundaries around conflict and the need for conflict.
The safe nature of conflict is incredibly helpful in all relationships. Even in friendships, you can tell people, Hey, you know what, if you get hacked off of me, just let me know and we'll work through it together. I don't like this whole silent treatment or whatever. You can just tell people this stuff and then they'll know you better.
That's what I love about boundaries and about. Being authentic is that you're letting people know you just a little bit better. Okay. So again, we're doing so much of this work inside the club. Come inside the club. I'm giving away 30 day free trials. Right now. All you have to do is enter, listen, 24. In your checkout and you'll just check it out for a whole month.
If you don't like it, just push the cancel button. But come do some of this deeper work with me. It's actually quite fun. So hopefully today in exploring the mad vibe, which is just funny, but it's not funny. It's so stressful. I maybe have helped you have a little less. Unnecessary drama, maybe a little less conflict or insecure moments in your relationships. You know, the mad vibe is a trigger. For so many of us, when someone seems mad at us, we all become like little scared kids.
Again. Worried, we have upset our people, . And you just like me. Are just a human being. We're just doing what we do, . So once you learn to change your response just a little bit, as we've talked about today, perhaps these moments will be. We'll go by a little faster, perhaps there'll like support yourself just a little bit better as you go through some of these, um, you know, just like a little emotional rapids, stay in the boat friend.
There's more rowing to do down the road. I'll see you again soon.
Thanks so much for joining me today. To support this free resource, subscribe, review, and pass an episode along to a friend in need. And always, please get the level of support that you need for your situation. Want a full session? Just reach out. I'm here to help. Head to takeouttherapy. com for lots more resources and to join my community.
This is better mental health delivered.