Lenten Journey: An Emotional Exploration – Frustration

As part of this Lenten Journey, I want to take some time exploring different emotions and experiences. Today, I want to give attention to Frustration.

Frustration happens to be on my mind today because we are in a transition in our family that requires that I shop for health insurance on the open market rather than through an employer. I will spare you the details but the variations in premiums, levels of coverage, network providers, and the complexity of identifying which of your doctors are in which networks is dizzying. I have long been an advocate for universal health care simply for the amount of creative and entrepreneurial energy it would release if people were free of employee-based health insurance. But now I’m an advocate for the single payer system as a way of freeing up the energy I am having to spend trying to figure out which option best suits my family.

In any case, I have experienced a lot of frustration today. So, I want to take some time to reflect on how we respond to frustration. I’m going to share my reflection on how I answer that question with you and I invite you to reflect on your own responses.

I am aware of the immediate emotional/psychological responses that I have to this particular emotion/experience. I grew up in a home that “fed” our emotions, literally. So, I know that is a “go to” response for me. I crave foods. There is a container of brownies upstairs in the kitchen that I made yesterday. My impulse is to soothe my frustration with a brownie, not one brownie but several. But mostly what I am aware of is that I want a distraction from my frustration. I don’t want to sit with this feeling. I want it to go away. One way to do that is to put a sweet distraction in my mouth.

The second response which is somewhat related to the first is that I get unfocused on the task. I linger on it rather than finish it. Of course, this lengthens my frustration but I don’t feel it as acutely. I’m not intently focused on the task and, therefore, the frustration. Instead, I am lightly focused on my task, easily distracted by the buzz of my phone where Facebook invites me into any number of distractions or a message from one of my sisters offers me a break from my research. None of these are necessarily bad for me (like a Tupperware full of brownies might be) but they accumulate into an ultimate lack of attention to avoid the frustration.

What is going on for me physically? I wish I had asked this question this afternoon when I was feeling it most acutely (as opposed to now when I’m both processing the feeling and doing something I enjoy – writing.) What I recall is that I was doing two different things. One is that I have a habit of wiggling my right foot when I’m feeling an uncomfortable emotion. The other is that I didn’t move from my desk and the computer I was staring at for several hours. I didn’t get up to get a drink (or a brownie) or lunch or go to the bathroom. I stayed fixed to my chair focused (and sometimes not so focused as I noted above) on this task. Finally, I am holding my frustration in my shoulders. Not only because I have been hunched over a computer for a good chunk of the day but because I have been holding my shoulders up while engaged in this task.

Now that I have done this reflection, what do I want to do next? I’d like to look at changes I’d like to make. Other responses.

I’m happy to say that I did NOT eat a Tupperware of brownies but I did have one this afternoon and another after dinner. But the impulse was there and I need not to rely on my other physical reaction to keep me from bingeing my emotions into submission. So, I’m going to start with the physical part. I DID go to the gym this morning so I don’t need to run a marathon or go for a long bike ride. But I do need to take measured energy (frustration) breaks. Set a timer and get up and walk around the block. Release some of that frustration physically. Since that will put me in the pathway of the brownies, I also need to pay attention, if not to my non-communicative stomach, to my body’s natural need for nourishment. Make sure that I eat lunch when it is time rather than allow myself to go hungry because I didn’t move until it was time to pick the kids up from school. (That’s when I grabbed that much-desired brownie, on my way out the door.)

So, for now, that is my solution to an awareness of my response to my frustration: Energy and movement breaks to release my frustration combined with a planned meal to take care of my awareness that my stomach doesn’t talk to me.

Now, you probably didn’t need to know all these things about my response to frustration but I wanted to give you an example of this exercise.

I invite you to do your own reflection on your response to frustration. How do you experience it emotionally and physically? Where do you feel it? How do you react to it? Are your responses healthy, unhealthy, a combination of both? If there are unhealthy responses that you would like to change, what solutions do you see for yourself?

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You are welcome to take this journey in solitude in your own personal journal or share your reflections. If anything that you do makes you think you might want to continue a journey using Spiritual Direction, now or in the future, you can make an appointment with me through my website: 

www.RedRocksSDC.com 

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