FIVES - CHALLENGING SENSATIONS
THE FIVES IN THE DECK OF CARE ENCOURAGE YOU TO TREAT CHALLENGING FEELINGS AS MESSENGERS AND TO LISTEN TO WHAT YOUR BODY AND MIND ARE TRYING TO COMMUNICATE TO YOU THROUGH THEM.
Challenging emotions and physical sensations have an evolutionary purpose - to help keep us safe by communicating to ourselves that something is wrong. If we approach challenging sensations with respect that they’re trying to help us and curiosity for what they’re trying to communicate, the sensations will lessen. Beyond that, once we’ve listened, we can honor ourselves by addressing any unmet needs that we’ve discovered.
Each of the Fives will give you a discrete skill in respecting and listening to your challenging sensations. While any of them independently can help lessen the feelings, you will need to draw from all four to become fully present with them. The goal of the deck is to introduce you to the basics so that you have a solid foundation from which to grow. There are integrated strategies that draw from all four that you can learn once you’ve become comfortable with the basics, such as RAIN, soften soothe allow, non-violent communication, or inner relationship focusing.
As you explore your challenging feelings, you will encounter what are referred to as secondary sensations or second-arrow sensations. These are feelings that arise in response to other feelings such as getting angry because you’re disappointed, or having your muscles contract around a cut and creating a new area of physical tension. Typically, these secondary sensations are hard emotions (and physical contractions) that serve to protect more vulnerable sensations (such as feeling anger to protect yourself from feeling afraid). Particularly when you find hard emotions like anger, shame, frustration, or despondency, check if there’s something more vulnerable hiding underneath that emotion. Without staying curious and compassionate, these secondary sensations can obfuscate the true message your body is sending.
You will also encounter challenging feelings that aren’t helpful to you in signaling current-moment problems. Much of our biological history is no longer relevant to our current situation so we may flag irrational risks. We may also carry maladaptive strategies from past trauma that once kept us safe but are no longer helpful, or have internalized criticism that makes us irrationally critical of ourselves. Even if we find that a challenging feeling is not helpful to us any longer, it’s still important to understand what it’s communicating, and to respect that it may have once played a role in keeping us safe. Even under these less helpful sensations, you may still find unmet needs in yourself that you need to explore, especially in old wounds that need time and space to heal.
There’s an added benefit to fully respecting challenging sensations -- it will make you happier. Research shows that the happiest people are actually those that explore and fully experience their range of emotions. Life is meant to be an experience rich in diverse emotional experiences - good and bad. Stay curious, and stay kind.
If you like more formal program learning, The Path to Resilience with Jamie Lynn Tatera is an 8-week program designed to help you fully savor the side-by-side experience that is life by learning to relate skillfully to difficult experiences and also intentionally create positive strategies for long-term resilience and well-being. She also occasionally offers a free journaling program with the same goal which can be found on this page, or you can sign up for her mailing list to learn when a new one is being offered.
Five of Spades - Emotional Labeling
The Five of Spades introduces you to the importance of naming and acknowledging emotions. When you name an emotion and allow it to be present, the emotion softens and you create space for mindful exploration. Sometimes, naming an emotion alone will allow you to move on. Sometimes, naming an emotion will soften it but the feeling will remain, and you will need to take up skills in the other Fives to explore and resolve whatever is under the emotion.
Emotional labeling requires naming your internal experience without drawing inference or perception as to what external factors or situations are causing it. Most people aren’t very good at this, and more often than not what follows the phrase “I feel” is either an opinion or a judgment. Because of this, emotional labeling can feel unnatural and can take a while to become good at. It’s often easiest to learn how to label emotions using feelings inventories, like this one available from The Center for Nonviolent Communication or the feelings wheel. Using one of these inventories can help you scan your body for emotions, provide words you may have trouble recalling, and help identify primary emotions that are being masked by stronger second-arrow feelings (like anger). They also provide guide rails to stick to emotions only because they don’t also provide lists of opinions or perceptions.
Be on guard for any opinions or judgments that may at first sound like feelings. If you can replace “I feel” with “I think,” then you are actually labeling a thought. It’s common to hear things like “I feel like you’re not listening to me” or “I feel like I do all the chores around the house.” These thoughts may be sticky, and they may be what you’re ruminating on, but they aren’t emotions.
Similarly, if your statement provides a perception of a second person, then it’s not an emotion. It’s common to hear things like “I feel attacked,” “I feel ignored,” “I feel unloved” or “I feel misunderstood.” These judgment statements conflate feelings with how you are perceiving what a second person is doing. “I feel attacked” could actually be “I feel scared and worried because my need for security isn’t being met.” “I feel unloved” could be “I feel inadequate and excluded because my needs for love and appreciation aren’t met.” “I feel misunderstood” could be “I feel insecure and dejected because my need to be understood isn’t being met.”
This may feel unnatural as most of us have a natural urge to blame something or someone else for unpleasant sensations. Part of emotional labeling requires understanding that you have a lot of agency in your own emotional process, and that no two people will feel the exact same way under the same circumstances - so external context alone can never explain what you’re experiencing. If you can understand and name what reaction your body is having to something, it allows you to step back and be curious about what needs are unmet, because of what perceptions, of what actions. When you begin to name and understand the parts of the process that are under your control more fully, you become empowered to communicate your needs and ask for changes that would help address them. Non-violent communication provides a framework for this kind of communication, if you want to explore it further.
The two steps of the Five of Spades are also the beginning of a more integrated process called RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Interrogate, Non-identify and Nurture) that is commonly used to work through sticky or unpleasant feelings. You can do a guided RAIN meditation with Tara Brach here.
Five of Diamonds - Somatic Processing
The Five of Diamonds introduces you to somatic processing - which is identifying and softening into the physical manifestations of your emotions or physical pain from injury. Our mind-body connection is so complete that it’s challenging to process emotions without also working through how the body is reacting to those emotions or to soften to physical injury without bringing attention to the associated feelings.
To begin this practice, you’ll use the body awareness skills from the Four of Diamonds and scan through your body, looking for areas of tension. This could be muscle contraction, soreness, tightness, an increased heart rate, shallow breathing, digestion issues, a headache . . . Once you’ve identified where you are having a challenging physical sensation, you’ll offer yourself a compassionate touch (a Nine of Diamonds skill), physically soothing the area. Then you’ll draw focused attention to the sensations in that area of the body while trying to mentally soothe and soften whatever you’re experiencing.
For some people, somatic processing is more accessible as a starting place for challenging sensations than labeling emotions or noting thoughts. While the mind wanders quickly, the body tends to be fairly stable and slower moving, and tapping into physical sensations can be a more grounding experience.
If you’re just starting with somatic processing, you can work through this short guided exercise for mindfulness of emotion in the body with Chris Germer. If you want to engage in a guided, integrated process that includes somatic processing, you can do a turning toward emotional pain or turning toward physical pain meditation with Dave Potter. You can also try Soften-Soothe-Allow (now called Being with Difficult Emotions) using this medium-length guided meditation with Kristin Neff.
For survivors of trauma, there’s a treatment program called somatic therapy or somatic experiencing. If you want to learn more, the book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine is a good resource.
Five of Hearts - Shared Humanity and Compassion
The Five of Hearts introduces you to the self-compassion break. It’s a formal practice of bringing mindfulness, common humanity, and self-compassion to a challenging sensation or situation. These three components actively confront some of our bodies natural responses to challenging sensations - self-criticism (confronted by kindness), a feeling of isolation (confronted by common humanity), and rumination (confronted by mindfulness). By quieting these three natural reactions, you’ll be able to dampen your fight-flight-freeze response.
To start this exercise, take a few deep breaths, and call to mind a challenging situation. First, you’ll bring mindfulness in by labeling whatever is happening (e.g., I’m feeling sad). Then, you’ll remind yourself that other people struggle in a similar way (e.g, Other people who encounter situations similar to this feel like I am right now). Last, you’ll speak kindly to yourself (e.g, This situation is hard. I can see that you’re struggling).
A self-compassion break alone may be enough to soften your emotions and move on. This may be particularly helpful if you’re in a stressful situation that you can’t escape from, and you just need to find a way to make space to experience it without extreme discomfort. For stickier emotions, the self-compassion break may soften them enough for you to feel safe to explore what’s underneath.
You can work through a guided self-compassion break using this extremely short recording with Jamie-Lynn Tatera, short version with Kristin Neff, or medium-length one with Chris Germer.
Five of Clubs - Exploring Unmet Needs
The Five of Clubs encourages you to look underneath your emotions at what needs are currently unmet or partially met. The reason we do this is because our needs serve as an intermediary between our perception of the environment (such as our judgments about what someone else does) and our emotions. While our feelings and unmet needs are always valid, our interpretations of the world will always be colored by our internal state and our past experiences. If we understand what needs are going unmet or partially met, we can understand if we’re having a rational response to our environment, and can have clarity on if we need to ask for any specific behavior changes to have our needs met.
Like with the Five of Hearts (emotional labeling), examining unmet needs requires taking agency over our emotional process and understanding more fully what internal context we bring to the table when interpreting the outside world. To engage fully in a needs assessment, we have to shed moral judgments of what happened and just ask the question - what needs of mine are unmet or only partially met right now. A needs inventory like this one from the Center for Nonviolent Communication is helpful for answering this question.
Once you understand what needs are unmet, you can ask yourself what perceptions of your environment led to that and confirm if they’re accurate. If your need to feel understood is not met by someone’s behavior around you, you can ask them to state back their understanding to see if your perception is correct, and provide strategies for how they can communicate understanding in the future. If your need for independence is going unmet because you’re perceiving a partner as being restrictive, you can ask if your perception is correct, and talk about strategies for you to engage more with independence. Having a strong needs vocabulary can help you to avoid triggering defensive reactions in others because it short-circuits our natural inclination to label the moral worthiness of behavior around us. Because of that, taking agency of our own needs and emotional process makes us more likely to have our needs met even when that means requesting a change from others.
It’s important to remember that you can always try to meet your needs yourself and that, even if the unmet need is being triggered by a social interaction, the best resolution may not be the other person meeting your need. This can be particularly true if the unmet needs are rooted in trauma and past adversity.
It’s also important to remember that, if you communicate effectively with a second person about your feelings and unmet needs, and they respond dismissively or callously, you don’t have to accept it. If you are having a rational perception and someone is harming you, and they are unwilling to correct that, you can always draw boundaries or end relationships. If the situation triggering the unmet need can’t be remedied, the best way to meet your needs may be to leave the situation.
A Final Thought
Sometimes, challenging feelings can be so extreme that they put us into an overwhelmed state. Very little can be accomplished when you’re overwhelmed, so it’s important to first find a way to self-soothe, distract, or calm yourself before you explore the challenging sensations. The deck is full of activities that may help you down-regulate from feeling overwhelmed such as intentional distraction (Tens), exercise (Eights), or time outdoors (Sevens). You don’t always have to fully explore challenging feelings in the moment. Often, self-care requires you to acknowledge that they are present but too big to process, down-regulate from the peak of your emotional experience, and then come back and explore them more fully later.