Emotional Awareness 101

EMOTIONAL AWARENESS 101 – ONLINE GROUP

March 8 – April 26

An online 8-week group experience for anyone looking to stop patterns of emotional reactivity and shift to a space of emotional awareness that will lead to personal and relational empowerment.

Led by Hillary Geffner, LMFT

Cost: $100/session* ($800 total for all 8 sessions)

Commitment: 1.5 hours each week

Schedule: Every Tuesday at 6pm ET / 3pm PT, March 8 – April 26

Where: hosted on Zoom! Be sure you are signed up with a zoom account and have the app downloaded on the device you’ll be using.

This is an online group for 8 people who are ready to end patterns of emotional reactivity.

Do any of these experiences resonate with you?

Difficulty maintaining your composure during emotional or heated conversations or disagreements?
Getting stuck dwelling on the past or worrying about what may happen in the future?
Feeling overwhelmed by the intensity of your emotions and lashing out or shutting down?
Struggling to understand what you are feeling and not knowing how to express yourself to the people around you?

Whether you are talking to friends, family, partners, or coworkers, it can be challenging to communicate through intense emotions, especially around sensitive topics. This cycle of reactivity and lack of self-awareness in our emotional process can lead us down a path of frustration, disconnection, misunderstandings, and perpetual reactivity.

The problem is not the existence of your feelings- it is how we understand, express, and manage our intense feelings that needs work. The way to change and interrupt these cycles is through emotional awareness.

Strengthening our emotional awareness, allows us to become more effective communicators, feel more equipped to meet our own needs, and express ourselves to others. This process is both an individual and a relational experience. Having confidence in our own emotional awareness makes us less likely to be threatened by or caught up in the emotional reactivity of our partners, friends, and family. This learning is essential to fostering a deeper understanding of ourselves and strengthens our connections to those around us. Through this work, you can shift from impulsive reactivity to active and mindful engagement.

In this group, you will gain skills, insight, and tools that will aid in your ability to navigate your emotional experience. Gaining emotional awareness to slow down reactivity will enhance the quality of your life and relationships. The more you know about your own emotional experience, the better equipped you will be to face life challenges, develop resilience, allow yourself to give and receive love, and ultimately feel empowered by emotion rather than overtaken by it.

Week 1: Emotions & Reactivity

We’ll begin this group by getting acquainted with the definition of reactivity, the role of emotion in relational experiences, and the many ways emotions are felt and expressed. We will begin to understand our relationship to our emotions; the triumphs and struggles of managing & experiencing emotions. Here we will start to uncover what being in tune with emotions means.

Week 2: The Limits of Labels and Language

We live in a world that values labels. We rely on language to code to ourselves and others how we feel. An important part of working with your emotions is being able to have the language to accurately describe how you are feeling. But too often our language around emotions is limited and generic. Feeling misunderstood by others is painful; feeling like we don’t understand ourselves is scary. Getting granular with language around emotions and how to talk about feelings is a crucial step in slowing reactivity and building emotional awareness.

Week 3: The role of our physical body

Our internal system is always communicating with us, but we may not always be listening. The mind and body are intrinsically tied; tuning into the physical sensations we experience is how we can decode what our bodies are saying. Our task is to get curious about the internal bodily experience of emotion. In this session, we will discuss how to recognize when emotion shows up in our body, how to connect with the physical experience within our body, and how to decode what these sensations are trying to communicating to us. We will deconstruct the myth that emotion comes out of nowhere, without warning. Exploring the connection between our physical and emotional world provides the space to slow down, listen, and connect to what is happening inside of us.

Week 4: How the outside comes in

Our external systems play an integral role in how we process, understand and perceive our emotional experiences. Believe it or not, there is no universally accepted definition of emotion. Our origin stories play a large role in how we interpret and experience emotions. Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly influenced by the people and systems around us. Throughout our lives we are collecting information from our family, our relationships, our culture, and our society that shape and define what we believe is acceptable vs unacceptable ways interact with ourselves and the world around us. In this session we will ask the questions: Where did I learn this? Who taught me what is right or wrong? What role did my family, society, culture play in how I express myself? Understanding all the external influences on your emotional experience will help you to decide if your current way of expressing yourself is working for you and give you the agency to choose what feels best.

Week 5: Right to feel, responsibility to regulate

It can be incredibly difficult to share how you are feeling in a way that honors both yourself and the people around you. Things like previous traumas, feeling unsafe in current or past dynamics, or lacking trust in self and your environment can derail even the best-intentioned dynamics. There may be times you don’t recognize the version of you who comes out in emotionally charged situations. Although it can be incredibly scary, daunting, frustrating, or confusing, when this happens, this is actually your nervous system responding to your experience. The good news is how and why we show up in reactivity is not a fixed permanent experience; we have the ability to work with our internal system to change these dynamics. When we understand, honor, and shine a light on where the reactivity is coming from, we have a much better chance at learning how to regulate. All emotions are legitimate; our task is not to judge whether or not we should feel something. Instead, it is our responsibility to understand our internal experience, and where this reactivity is coming from so that we can express how we feel in a healthy and constructive manner. This week, we will learn how and when to de-escalate. Addressing the components of self-soothing, coping, and regulation.

Week 6: Pitfalls and Challenges with Emotional Expression

Feeling intense emotions can be overwhelming and sometimes we simply don’t know how to respond to them. There are many ways we resist and silence our emotions. It is natural to not want to feel a negative emotion. Some of us feel suspicious of a good emotion, fearing it will be taken from us or we will be blindsided waiting for the next shoe to drop. In this session, we will address why and how we turn away from our emotions and how we can learn to turn towards and embrace your emotion. While we cannot control whether we feel something or not, we are not powerless to our feelings. Blocking, avoiding, judging, or ignoring our feelings only increases reactivity. When we learn how to tune into our experience and observe our experience, we are more equipped to cope with the experience and less likely to respond through impulse alone.

Week 7: The Space Between Feeling & Responding

Emotions are data; they signal that something is happening within and around us. This week we will learn the skills for communication, mindfulness, the importance of boundaries, the role of curiosity in emotional awareness, and how to communicate through high-intensity emotions. We will explore the role of vulnerability and safety when expressing emotion. Strong communication allows you to get better at taking pause when necessary, ask clarifying questions, or advocate stronger. When we build a strong relationship with our own emotional process and trust ourselves, we are much better equipped to express and communicate effectively.

Week 8: Breaking Cycles & Increasing Empowerment

We often feel like we are having the same challenges over and over; we’ve seen this movie before but don’t know how to stop it. In our last session, we will identify the role of emotion in repetitive cycles. We will discuss how the illusion of control, the dread of living in uncertainty, and the fear of not being heard all contribute to being trapped in conflict loops with self and others. Building on content from each week, we will increase confidence to break out of repetitive cycles of emotional reactivity and impulsiveness. Through this learning, you will decrease defensiveness, approach your emotional experience with compassion and curiosity, enhance connectivity with self & others, and feel more equipped to manage your reactivity.

Spots for this workshop are very limited, to facilitate a safe and intimate environment for everyone – we are only accepting 8 participants, so fill out the application below to be considered for the group!

*Three payment options:

1. Full Amount ($800) upon confirmation or

2. Two Payments

$400 upon confirmation & $400 March 28th

3. Three Payments

$200 upon confirmation, $300 March 21th, $300 April 4th

Emotional Awareness 101