I thought, Oh, it would be fun to have a giveaway and do a contest. And I should know by now not to underestimate all of my coffee and pearls ladies and Larissa’s fit. And Holy ladies, we have been putting work out into the world for a long time. So even though this is a baby podcast you guys just came out for us in such a huge way. And so I just wanted to read two of them today. One came from Megan and she said, I think this is my new favorite podcast. I love everything that Sterling creates. Thank you. And I’m so excited for this project. These ladies speak so beautifully and give such great advice about how to live more intentionally. The advent episode is amazing and I can’t wait to try some new traditions this season with my family. I agree, Megan, since I didn’t do the advent episode, I also can say that it was absolutely amazing.

And I am also going to try out some of those tips as well that she shared next Kaitlin shares pure gold. If you do nothing else for yourself today, listen to this podcast. I love that. She says this, even if the are screaming in the background, so grateful for the wisdom here, it has really helped me feel confident in my mothering and my faith longtime fan of Sterling. So I can say confidently that this podcast is going to change lives. Give it a listen. Thank you, Caitlyn so much. This is going to be by far the best work I’ve ever done. And Larissa just brings such a lovely balance to what I do. And I’m so excited for her to share some of her tips about stress and overwhelm and parenting teens. And it’s just going to be so great. So with that, let’s dive into the episode today.

I’m going to be talking about why feelings matter. And I think that women, you know, we come into this world and God gives us the gift of receptivity, right? So men are supposed to go forth. They go outward into the world and women have been created to receive. We receive into our bodies. We receive children. We receive people into our homes. It is just a special gift that God has given us. And we also receive a lot of feelings. It is one of our gifts, our ability to feel things strongly and to know what our children are feeling and what the feeling of our home is. And somewhere along the way, not surprisingly the devil and our culture twisted this to make us feel like we are crazy. Well, you’re just so emotional, right? It must be that time of the month. And we received these negative messages about how feelings are bad and women shouldn’t feel as much as they should as they do.

And so I just want to say, first of all, that those are just lies. Now. I think that reacting as emotional adults means that we can have strong feelings and not scream at people, right? So, you know, if we are losing our tempers often with our children or husbands, we can check ourselves in that way. But having strong feelings is a wonderful gift from God. And the way I like to think about it, my coach shared this with me is that our feelings are Lee. It was her husband actually, just to be clear, feelings are actually like the lights that show up in our car and the dashboard when something is wrong, it’s a masculine analogy, but hanging up. So when the check engine light comes on, it just tells us like, Hey, something is up. You need to investigate what’s going on. Right? And our feelings are just like that.

They are signals from God to say, Hey, slow down, pay attention to what is happening. So when we have happy feelings of joy and exuberance and enjoyment, those are signals from God to slow down and say, Hey, pay attention. Is there something here that you should slow down and be thankful for it? Is this a moment when you can connect to me your creator who gave you these gifts? Maybe I’m trying to show you how important this person is in your life. Maybe I’m trying to show you a gift that I’ve given you, that you’re not using. I have a client who just absolutely comes alive when she dances. And so to me, it’s very obvious that God has given her feelings. When she is dancing to say, mama, you are a dancer. That is a gift. That is your talent. How can we bring that out into the world more? And some of you feel this tugging on your heart that you should be doing something else, something that you’re not doing right now. And I want to challenge you. I want to invite you to pay attention to your feelings. Where do you feel excited? Where do you feel hopeful? Where do you feel at ease? Where do you come alive? Pay attention to those feelings? God also gives us negative feelings and those are check engine lights as well. What’s going on with you, mama? Why are you feeling anxious or scared?

Why are you feeling deprived or rejected? Why are you feeling lonely or belittled? Okay. We slow it down and we really pay attention to our feelings. And we get curious about them. They always tell us. Now they may tell us that we have a deep belief in our mind that is untrue. So you may have a deep belief that you are not good enough. And so you may experience something in your life, maybe pulling up your car to the, you know, kid drop off light. And you notice, you know, the other moms have really nice cards and yours is like held together with duct tape and you know, is not very pretty. And you might feel this wave of shame or not good enough

Because you have this thought.

I don’t have nice things. I’ll never fit in with them. And so you may find that. And even though that’s not true, it’s a lie. God may be using that feeling to show you, listen, daughter, you are believing a lie about yourself. You are worse more than rubies. I dreamed a view for millennia before I created you. I created you to be a mother right now. And I knew exactly what car you were going to be driving. And this life is perfect just for you and you are perfect for your life. So sometimes the feelings are designed to show us a lie that we are believing, and God is using that to say, pay attention. You need to do some cleanup work in your mind. It is time to pull out those weeds. And I want you to begin to slow down and listen to your feelings this week.

And if you are part of Catholic, mom’s social and want you to pop in there and we’re going to be talking about feelings and here’s, what’s so interesting to me. This was like the, your feelings for me. I, my Protestant neighbor who I don’t know very well, she’s been in my house one time she came into my house and she was, we were talking about marriage and she said, Oh, if you haven’t read this book, how we love, you should check it out. It was really great. And it really transformed my marriage. And I’m like, yes, I’m all in on marriage books. I love marriage books. So I went and got it and then bawled my eyes out. I feel like everyone should be assigned a personal therapist while they’re reading that book, because it’s so intense about your childhood and how you ended up loving the way that you love.

So there’s your warning, right? There’s your sticker right there. Like it’s intense. Have some tissues, you know, give yourself some space when you read it. But the book ended up being all about feelings and how we don’t communicate our feelings very well. And the authors say that they discovered this kind of late in their marriage. I want to say they were maybe 15 years in. And they immediately realized that they were not teaching their children, how to articulate their feelings and to be comfortable talking about their feelings all the time. And so they began doing this as a family and she talks about how the older kids were very resistant, but their youngest who I believe was five at the time that they began doing this. They said, now they’re all adults. The five-year-old is the most like happy and well adjusted of all of them because she never remembers a time when it wasn’t totally normal to just be honest about your feelings.

And so in that book, it had a huge list of feelings, words in the back. And then later I read a book about emotional childhood neglect. And that was written by a man who was not religious. The first book was written by a Christian couple and he had a very large feelings list. And then I recently took another class, which I feel like had nothing to do with anything of this. And they also had a five page list of feelings. And so I have this printed out and now my husband and I have serious conversations, no joke. We have a feelings list with us and we try to speak very slowly. And we tried to not use the words, happy, mad, sad, anxious. Right? Those are so common that I think they’ve lost a little bit of their power when you’re trying to explain to someone else what you’re feeling because anxious can mean, should I buy this dress in black or should I get it in Navy blue?

I’m not really sure an anxious can mean I’m about to have a panic attack because there are more than five people in their room I’m about to walk into. And that really triggers me. And so I just wanted to read a few of my words, words that I really love on this feelings list. And there must be a couple of hundred on them, but just to give you an idea of some words that are available to us yes. That are ones that we don’t tend to use very often. So one of them is blind-sighted Stoney. I feel Stony right now. I like that one also. I’m kind of a Stoney lady tolerant. I feel like I channel mr. Darcy sometimes with that one, I suppose I can tolerate this tender. I especially like using that word. When I think of my husband parenting the children, I try to tell him, and I really appreciate when he’s really tender with them honoring. I want to honor myself. I want to honor the Lord. I want to honor my children. Some of them are phrases like in the zone. I really like in the zone. Another great word for that is flow. Sure. We’ll be talking about flow later, absorbed, you know, anything absorbed can be a positive or a negative feeling on top of the world, withdrawn

Aching, crushed and missed.

Those are just some of the words that I really wanted to share with you guys, just as an example of how I think most of us can do a much better job communicating what we’re feeling, but if you’re like 99% of us, you weren’t taught how to feel your feelings and you weren’t taught how to express your feelings. And so I will put a link to a feelings list, and I want you to think about printing it out and having it with you the next time you’re trying to express yourself either to your husband or your children or to a friend in a serious conversation.

I’m just giving you

Space and being a little bit quiet and asking yourself,

What am I really feeling? Because when we look for a word beyond happy, sad, mad, when we get more specific, it’s a lot easier than to figure out what thought we were having that caused that emotion. And this podcast is going to focus so much on that. Our thoughts control our feelings one hundred percent of the time. It seems kind of incredible, but it’s true. And sometimes we can’t find the thoughts until the next day or two days later, I still experienced that like waves of strong emotion. And I can’t quite grasp the thought right away. And that’s okay. That’s why we’re going to be doing this work together. That’s why we recommend doing daily mindset work. And we’re going to be doing that together in the program that we launch after Christmas. Most of all, I just want you to begin to believe that your feelings are a gift from God. He gave you those feelings so that he could tell you something about your mind. They are the dashboard signals for, Hey, slow down, pay attention. You need to understand something here.

All right, ladies, that is what I wanted to share with you today. About feelings hop on over to Catholic. Mom’s social. If you want to chat about it. And I look forward to chatting with you next week. Thank you for listening. And remember mama, you were made for greatness.