For your question regarding emotional health, there was a combination of things I did, and still continue to do so.
The first plan of attack was IC. My IC was helpful, but not as helpful as I wanted. But at the same time I probably had unrealistic expectations of IC curing my emotional problems. Talking to her allowed me to really figure out what some of my problem behaviors were and then I did a lot of internal reflection to see the root causes of it.
I'll give you one concrete example.
Whenever my kids didn't do as I asked them, I would feel disrespected. When exW wouldn't do things the way I wanted or messed up some sort of system, I would feel disrespected. It was as dumb as not putting dishes in the dishwasher right or meddling in the kitchen when I was cooking.
My IC challenged me, very graciously, about the concept of disrespect. She just asked me to consider why I felt disrespected. And then took on the role of the kids or my exW and played what they might be thinking or doing. I didn't like getting challenged at first. But as we dug deeper, it came down to my need to control the environment I was around. The control gave me a sense of stability. Then we went deeper to understand why I needed to feel that level of control. It came down to my childhood traumas of abandonment and neglect from both parents and how I have always living in survival mode. My survival mode required me to have control so I didn't feel destabilized like when I was a child and a youth. IC made me take a wider perspective, but she did it gradually over time by picking my arguments and thoughts apart slowly so that I could see differently.
And then once I knew why I was having these behaviors, I started experimenting with taking different approaches that would require me to let go control. And I did that gradually and it was kinda maddening at first. But over time my kids relaxed around me. They saw that I was more predictable in my emotional reactions to adverse things. I also relaxed and it improved my ability to deal with my emotions and understand them. My survival strategy had been to suppress emotions and this allowed me to slowly let them out and manage them.
There is a quote by Viktor Frankl that I live by and it goes something like this: Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
I put that into practice and I do it every day now. It doesn't mean I don't feel the emotion or understand it, but I have the power to choose how to react to it. This has been a game changer for me.
Another thing that helped my emotional health in tandem with this work and personal reflections was to engage in meditation. I aim to do at least 60 minutes a day. Again, this has been a game changer.
Other books/works that have helped me:
Emotional Agility by Susan David The Work by Byron Katie - you can find her stuff online for free
Reading biographies of high achievers - Rich Roll (Finding Ultra) & David Goggins (Can't Hurt Me).
Listening to a lot of podcasts - Rich Roll, Impact Theory, Gary Vee, Finding Mastery, Aubrey Marcus etc.
You have to go do the internal deep work. What are your emotional stop gaps from life? Work with someone who can help you uncover these things and then outside of IC sessions, take the time to reflect and parse through those experiences. I kept a journal that helped me put down thoughts on paper. I thought it was a useless exercise, but again very very helpful. I gained insights from it that I didn't even know.
