Areas › Low mood and hard feelings
Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
Narrowed down
3 practicesTheme · Tolerate distress
How long you have
Approach · DBT skills
When · Any ordinary day
Accepting reality as it is means dropping the fight with what has already happened. It does not mean staying somewhere that is still harming you.
The two get confused often, usually by people who were told to be patient by whoever benefited from their patience. A rough test: acceptance is for…
A hard feeling is not damage and it is not a bad attitude. It is a feeling, meant to be felt, and the only real question is at what pace.
Plenty of people were raised to treat their own sadness or anger as a failure of character, so the feeling arrives and shame arrives just behind it.…
Before you go anywhere near the hard memory, you need to be able to stay in your own body while something difficult is happening in it. That capacity is part of the work, not a delay before it starts.
Phase based approaches put this first for a plain reason: people who cannot bear the arousal either drop out or push through and come away worse. If…