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
7 practicesHow long you have · Twenty minutes
Approach · Emotionally focused
When all you can say is that something happened and you went off, take it apart in five pieces: what set it off, how you read it, what your body did, what you made it mean, and what you wanted to do next.
Written out on paper it usually stops being a blur. You often find the trigger was small and the meaning was enormous, or that your body was already…
Going deeper into a feeling only helps if it is being put in order at the same time. Depth without order is just flooding.
So as the feeling rises, keep laying it out: this is what happened, this is what my body did, this is what I was afraid it meant. If your chest is…
Emptying the feeling out at somebody does not shift it, and being told what to do instead skips over it. What changes things is feeling it with someone who stays.
You can tell the difference from the inside. Venting has a rehearsed quality, the same phrases coming round again with the heat kept up. Advice…
Take one episode from this week and give it five lines: what set it off, how you read it, what happened in your body, what you took it to mean, and what you wanted to do.
Doing this with an actual event, rather than in general, is what makes it useful. Keep the lines short and resist tidying them into something more…
You cannot taste food you are eating fast. Feeling works the same way, so slow the pace until there is something to actually notice.
In practice that means one sentence at a time, with a pause after it, and questions like what happened in you just then. Both of you will want to…
When you are trying to reach a feeling, stay with the actual sentence that caused it rather than paraphrasing it into something milder.
She said you are too difficult. Said again, gently, it keeps the moment alive in the room instead of turning it into a memory being reported.…
A friend or a counsellor telling you that you are not a monster helps, and it only takes you so far. The shame usually sits with one particular person, and it eases most when that person hears the thing and stays.
So aim a disclosure carefully rather than widely. Choose the person the shame is actually about, pick a moment with room in it, and say the small…