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
5 practicesHow long you have
Approach · Trauma informed
When · Any ordinary day
With someone carrying old shame, ask about the closeness itself. Is it alright that I am sitting here with you? Would a bit more space help? Then adjust, and let them see you adjust.
Small changes work best. Shifting your chair back slightly, looking away for a moment, softening your voice, then checking what that was like for…
Shame speaks in one flat sentence: I am bad. Notice that it never offers evidence, it just announces a verdict.
Because the claim covers all of you, no good day can disprove it. That is what makes it different from ordinary regret, which points at one thing you…
You were the child. They were the adults. Say it as often as you need to, because shame will keep quietly filing it the other way round.
It is not an argument to win, more a fact to keep returning to. When a memory arrives with you cast as the guilty one, try describing the same scene…
When a child cannot stop what is happening, the mind often settles on the one explanation that leaves some control: it must be me. Being powerless and being at fault are not the same thing, though they can feel identical.
Try separating what was genuinely within your reach at that age from what you assumed, or were told, was your job. A child cannot make a parent stop…
A child facing a frightening parent often reaches for the safer story: I am the bad one and they are fine. It costs the child their sense of worth and buys them a world that still makes sense.
If that bargain feels familiar, notice that it was clever rather than foolish. A small person who depends on someone cannot afford to know that…