today my therapist told me that sometimes negative feelings like guilt, anxiety, self loathing, etc are like the hiccups. they’re uncomfortable, we don’t like them, there’s no way to turn them off; they can even be incapacitating for a while. we don’t always know where they came from or when they’ll go away, so sometimes instead of focusing on why we feel a certain way we need to get better at recognizing its temporary nature, keeping perspective, and enduring discomfort. i feel like a lot of self-improvement rhetoric is about pinpointing specific causes for negative thoughts/behaviors so you can eradicate them, but people with chronic mental illness really need to work on allowing themselves to experience these feelings without going into a downward spiral.
with the caveat that mindfulness isn’t for everyone, it can be useful here. “oh crud, I’m feeling X again. well, there it is. this sure is happening right now.” acknowledging without interrogating or trying to draw conclusions.
what I like about it is it gives me room to feel the feeling, but also to step back one and say “yep, that’s a feeling I’m having,” which is better than “I am this feeling and this is forever.”
(how much time have I wasted trying to figure out WHY I’m feeling something when it was really just the equivalent of a random muscle cramp?)
