How do we care for ourselves when we are in a bad mood? Every day I learn from my clients about how sadness, irritability, frustration, and depression present themselves in our lives. We need to honor those emotions, but it’s also important to create coping skills to move through them.
All of these are normal states but often the focus is on trying to get rid of our negative feelings as quickly as possible. When I was a child I heard “don’t cry” much more often than I ever heard “It’s ok to cry.”
Current research on resilience is clear that all emotions are normal, and that we are better off when we allow ourselves to both experience and expect the full range of our feelings.
However, negative emotional states can be much harder to tolerate! When the emotion that is being experienced is loneliness, grief, shame, guilt, pain, numbness, fear, or anxiety, we might prefer just to skip it. How is one to welcome and tolerate these feelings when they feel so bad?
Recognizing exactly WHAT you are feeling is a great first step. This concept has become known as “emotional granularity,” and it is the process by which you take the time to fully explore and name what you are feeling. It can be helpful to have a long list of emotions handy in order to do this. The reason it’s so important is that it gives you clues about what may have caused the emotion and what is the best way to work with it. Sadness, happiness and anger are such big basket emotions! Once you look further, it could be that what you are feeling is closer to something else, like indignant, content, or crestfallen.
Another strategy is giving yourself a “meta-moment” or a pause to be with whatever you are feeling. This pause is worthy of a newsletter itself. We are very quick thinkers! Humans tend to go from physiological awareness of an emotion right to creating a thought about that emotion and then directly to reacting to that thought and feeling combo in less time than it takes for a glass of water to reach your mouth. A pause, any pause you give yourself, allows you to slow down your process long enough to investigate, to discover just how this feeling presents itself in your body, and to make new decisions about how to respond.
The next step is to tend to yourself in whatever emotion you are feeling, in a kind way. I know that, for many of my clients, self-criticism is much more utilized than self-compassion. Internal self-talk can run the gamut from: “Don’t feel that! That is ______ (insert: unkind, ridiculous, stupid, etc.)” to blatant self-abuse like: “I am the worst” or “You wouldn’t feel this way if you were doing things right.” This is not helpful for tolerating an emotion! It turns the volume up on the feeling and creates more secondary feelings and thoughts that tend to escalate a negative mood rather than simply allowing it to be present. (It should be noted too that self-talk doesn’t always present itself as self-blame. A close second is “other” blame, such as “YOU are terrible and mean for making ME feel this way!”)
Whatever you are experiencing, tolerating its presence long enough to let it do its work will require kindness towards yourself, and patience. That is the only way to be safe enough to be able to feel it fully. I find it very helpful to remind myself that everyone feels this way (no matter what that feeling is, it’s probably true that I'm not the only one). Even then, and even after tons of my own work on myself, this is a challenge. It can take practice and dedication to learn how to be kind towards yourself. I have found it helpful for me to recognize that my compassion towards myself is directly related to the capacity for self-compassion in those closest to me. If I model it, they will pick it up.
Now what? Now that you are in the thick of the experience of an emotion, what does it feel like in your body? What does it want to do? Are tears coming? Do you need an angry walk? Would it help to write it down or call someone? Some of my emotions call for soothing, like an extra fuzzy sweater, or some hot tea and a blanket. Other emotions call for action: walk away, get out of the house, do some angry cleaning. Some emotions need to be communicated. They need a boundary, or comfort, or justice. Some just need to be felt and recognized.
How can we, collectively, continue the work of normalizing the expression of all our emotions? How can we first make room within ourselves to accept and welcome the full gamut of our emotional experiences and then how can we support our children and spouses and friends? How can we honor the harder emotions while also encouraging the expression of that emotion to be constructive rather than hurtful?
This year I want to invite my client and family community into a “back to basics” exploration of how emotions are felt and how they contribute to our thoughts and behaviors. To pair with this exploration, I will be researching and developing practices for self-compassion, and communication skills. It is my hope that the combination of these three skills together (emotional awareness, self-compassion, and communication) will serve as a positive adjunct to the therapeutic work I do with your kids, yourselves, and your families.
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