I’ve trained myself not to give too much weight to the thoughts that come bundled with certain emotions usually because those thoughts are stupid or unhelpful, whereas I suspect the emotion itself might not be. A friend of mine (who’s a clinical psychologist) often reminds me that there’s a difference between intellectualising an emotion and actually sitting with it with the goal of feeling it fully and seeing what it has to offer. I still find that hard to do. I get why people who intellectualise their emotions (myself included) might end up going down the trauma rabbit hole, trying to ‘figure out what happened’ while I not sitting and feeling the emotions.
This post really resonates because the thoughts accompanying low-valence, high-arousal states like anger are often false narratives. And perhaps the real move is to not mess with that narrative, but to let the emotion shift on its own, as the internal state changes (hunger, tiredness, etc).
I’ve trained myself not to give too much weight to the thoughts that come bundled with certain emotions usually because those thoughts are stupid or unhelpful, whereas I suspect the emotion itself might not be. A friend of mine (who’s a clinical psychologist) often reminds me that there’s a difference between intellectualising an emotion and actually sitting with it with the goal of feeling it fully and seeing what it has to offer. I still find that hard to do. I get why people who intellectualise their emotions (myself included) might end up going down the trauma rabbit hole, trying to ‘figure out what happened’ while I not sitting and feeling the emotions.
This post really resonates because the thoughts accompanying low-valence, high-arousal states like anger are often false narratives. And perhaps the real move is to not mess with that narrative, but to let the emotion shift on its own, as the internal state changes (hunger, tiredness, etc).