I would like to preface this piece by saying that professional help is relatively easy to come by if feelings of hopelessness plague you more often than not. Please seek it. When you find someone that is a good fit for you, it can change your life.
When you find yourself going down the shame/depressive/anger/sadness/bitterness spiral, one way to deal with it is to take a step back and observe your thoughts, feelings and/or emotions.
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash
Be the observer of what is happening for you in that moment and ask yourself the why, what and how questions.
Why - are you thinking/feeling/emoting in this way?
What - was the person/circumstance that triggered this reaction?
How - can you respond next time instead of reacting?
When you step back and look at things objectively, looking at the bigger picture, you can generally see the whole situation from a clearer and less reactive point of view.
Journaling can help getting the chaotic mess in your head onto some sort of organised mess on paper.
It acts kind of like a sounding board. Allowing you to see what's really happening from another perspective.
I know what you're thinking - sometimes you just can't help but feel how you're feeling and it's really hard to "step back" and I get it.
Sometimes I feel exactly the same way but if that is the case, what I would then suggest is to feel exactly what you're feeling fully.
No distracting yourself with food or television or drugs and just feel it. Feel it all, no matter how painful.
It may help to see emotional pain as nothing more than electrical signals traveling from your body to your brain.
What really does help is when you accept how you're feeling instead of doing everything in your power to not feel.
It makes it so much easier to deal with.
This is when you metaphorically 'let go' in the rapids you have just encountered on your once peaceful river and allow them to take you wherever it is that you're going anyway, just with less resistance.
You know the rapids mellow out eventually and they become a peaceful river once again.
It's the resistance of what is happening that makes things ten times harder than they have to be.
Knowing these steps are very handy tools to have in your tool belt.
It's funny that I have known about these for such a long time but when you're in the heat of it, you can forget about any and all tools that you may have at your disposal.
That's ok.
As far as I know, I haven't met anyone who was perfect that has it all figured out and mastered. I also haven't traveled to any monasteries, so maybe I'm wrong...It's happened before.
Just know that when you forget yourself and fly into a reactive whatever, you can just have a little giggle at yourself because you're human and it's completely natural. Once you've done that, you can resume the tool application procedure.
Be kind to yourself because sometimes, you is all you got!
Sending all the love.
Rx