Feeling Feelings

I joked with Tracy that rejoining Facebook has killed my blog - so here's an attempt to resurrect it.  And with an actual long serious topic no less, go figure.  (Though you might be forced to endure a blog about FanX next.)

In dealing with my anxiety disorder and depression this year I went to a really fantastic counselor who gave me a lot of tools to try out in an attempt to help me manage my issues and be happier.   One of those many tools was a really basic but useful set of steps for dealing with emotions.    This, we decided, was an important thing for me to figure out since at the height of my problems with these illnesses my panic attacks often seemed divorced from any obvious outside cause, or at least, any cause that merited the level of panic I was experiencing.  And as many of you already know, my worst moments of anxiety, depression, and panic often come AFTER the worst of the stress has already passed and started to calm down.

At face value the first two steps in this process seem extremely obvious.  When you start to feel out of sorts you're supposed to identify the emotion your feeling (identifying the cause of the emotion if possible), and then actually allow yourself to feel it for few minutes.  Seems almost silly right?  I mean if you're mad, of course you're mad, and what good does it due to dwell, for any length of time, on the fact that you're mad? 

Well, you'd be surprised.  In my experience if you allow yourself to actually feel mad, or sad, or scared about what's bothering you, instead of running from the emotion or trying to shut it off a couple of things happen.  First, you get some perspective.  Small things, properly dealt with in the moment, logically considered and worked through, rarely come back to bite you emotionally.  On the other hand, if it's big, you can realize that your feelings make perfect sense for the situation, and you can ask for help or make a bigger plan for dealing with them.

Second, identifying emotions in the moment actually lets you turn your energy on the actual cause of what's bothering you.    And often if you turn the full force of logic and positivity on that originating source, it can be extremely helpful.

I have two examples from the last week - one small and one pretty darn big that illustrate this point.

The small one comes from today.  For the last two days I kept hearing about people having Super Bowl Parties, and everyone, even people who didn't actually like football seemed to be excited about going to one.   So after Church today when I came home I was feeling a little sad about the fact that I had no Superbowl Party to go to.  I even said so to Tracy.  It was absolutely ridiculous, and since I knew it was ridiculous I kept ignoring the thought and trying to focus on something else.  Then - remembering all of this good counselor training I actually allowed myself to feel a little sad about it.  Once I did that my logical brain chimed in - I've already had a really busy weekend and I was really thankful for my quiet Sunday and I realized that if  I had been given the choice to go to a party I would have chosen to stay home.   It wasn't just the Pollyanna right answer.  Because I'd actually worked through it my weird bit of sadness went away and really FELT happy about being home.

The much bigger one comes from last weekend.  Last Sunday night I saw a cute video online that featured a dad and a baby.   And it made me really sad and jealous and all sorts of crap.  Now keep in mind, I don't even actually KNOW the people in this video, it was simply the image that set me off -  as in sick to my stomach, fighting back tears, upset.  It seemed like the most bizarre, truly unstable reaction in the world, so bizarre that when Tracy asked me what was wrong, I didn't even want to explain it because it seemed so nuts.

...Then I made myself stop and think about it.  My weekend had started with a baby shower for a colleague at work on Friday, which was a lovely and fun event, but also featured a conversation by several of the women about how a billion (okay I'm exaggerating) women in the Library were pregnant.  Saturday morning I got to hold the adorable baby of a friend of mine, a baby who seems to really like me.  Sunday at Church we sat surrounded by darling families, one of whom showed up at my doorstep later that day to ask me a question and in the process of that visit the little girl gave me a little sparkly bear sticker.  Each of these events, in and of themselves, is actually a good thing, a very happy, fun thing - that I usually love.  But that weekend, all piled together and topped with a ridiculous online video, reminded me of things I want, for both myself and Tracy, that we're probably never going to have. So I told Tracy what my, now totally understandable, tears were about, and we talked and I felt better...and because of that, well, I still love holding cute babies and showing off pictures of my nieces.  But if I had run from those tough emotions, or tried to drown them in some mindless activity, it surely would have come back to haunt me.

Anyway, I was thinking about this a lot tonight, and I felt compelled to share.   It made me feel like I'm getting healthier and better at dealing with this stuff all the time.   Many of you who read this blog help me on a regular basis, and I'm extremely grateful for that.