Emotional pain management is a skill that is extremely important and usually untaught. Kids are supposed to pick it up on their own, generally. Many parents even think that leaving kids to work through emotional pain on their own is the way to teach them.
This generally does not lead to the development of healthy methods for working with emotional pain, for the same reasons that children donât generally know how to do first aid if you just leave them with an injury: they donât have enough information to do that.
Emotional pain can include grief, heartbreak, and anxiety, but it also includes things people are less willing to name because they sound like moral failings instead of pain: envy, anger, and regret. Those often end up mentally relabeled as âhurtâ because being hurt has no moral weight. This obscures whatâs going on and makes it harder to figure out what to do. Bad managing of emotional pain leads to increased emotional pain, especially stress, frustration, and shame.
This is a system that I use that makes it easier for me to manage emotional pain. Feel free to take whatever parts of it are useful for you.
Step 1: What caused the feeling?
Figuring out why youâre upset is often easier than figuring out how youâre upset, and can help you to figure out what feelings you have about it. For instance, if the cause was in the past, then anxiety is less likely. If you know the feeling but not the cause, it can be useful to switch the order of this step and step 2.
Letâs say that Iâm really upset and itâs really unclear to me how I'm upset. two questions I find useful are:
Am I upset because of something that happened in the past, is happening now, or will happen in the future?
Am I upset because of a system, an event, an ongoing situation, or a person?
Letâs say for the sake of the example that Iâm upset because a stranger made a passing cruel comment about my appearance. It happened in the past, and was because of a person. This helps to build the foundation for the next steps.
A common and false assumption is that the amount of emotion youâre feeling and the seriousness of the event should match up. This is untrue. Sometimes you have no real reaction to serious trauma. Sometimes you implode because you lost your shoe. Itâs not useful to you to think about how much emotion you âshouldâ have about something.
Step 2: What is the feeling?
The event was a person being cruel to me about my appearance. Knowing that can help me to narrow it down, but the answer may not be the one that seems to âmake senseâ for what happened. Instead, itâs one that makes sense for who you are, what youâve experienced, and how you react.
Since theyâre a stranger, itâs not betrayal. There could be rejection, but Iâm not sure since I didnât care about them before they were cruel. Itâs definitely not shame- I know thatâs incorrect as soon as I consider it because itâs just, wrong.
Instead, it ends up being a mixture of loneliness and frustration. Loneliness, because to me it feels more alone for someone to be cruel than to not interact with them at all, and frustration, because I am struggling with understanding why they did it.
Step 3: Is this within my control?
If what upset you was beyond your control, itâs time to take care of yourself, because the only thing you can change here is how you feel. Changing that feeling isnât a matter of willpower. Instead, identifying the feeling informs how you take care of yourself to make that feeling lessen or go away.
I canât control what strangers say to me. Since the appearance comment made me feel lonely and frustrated, I should address those directly. For me personally, finding someone to hang out with and to vent to about it, going for some exercise in a group, or chilling with a pet would all work. I really recommend writing down what works for you for different emotional pains, so that youâre not trying to solve what to do when youâre in emotional pain.
If it is in your control, then itâs time for Step 4: Whatâs between me and this being solved?
Letâs say that instead of a stranger making the comment, it was the first thing that popped up when I looked at myself in the mirror. Thatâs in my control. So why did it happen?
Sometimes the answer is that you hadnât thought of it because this is the first time this has happened. Sometimes itâs that you never found the time. Sometimes itâs because you forgot. All of these are solvable. Perhaps I saw someone who looked similar get spoken to with the same cruelty, and I need to unpack that.
The tricky part here is that almost everyone has been taught that if something is in your control, and the barriers are solvable, then you should have done it already- causing shame to either show up or pile on, making the pain worse.
If shame shows up for you, the best thing you can do is put it in the queue. Itâs an emotional pain that will need to be managed, but itâs not the one youâre working on right now. If you let shame derail you from figuring out your barriers, then you will struggle to reach any solutions. You cannot solve a problem you do not understand.
Sometimes the answer reveals a deeper problem. Maybe the person I heard say that is my main support, and their negative comments are affecting my emotional health, but I canât afford to not have them.
Sometimes the barrier is that you donât have money. That you donât live in a safe location. That youâre too worn out to do anything. Problems that are either beyond your control, or need to be solved before you can even begin to address the problem that directly upset you. Whatever the root cause may be, not knowing it leads to frustration and shame, as you try to wrestle with something you can't do yet, or with the wrong problem entirely.
Trying to treat something you can change as something you canât leads to frustration with the problem cropping up repeatedly. Trying to treat something you canât change as something that you can is a recipe for shame. In both cases, stress piles on because you are using the wrong tool.
This is what works for me. If you don't have a method, I encourage you to try it out and see what works for you.
pixelskylines
kaledo-art
discoholicmusic
annaxmalina
vaporwave
