PossumZelda

This is the whole game after a certain amount of runs.

It may sound woo woo but it’s an important skill capitalism and hyper individualism have robbed us of as human beings.

Learn to process your emotions. It will improve your mental health and quality of life. Emotions serve a biological purpose, they aren’t just things that happen for no reason.

1. Pause and notice you’re having a big feeling or reaching for a distraction to maybe avoid a feeling. Notice what triggered the feeling or need for a distraction without judgement. Just note that it’s there. Don’t label it as good or bad.

2. Find it in your body. Where do you feel it? Your chest? Your head? Your stomach? Does it feel like a weight everywhere? Does it feel like you’re vibrating? Does it feel like you’re numb all over?

3. Name the feeling. Look up an emotion chart if you need to. Find the feeling that resonates the most with what you’re feeling. Is it disappointment? Heartbreak? Anxiety? Anger? Humiliation?

4. Validate the feeling. Sometimes feelings misfire or are disproportionately big, but they’re still valid. You don’t have to justify what you’re feeling, it’s just valid. Tell yourself “yeah it makes sense that you feel that right now.” Or something as simple as “I hear you.” For example: If I get really big feelings of humiliation when I lose at a game of chess, the feeling may not be necessary, but it is valid and makes sense if I grew up with parents who berated me every time I did something wrong. So I could say “Yeah I understand why we are feeling that way given how we were treated growing up. That’s valid.”

5. Do something with your body that’s not a mental distraction from the feeling. Something where you can still think. Go on a walk. Do something with your hands like art or crochet or baking. Journal. Clean a room. Figure out what works best for you.

Especially for those of us with CPTSD or who are emotional abuse survivors. If you have trauma related to that, it's highly likely that you've been taught that your feelings are "wrong", "a burden", or "out of proportion" if not perfectly mid-line and peaceful. So, a lot of the time, we'll have a knee-jerk reaction to feel panic/shame/guilt just from identifying that we're experiencing things like anger, discomfort, wanting to stop/not do something, anything that needs action other than agreement/participation. We'll try to either pretend the feeling isn't happening - masking it, ignoring it, etc. Or, if we force ourselves to acknowledge it, there's this rush to fix it or stop it. To try and speed through the processing part so we can return to something less "abrasive" which therefore feels safer.

There is nothing wrong with feeling "bad" things. An emotion - ALL of them - is a reaction to a stimulus of some kind. You are mad for a reason. It might not be logical and as the OP says, it might not be proportional, but it's not incorrect. It is normal and human to get mad at things sometimes. Managing what you DO about the feeling is good, it's not a license to do whatever you want, but forcing yourself to work through it/get over it as quickly as possible isn't necessary. You don't have to feel bad just for having it.