uncanny city garden

"Water and sun. And perfectly well drained soil. No, not that sun through the windows. INTO MY CAPILARIES STRAIGHT OR NOTHING."

aerin frankel x the locked tomb

How to identify, and then deal with, your emotions

Emotional regulation skills

Conflict resolution skills

Creating and enforcing boundaries

Dialectical Behavioural Therapy skills

Emotional intelligence ideals to aim for

Axes of self-care/wellbeing

Self-care self-evaluation (find out where you’re starting)

How to make a self-care checklist

How to start a self-care habit

Reparenting resources

Crash Course Psychology

KhanAcademy: Understanding the Self and Society (some units more relevant than others)

Emotional education activities for children and teens

I think it’s really important to approach how to handle your feelings from the starting foundation that our emotions are not the discrete, singular phenomena we call them. We say we feel sad, happy, relaxed, or angry, but these names are useful simplifications to communicate things that are much more complex. Our emotions are a continual vital function of our bodies and brains, just the same as our heart rate or blood sugar and such, what we speak about with individual names is breaking up the different relative experiences of our nonstop, dynamic chemical and psychological equilibrium. I make it a point to emphasize something complex like this bc it conveys a lot of important things about how to care for your needs and disrupts some harmful common ideas and norms all at once.

First, your feelings are as constant, dynamic, and involuntary as any other autonomic process of your body. You don’t control them by force of will alone, and you can’t just turn them off, nor should you. Feelings don’t carry fault, you don’t make them work the way that they do and no one can be blamed simply for having them, they’re a part of how you work even when they hurt and that’s not something anybody deserves to be judged or punished for. They’re also important tools adapted to help you, even the negative ones, bad emotions aren’t bad for you to feel you need them for the same reason your body needs to feel physical pain, it indicates to you that something is wrong and you have a need that needs to be addressed. Trying too hard to make bad emotions just disappear can end up digging you into habits that only hurt you in the long run and don’t ultimately make the issue better, unmet needs will still be there when you’re not looking, so you can instead learn to think of managing your emotions as learning to answer what they’re asking for. I use the language of caring for your feelings rather than dealing with them for that reason, they’re something you can respond to constructively and they’re part of you, not a burden.

Second, feelings are indeed pretty unreliable a lot of the time, that’s just the same as any other aspect of our organic and fallible bodies and minds. The different processes of our brains, be they emotions, recall of memories and information, conscious reasoning, unconscious biases, or executive functions, are all imperfect and will fail plenty of the time on their own, because they rely on one another to check and balance each others limitations. Your emotions are important, and dismissing them outright to excess can do you a lot of harm, but it’s also perfectly ok to conclude sometimes based on your understanding of a situation and your own and others needs that your feelings are telling you something you shouldn’t listen to. We get angry at people over little things, we sometimes feel hurt by interpreting things in a way we know wasn’t intended or isn’t really being said, we judge quickly and harshly and have to correct for our own biases, none of that is a bad thing. “I don’t need to listen to this” does not mean “I shouldn’t have felt this way in the first place”, you can’t really help that fact and nothing good comes of blame that doesn’t help to change voluntary actions. It’s ok to realize when your feelings are telling you one thing but coming from a very different place, you’re not doing anything wrong there and that’s still a need that you can learn to address without acting on something that’ll hurt you or punishing yourself for what you feel, there’s no such thing as a thought crime.

Finally, your feelings are astronomically more complex than can really be put into words, and are at no point ever static. Nothing in the human brain is ever static, we don’t load things into memory or have a switch to turn on or off for our feelings, what happens inside us are staggeringly complex electrical and chemical processes with no start and no end, only changes in its workings, and that can be really good to keep in mind. Emotions aren’t just staying the same no matter how much they may feel that way, even the suffocating constant ones that feel like they never end, because that’s not just one single phenomena it’s a state that ebbs and flows and is always responding to what’s happening around and inside you. That can be a really important answer to asking “what’s the point?” when things are bad, because how bad or what kind of bad always matters and little victories and ways to shift that state in a better direction still have value even if they don’t fix everything at once. Be patient with yourself, the dynamic state of yourself doesn’t reform completely in a day, but it IS always receptive to change. It’s also good to bear this in mind when you struggle to communicate your emotions, feelings have a coastline effect, there is no degree of magnification where you no longer have new information to find. It can feel like overwhelming emotional states are just what they are and there’s no way to encompass that in a sentence, but you don’t need to get across everything all at once, you can start broad and simple and then dig deeper layer by layer. What’s brought up these emotions at this moment, what makes those influencing factors elicit the feelings they do, what other emotions and thoughts have this emotional state been bringing up for you, how does this emotional state shape how you behave and how you look at new things in the moment?

It's literally just a goose.