Welcome to part 2 of the miniseries mentioned in my previous post. A short recap: feeling shitty sucks, and avoiding emotions REALLY sucks, because when you don’t find a healthy way to deal with what’s going on, it builds up and explodes. This post is going to be about how to take stock and process the emotions you are experiencing. Which means looking at the events that have taken place and how you felt with in each one of those situations.
Why?
Why should we do this? Because it’s a good way to get everything out in the open, get it off of your chest, doing this literally feels like a weight has been lifted, or at least it has in my experience. There is also another important reason, it is so you can see if there is a pattern. If you are able to identify a pattern, you can work at resolving it!
How does this help?
By stating your emotions, or the issues that caused those feelings, it essentially takes their power away. For me writing everything down, rage writing is what I call it, felt amazing! Looking at the scribbles, frantically written list and half written paragraphs, made me feel a tad bit better but also made me seem foolish for having some of those feelings.
Let me clarify, I believe that no feeling is foolish, but… Being completely irate because of some shit someone else said about me, seemed ridiculous because none of it was true. So I dug a little deeper, and asked my self why that pissed me off. The answer was simple, I wasn’t as mad as I was hurt. Hurt, that a family member would say things like that about me. Hurt that this person spoke about me when I wasn’t around. And yet more hurt because what they said wasn’t true, and the fact that others believed it. It’s heartbreaking to have a realization like that
This is why writing it all down helps. You can get to the root of your feelings, it will help you better see what is really going on, and how you can fix it! Bringing these feelings to the light, is also helpful because you are able to see if your projecting those feelings into areas of your life where they don’t belong. Because of what was said about me, I started questioning everything. Lashing out in anger because one of the girls asked to do something or have someone over. Or better yet, cutting everyone off because if one or two people had those opinions of me, then surly everyone else did as well. Projecting my own hurt feelings into everyday life made things pretty crappy.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What are you feeling?
- Why are you feeling this way?
Make sure to dig deep was it a situation or something someone else said?
- When did you start feeling this way?
- What have you thought or felt since then?
- What do you need to over come this?
Grab some pen and paper, write it all out without thinking of proper grammar or punctuation. Don’t leave anything out, even happy moments need to be shown too. Write some curse words, cry, don’t worry yourself about penmanship, no one is going to see this except for you! Typing can also work, this process is really just about what works well for you.
What I did when I wrote all my bothersome feelings and pent up crap out, I felt like my hand was going to fall off. I cried and experienced some anxiety, but I kept going. After doing this, I slept better than I have in a long while! The next morning, I woke up with a renewed sense of purpose, I didn’t feel like I was going to explode, thus is the glory of rage writing!
I gave myself an entire day to process what I had written, truthfully, some of the things on my list I am still processing. Healing doesn’t happen over night, it takes time and commitment. This will be what some people need, just write it out and be done. Others, like myself, need to take further action, in the next few blog posts, I will talk about how I release these feelings and why it’s important!
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[…] Doing this gets the stress from the day out into the air. Journaling helps with extremely tumultuous life events because if you don’t feel comfortable talking to a friend, you can write it all out. Essentially you are talking to a friend, yourself, but in a very non-judgemental way! Writing is a great way to get to the root cause of the problem. See my previous post called “The Glory of Rage Writing!” […]