Emotions are interesting. To be going along and all of the sudden a pang of pain from nowhere right in the center of your chest. Because we rarely talk about these experiences it makes me wonder how often this happens to other people. For me, I’d say it happens at least 4 to 5 times a day. These specific instances do tend to come and go quickly as they do not seemingly appear to be connected to any conscious thought or event. But during these occurrences, the only way to describe the feeling is that it just feels like for that moment, everything is not ok. That I am not ok. I’ve attempted at times to try to put my finger on the exact issue. My brain of course wants to solve and fix the issue. So it digs and does some analysis, scanning previous instances of “not being ok” to see if there is any sort of a match. Some things seem somewhat related but nothing fits perfectly. It is sort of a mixture of fear, loneliness, jealousy maybe, anger. I don’t know. It is like a hairball of bad emotions that got blown out from under the bed by a stiff breeze. After being unable to find an exact match, usually, I just resume whatever it was I was doing and before long it is gone.
There are lots of things I’ve learned through therapy concerning thoughts and emotions. I’ve learned that emotions are neither good nor bad, they just are. Emotions oftentimes are what can help drive some sort of action. It is a tool that the brain uses to get us to do something. If we feel good, the feel-good emotions promote us to do whatever it was that made us feel good, again. If we feel bad, the feel bad emotions help drive us to avoid something or change a behavior. The brain and body work with the system it was given to try to make us thrive and feel good. It wants us to feel good. But sometimes a system can get damaged or altered is perhaps a better word. A lot of my last 6 years of adult life have been spent trying to retrain my brain. To learn and maintain new habits. To not get stuck. I used to think that dwelling on my negative emotions and the thinking that brought them about and resuscitated them repeatedly would somehow fix it. I truly felt I could permanently solve some deep-rooted issue by thinking more about it. What I’ve learned is that negative emotions and strange mental thoughts, there is no fix to that. They are a part of the human experience, at least they are a part of my human experience. Therefore, what I must learn to spend my time on now, is evaluating when those ugly hairballs come out, whether or not “thinking this way is helping me to feel good or achieve my goals”(author unknown). Then if it isn’t, learning to use my mindfulness tools to ground myself today. To use mantras as needed for comfort. My favorites are, that I am safe and I am ok. That I am loved. That I am capable of love and affection and that love and affection are on the way.
Anyway, wishing you all peace in present moments today.
Shaynanigans 