Everyone deals with negative thoughts and feelings. Sadly, these painful emotions seem to always surface at the most inopportune times. The real issue is these unresolved emotional struggles can distract you from the things in your life that are good.
If you give these thoughts much credulous, you will soon notice that your mindset is more negative than positive. Breaking the habit of a pessimistic mindset is not easy, and it requires retraining your brain to let things go. When’s the last time you’ve felt stressed out?
The average person feels stress quite often, and it can get to explosive levels before you know it. Consequently, when you’re under pressure, your mind tends to ruminate about all the issues from your past that keep resurfacing. How do you calm the chaos in your mind and get the internal chatter to stop?
Four Ways to Deal with Painful Emotions
Whether someone has hurt you or you’ve been abused doesn’t matter; any hurts can cause you to ruminate on all the wrongs in your life. Thankfully, there are four ways that you can use to conquer these problems and move on.
1. Learn to Be Present in The Moment
One of the most powerful tools you will learn is how to be in the moment. It’s easy for your mind to wander to the past when things are going crazy. Your mind needs justification for what you feel, so it likes having a pity party and bringing up all your painful emotions from the past.
Another problem that commonly happens is that people worry about things that haven’t even happened yet. How many times do you sit and fret over something that may or may not occur in the future? If you have an anxiety disorder, you’re prone to worry more than someone else.
However, an article referenced a study about worry. Experts found that more than 85 percent of the things you fret over will never happen. Think of all that time you waste because you’re not present in the moment.
Both your future and your past are robbing you of valuable time in the present. The way to counteract this issue is to focus on the here and now and not give yesterday or tomorrow center stage. Now, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan, but it means that you don’t let what hasn’t happened yet clutter your mind.
It sounds like a simple process, but it’s not as easy as it appears. However, there are a few tricks that can help you be in the moment. Find an image that brings you peace. Maybe your place of refuge is a beach surrounded by seagulls and waves crashing all around.
When you hold this picture, allow your mind to let go. If this trick doesn’t work, then you can try counting. When anxiety from painful emotions starts revving up, then you need to defuse it. Start by counting from 100 down to one. You can even calculate by fives if it makes things more interesting.
The key is to focus on counting; then, your mind doesn’t have time to ruminate about all those painful things. This strategy helps you to clear your mind so that you can reconnect with the world around you.
2. Re-Center Your Mind and Find Tranquility
If you allow your thoughts to have center stage, then you will disconnect from the world around you. How can you be focused on your job or your child that’s toddling bout if your mind is a million miles away? Even worse, if you feel guilt or shame associated with these emotions, it can put you in a horrible mood.
The more power you give to these harmful and painful emotions, the stronger they become. It would help if you defused these feelings by reconnecting with the world around you. One way that you can reconnect is by volunteering. It’s challenging to have a pity party for yourself when you see that someone else has things much worse than you.
Another thing you might want to do is put your feet on the floor to ground you and pay attention to your surroundings. Focus on the here and now and notice the room’s color, the smell wafting through the air, and the conversations going on around you. Dialectal behavioral therapy teaches you to come out of anxiety by focusing on the atmosphere.
Since your brain cannot focus on two things at once, it’s much more pleasant to focus on your space rather than these emotional challenges. Lastly, to reconnect with what’s around you, you should go outside in the sunshine. Even if it’s raining, who says there’s anything wrong with dancing in the rain?
Mother Nature has so many therapeutic properties that many don’t use. Do you love the smell of spring rain as it sends the nectar of sweet flowers permeating through the air? Have you noticed any birds building nests as they prepare for a new life?
There is so much beauty and tranquility all around you, but if you’re caught up in the chatter inside your mind from your pain, then it will pass you by.
3. Stop Being So Self-Conscious
When you allow these painful emotions to creep in, it promotes self-negativity. Are you a self-conscious person by nature? Do you have a dialogue that runs through your mind that keeps your esteem low?
Negative and hurtful emotions often come with damaging thoughts. All these thoughts play like a film in your mind that keeps going round and round. Sadly, these thoughts are very distracting and keep you from accomplishing what you need to do.
Have you ever tried to talk to someone whose mind was a million miles away? It’s like pulling teeth to get an answer from them. You become impossible to talk to, and it’s a challenge for you to focus when you pay attention to this reel of negativity that’s running in your mind.
To boost your esteem, you should do activities that make you feel more confident. Can you bake or cook well? Why not whip up a batch of cookies to take into the office with you? When people taste the goodness that comes from your hands, their compliments will give you a boost.
It feels good to be complimented. Now, once you have that feeling fresh in your mind, you need to remind yourself how great it feels when you put aside all the negativity and allow yourself to shine.
4. Don’t Run from These Thoughts – Process Them
Have you ever met someone that can’t get over an issue? Take, for instance, a woman named Ruth. She was engaged to be married to the love of her life, Bob.
Ruth and Bob had an excellent relationship, and he completed her. She was so looking forward to spending forever with him. One day they were swimming at the local quarry, and Bob dove into a section that wasn’t as deep as he thought.
He ruptured his stomach and had other internal injuries. Bob passed away that day, and Ruth was never the same. Though she found love again and married, there wasn’t a day that went by that she didn’t think about Bob.
The pain she felt in her heart was too much for her to bear, and even with seven children and a house full of work to do, her mind often replayed the events of that day. Sadly, Ruth never came to terms with the significant loss she suffered in her life, and she developed bipolar disorder.
Had she processed the feelings appropriately and dealt with her pain, her outcome might have been quite different. The fact is that your negative and hurtful emotions will haunt you if you allow them to. What Ruth needed to do was to stop ruminating about the events that happened.
She felt remorse because the tragedy left her unable to deal with the situation effectively, so she hid the emotions deep inside and never talked about it. How much better she would have felt if she let out those emotions and talked about them. Bottling things inside can be dangerous, as your mind can only handle so much stress and pain before it shuts down.
You mustn’t run from your issues and learn effective ways to deal with them. Speak things into the open, cry at the top of your lungs, be angry at the situation, but the good news is you will finally come to terms with things. It’s okay to hurt, and it’s okay to cry, but you can’t let it go on forever.
Final Thoughts on Handling Your Painful Emotions
Your life is going to have ups and downs. There will be triumphs, and there will be tragedies. It’s just as important to give the successes in your life the same amount of attention that you give your failures.
When situations shake you to your core, you must get help in dealing with these emotions. If the tricks above don’t help you process things, then get the use of a counselor who is well trained in cognitive behavioral therapy CBT or dialectical behavior therapy DBT. The important thing is to get these feelings from the inside out to have a happy and positive life.
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