emotional processing strategies
Sometimes in life, things come up that one can be upset about.
With this, one can employ different strategies to deal with this, which can be more or less appropriate depending on your life situation,
I try to catalogue some different ways you can react, and look back understand when each of these might be useful. I don’t claim to know anything new, but I find it useful to think about these things in my life sometimes.
one popular reference is the “5 stages of grief” (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) though its more of a starting point to map things to, rather than a full map, and I won’t refer to it much.
suppressing
if you are currently too busy in life, one strategy is to just not think about it.
It can be a pretty reasonable strategy if you need to employ it temporarily. It can also be slightly helpful to have some distance between you and the event so that you can get some of the facts straight. Sometimes “not right now” is just the thing you need.
However, its much better as a strategy to employ short-term if your busy, rather than long-term. it can make you think less clearly about a topic if you are not able to fully think about the parts that are upsetting, and can end up with the next strategy. Some can channel this energy into “doing things/keeping busy”, though doing this long-term also seems inadvisable.
this is probably the one I have the most long-term experience with, though its much easier when your emotional range generally is on the lower end anyway. But I don’t really think its a good strategy.
self-deception
this is slightly different before, and is more bad. this mostly involves self-deceiving oneself. This is worse than suppressing, and also less effective.
Generally one still feels quite bad about the topic, just in a way that is more trigger happy about what other people might say about a topic. rationalizing things away. Its not good.
Escaping this can sometimes take someone else noticing.
being upset
Sometimes you can just be sad about it, cry about it, not do much. This is a pretty reasonable thing to do. Its not the way this can manifest can differ a lot.
one way is in a more lathargic, not-knowing-what-to-do kind of way, but also not thinking about it. Just trying to accept the situation as it is.
Another is to emotionally run away, maybe by doing some physically exerting activity, that helps to get your mind in a state where being upset feels less bad.
thinking about it
I really like journalling as a way of processing and thinking about emotional topics. There is a sense in which writing is a form of thinking, and so spending an hour just continouslty writing about the topic forces you to engate with it and get beyond the points where you only could think so far about it.
It can often be insufficient to journal in one session, perhaps you reach a wall where you actively thinking about it doesn’t help, and thinking more passively about it, such as showering or going for a walk, is more useful, though this is generally better if you already spend time doing structured thinking too.
sometimes this can be more like “bargaining” in language of the 5 stages of grief, and its worth noticing if you are trying to solve your solutions with one quick fix and commit to some strategy straight away. the feeling of “i need to do something” can be useful, though it is also often combined with not thinking in depth about the options you are deciding to do.
solving the problem
if the sad thing is something you can solve, you can stop feeling upset about it temporarily, but if you don’t solve the issue then you will probably end up being sad about it again.
sadly, some issues cannot be solved by one person, so you may get sad about it more times. Though hopefully each time will be slightly less bad than the last. Maybe take this as an opportunity to grow in life in other ways.