Feeling vs ruminating
Feeling awful is okay, but try not to think about it
Feeling awful is okay
I went to bed on Thursday in a bit of a bad mood, and by the time I woke up on Friday morning, I was depressed. I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to interact with anyone. I didn’t want to move my body. I just wanted to curl up in bed and feel really, really sad.
I had to get up though, and for a little while, I tried to pretend I was okay. Then I remembered that my own advice is always to allow the feelings to exist as they are. So I stepped into a room where I could mostly be alone—my dogs like to snuggle in the morning, and I couldn’t say no to that, so they stayed with me—and I sat on the couch and focused on what I was feeling.
I had a few moments where my thoughts went into overdrive, and I felt bad for myself. I’ve had some big things come up lately, and I knew they were at the root of this feeling, but I’ve spent the last couple of weeks processing one layer after another with this stuff, and so I was disappointed that they were still getting to me so much.
But then my thoughts subsided, and I just sat there feeling awful.
I felt really, truly awful. No crying. No raging. No shaking. No journalling. Just sitting on the couch and feeling like my body was too heavy to hold itself up. Just feeling like my chest wanted to collapse in on itself. Just feeling how hard it was to breathe at times. No more thoughts. Just feeling awful in every cell of my body.
I’m not sure exactly how long I sat like that, but without me being consciously aware of it happening, the feelings began to shift. At some point, it occurred to me that I needed to call the DMV to get an issue with my drivers license taken care of, and so I did. I’d been trying to deal with them all week, and that morning, I finally got through to someone helpful, and I was able to resolve the issue with much more ease than I’d expected.
Only after I got that taken care of did I suddenly realize how much better I was feeling. The day turned out to be a pretty good one, but only because I had allowed myself to feel awful initially.
The problem is the thoughts, not the feelings
We tend to get a lot of advice not to wallow. I know a lot of people who would have been horrified if I had told them I needed to sit on a couch and feel bad until it went away.
Many people will try to cheer us up, or tell us to be active, or tell us not to let our emotions get to us, or tell us to think positively, or any number of suggestions to avoid feeling bad. There seems to be an underlying belief that we should always be trying to feel good. We should always seek joy and happiness, anything to not get stuck in depression.
There seems to be a fear that if we get sucked into a bad emotion, we’ll get stuck there and never come out. This fear isn’t completely baseless. However, the problem is not that we’ll get stuck in the feeling. The risk is that we could get stuck in rumination.
My experience with rumination is that it’s a symptom. Rumination can serve as a distraction from something that your subconscious thinks is even worse than whatever your mind is focusing on, and it can also be a misguided way for your mind to feel in control.
Your mind might focus on thoughts and rumination to distract you from repressed emotions and feelings that your subconscious thinks are too big or painful to process. Alternatively, your mind might use rumination to feel in control of the emotions that are being (subconsciously) repressed, or your mind might use rumination to try to feel in control of events that you fear may happen in the future (but likely never will, or at least won’t happen in a way that your rumination would be helpful).
Our thoughts can cycle through and trap us in a merry-go-round of hypotheticals and negativity. Feeling your feelings, however, is a process that moves through you. Feelings don’t stay with you if you give them space to exist. Thoughts can get stuck in loops. Feelings are a wave that crashes through you and then dissipates. Part of healing is learning to get out of our minds and thoughts and back into out bodies and feelings.
How to deal with rumination
The two techniques I found most helpful for dealing with rumination and spiraling thoughts were JournalSpeak and Parts Work. JournalSpeak can help you access the deeper emotions that the rumination is masking, and Parts Work can help you identify the parts of you that are upset. I found Parts Work to be especially helpful for minimizing how much I was identifying with the thoughts. It enabled me to see the thoughts as something that an upset part of me was working through, but the spiraling and the rumination and the negativity weren’t actually “me.”
That said, getting to the point where I could feel the painful feelings with barely any thoughts took years of practice. Fortunately, there are still steps you can take to ease rumination, regardless of whether you’ve done any of the healing techniques I recommend on thehealingpathways.org.
I recently listened to the audiobook version of “Stop Letting Everything Affect You: How to break free from overthinking, emotional chaos, and self-sabotage,” by Daniel Chidiac. He offers some techniques for dealing with rumination that focused more on positive reinforcement and brain retraining, and which I think can be helpful alternatives to my approach.
One of the easiest suggestions he makes is also a common practice for processing emotions: name it. When your thoughts start looping, or when you can’t stop replaying a past event in your mind, or when you find yourself fearfully planning how to deal with some future event or conversation (especially something that is unlikely to happen exactly as you planned, if at all) — basically, any time you realize you’re ruminating—just say, “I’m ruminating.” That’s it. “Oh wow. This is me ruminating.” “Ah. So that’s what my rumination looks like.” However you want to say it, the point is to make a mental note that what is happening in your head is call rumination.
Another helpful technique is to identify ways in which the negative thoughts are not always true. Rumination can often involve generalized statements. “I’m always sick.” “I can’t do anything because of this illness.” “My life is ruined now, and if I can’t get healthy, it may never get better.” If you find yourself thinking things like this, note that it’s rumination, and then identify a positive statement that proves that the negativity is either wrong or incomplete. For example, if you notice yourself saying, “I’m always sick,” you could note that, actually, last week, you had 20 minutes where you felt okay. Or maybe you can note that you may be sick, but at least you can still take a 20 minute walk sometimes. Or maybe you forgot how sick you are while watching K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix (or you can pick a different show/movie if that one doesn’t resonate).
The point is to find ways in which the generalized statement isn’t completely true. So always make sure that anything “positive” you tell yourself is something that you—even the negative, ruminating part of you—can recognize as true.
I really like this latter technique because it can serve as a jumping off point for JournalSpeak and Parts Work. The very act of disagreeing with your thoughts is an example of having at least two parts within you. At that point, if you’re up for it, you can use JournalSpeak to try communicate with the parts of you that feel awful, while also channeling the part of you that realizes your thoughts may not be a completely accurate representation of you or your world.
Chidiac offered some other recommendations in his book as well, so you might want to check that out.1 I also tend to like Therapy in a Nutshell for tips that are easier than some of the things I did to recover,2 such as this and this on rumination and overthinking.
You might literally check it out! As always, I’m a fan of using the library, especially if you’re ill and funds are limited.
For some reason, I never found her tips on an issue until after I had already worked through it with my own process.