Coping with your distress.
Sadness doesn’t need to be ‘cheered up’ or chased away.
How do you cope with your distress?
I’m going to talk about learning to cope with distressing feelings and why it is important to acknowledge your emotions rather than ignore them.
How many times has someone said to you ‘I don’t want to talk about it?’
It might even be someone who you live with and you may experience frustration because you can see that they appear stuck.
Do you feel as though it is easier not to talk about the issues you are facing?
Everyone learns ways to survive as they navigate the tricky waters of life.
Do you recognise this pattern?
Something happens:
- A difficult conversation
- Some conflict with a family member
- The loss of a relationship
- An ending of some sort
- A death
- Fill in your own scenario
What has happened? How do you cope with this situation?
Some ways you may try to cope are by using unhealthy distraction; keeping yourself so busy there is no time to reflect, for example:
- Throwing yourself into work, maybe working long hours.
- Withdrawing and isolating from other people as a way to help you feel safer.
- Using video games and gaming into the early hours every evening.
- Scrolling on social media platforms, mindlessly
- Using alcohol to attempt to numb your feelings
- Burying your head in the sand and hoping the situation will go away.
- Comfort or binge eating unhealthy foods
- Excessive shopping
- Putting on a brave face and telling those around you that you are fine, when you’re not.
These coping mechanisms might work for a time, even many years, until they stop working.
Maybe you considered talking to someone else but you felt it might be ‘too much’ for them to cope with. You worried you might inflict your misery upon them.
Maybe you tried to talk to a friend or family member. They didn’t understand and maybe you felt that they were blaming you. Or perhaps they wanted to compete with your experience and tell you about their own problems.
If this led to a bad experience for you, maybe you decided talking about it isn’t helpful for you.
It may be that you began to experience negative thoughts about you. This can lead to feeling afraid. Afraid of what others think, adding to your already distressed state.
You decide ‘it is better to keep how I feel and what has happened to me locked inside’.
Would you like to be able to sit more comfortably with how you are feeling and learn how to cope with distress?
It takes practice and who wants to practise sitting with an uncomfortable emotion? 😫
It is possible that you have learnt to judge an emotion you are feeling.
You may have learnt when young, from those you lived with, that they felt uncomfortable or awkward if they saw your tears.
Even young children quickly pick up whether their safe adult is in a relaxed state or not. If you did not have a safe and predictable adult, you may have not learnt to identify your feelings at all.
Children learn in primary school to begin to hide their feelings. They don’t want to worry those who care about them. They seek to protect those they care about.
Children notice whether there is space and time with their care giver for how they feel or not. When they are not listened to and helped to acknowledge and identify their feelings they may dismiss them too and learn to ignore what they really do need.
If you imagine a much younger child of about 2 or 3 years old and they can’t have what they want or they hurt themselves.
What do they do? They fully express and experience their distress. They cry loudly and uncontrollably and often they take time to be soothed and calmed back to a state where they are able to cope without being held and comforted.
Sometimes people use the expression ‘negative emotion’ to describe feelings of sadness, anger, fear or despair. Every emotion we experience is in fact normal.
All emotions are part of a normal range of the human experience.
It is how you respond to each emotion and sometimes the reaction of those around you that can be distressing or unpleasant.
However if you are able to be curious about each feeling you experience, this can help you gain understanding about what is happening to you. Leading to learning how to tolerate distress.
It makes a difference if you are able to identify an emotion and name it. Even this acknowledgement and naming of the emotion and how it is affecting us can help to bring more calm.
Do you know whether or not you have a strong emotion buried deep inside that you are trying to ignore?
If you know you have been ignoring your true feelings, or hiding them, may be it is time to try something new.
Why is it important for you to cope with your distressing feelings?
If you suppress an emotion, it will come back much louder. It could even return as a physical pain in your body somewhere.
One way to begin to tolerate the emotion is instead of pushing it away when it tries to surface is to stay with the emotion, even for a few seconds.
You have a choice and you are in control
It is important that you are able to feel safe before you begin to allow yourself to let the emotion or feeling become present.
You may feel too uncomfortable with the idea of allowing the distressing emotion to be present in this moment.
This is why it can be useful to have another trusted person alongside you, so you don’t feel alone with your experience.
If the idea of talking to another still seems impossible, you may like to write down and express what you are feeling that way. It is another way to be able to reflect on what is happening inside you.
When I trained to be a counsellor the course took over my life, it took large amounts of my time and attention. It was hard work, and also such fun learning something new, meeting new people.
It was a whole day each week of learning and talking about meaningful things. This suited me.
I learnt so much about identifying my emotions. I was encouraged to keep a reflective diary about my experience of my learning journey.
One thing I learnt was that rather than trying to ignore and deny my sadness, this was an emotion that could be felt, experienced, tolerated and processed.
My sadness didn’t need to be ‘cheered up’ or chased away.
I discovered that one way I had coped and got rid of my feeling of sadness and wanting to cry was to laugh or smile as I talked about something that was upsetting.
This was a total revelation. I had no idea I chased away my sadness with a smile. It was a shock for me to find this out.
I found out because of the observations of someone who was really listening to me and helping me to become attentive to my emotions.
When we keep all the sadness inside, the emotion maybe hidden or buried. When we start to speak about what is making us sad, the emotion becomes much more on the surface.
There are of course different levels of each emotion and that includes sadness.
Some sadness is linked with those who are very dear to us or a loss that is life changing. This sadness may take much longer to feel able to and find courage to process.
Offering yourself reassurance and using self soothing techniques is another way to help you feel able to comfort yourself in the midst of the painful feelings. I’ve written a blog with ideas about how to find some calm and cope with distress here.
The last day of my university course, I made friends with sadness. I was sad and I cried and yet something about allowing myself to be sad felt really right. It felt ‘as it should be’. This felt like a new skill, a very useful accomplishment.
Of course I felt sad and it was painful, sadness can feel distressing and uncomfortable. Endings are not often talked about and they can be a source of sadness.
Talking about what has happened to you is not a magic wand.
However, being accompanied by someone who knows how to listen and who you feel safe and accepted by, can help you to feel less alone with whatever situation you face. Someone who isn’t going to be upset by your strong emotions of sadness, anger, fear etc.
It was during my own therapy sessions as I navigated a life changing situation, that I learned the idea of choosing to sit with the distressing emotion for short amounts of time, to help me learn how to cope.
In this blog I have talked about some first steps in how to learn to cope with distress.
Learning to tolerate this experience is something that is life changing. To gradually learn distress tolerance and be able to experience your emotions that may have been pushed away for decades even.
It is the beginning of being able to come to acceptance of your very real, valuable and important emotions and feelings.
Learning to cope with distress can be profoundly life changing for the good and once begun brings new awareness and possibilities as you go through the rest of life. Enabling you to support those around you with their emotions and feelings too.
If you don’t have someone you feel really safe and accepted by, you may choose to speak to a trained professional.
I hope you have found this blog useful. I work with lots of people who have kept their feelings inside for a long time.
It is fulfilling to watch them be relieved of a huge burden or weight they have been carrying as they are heard and they and their feelings are validated.
All feelings are normal. If you would like to receive support to cope with distress it is important to find someone who can support you, don’t suffer alone.
As a counsellor, I’d love to help you.
If you would like to work with me, please get in touch. I look forward to hearing from you.