Be kind to yourself and others around you.

Coping with stress and other heavy emotions is a fact of life. Regardless of your status in life, you will eventually feel heavy emotions at times. How you manage it is fundamental to your over all health.

“It’s not just as easy as “snapping out of it”. You cannot just turn off an emotion because you think it’s negative. We must honor each emotional state and give it the same respect that all emotions deserve, they’re valid feelings.“

So what do you do when these emotions like: inadequacy, guilt, self doubt, depression, sadness, bitterness, resentment and anger start to come up?

Identify the origin of what is invoking a heavy emotional response.

This can be hard to do when your feeling a sense of heaviness. But just acknowledging the emotion your feeling starts the process of releasing it.

“Be real” about the situation and the circumstances. Or rather be honest with yourself.

There is always a need to be truly honest with yourself and the emotions you are feeling. Honor the capacity of growth and understanding you are at. This is a radical acceptance. Radical acceptance means that you accept the way your “current” situation is and everything involved including the emotions you feel. But you “understand” that the current situation and emotional state will eventually change. Being real with yourself about your current situation is part of the process of releasing the heavy emotional states.

Be kind to yourself.

This is the one that is the hardest step because it’s not easy to be kind to ourselves when we are coping with heavy emotional states that could easily makes us think less of ourselves. So what do you do when this happens? Start with baby steps towards better selfcare. In DBT and Crisis therapy, the focus becomes centers on a healthy daily self care routine to help you cope with different emotional crisis’. Focusing on basic needs such as water intake, food intake, sleep, and basic grooming. Ask yourself: Did I drink enough water today? Have I eaten? Did I sleep enough last night, can I take a nap? Have I showered today?

Those questions might seem unnecessary but the biggest cause of someone having a spiral into heavy emotions that last all day or all week is because they then begin to disregard their own emotional thoughts, feelings and care. How you cope with heavy emotions is contingent on how willing you are to care for yourself in those moments.

Let go of the need to control the outcome.

Those are tough words to say, letting go of control towards how you want something to go or how it is perceived is extremely difficult. But holding on to the control is honestly an illusion. You do not actually have “control” over people, places, and things. The need to control it truly only hurts yourself but it can also hurt the people around you because you then begin reacting to things in a more “out of control” manner trying to “find” the control in the situation. So release this. How?

By stepping back and giving yourself a moment or a time out. Before you say “well I don’t have time to step back, I’m in a situation that requires my immediate attention.” Regardless of your circumstances, you have a choice. You have the right to choose your behavior and you have the right to the proper boundaries. No situation is impossible!

So step back, honor how you feel. If your in a moment that you have to act in immediately, take big, long deep breaths in and out expanding your stomach. This helps you to ground through breath work. The more grounded you become the more your response will become.

Regardless of your emotional state, please know. It is valid, you are not wrong, it is justified, and it does matter. There is just no such thing as too little or small here. We have been taught by our parents, their parents taught them, and their parents also taught them it just continues down as a cycle of behavior, patterns and programming of how to cope with your emotions. Re-examining this can help you move in a direction that will honor your emotions and create a healthier balance in your life.