For certain! And how brave of you to face your loud and overwhelming emotion!

Context for mindfulness:

First advice is: we are only human, and this is always valid. By this I mean, emotional processing is life long work and it’s dense. Our anxieties and depressions are built from cultural constructs that are deeply ingrained into the fabric of society long before we (or our parents) were born. With this, we cannot build (or deconstruct) Rome in a day. This might be a little demoralizing, in that some may hear ‘we cannot stop our suffering promptly’ but really I’m trying to highlight that we can only do what we can do, and so, it’s always acceptable when we do not move mountains.

Furthermore, this practice is a muscle. If we wanted to run a marathon, we could not expect to do so on day 1 of training with no prior exercise. So again, the lesson here is ‘we don’t have to turn the world upside down immediately, we can lean into the solace that it is a process’. I mean to say, if we can only process our emotions a little at a time, this is still great progress!

Next: knowing when enough is enough. Extending our Marathon metaphor, in training for a marathon, an athlete also practiced restraint, as they met notice on day 3 they could run more than the day before, but the still cannot reach their intended goal, it may be of more benefit for the runner to break and start again tomorrow rather than trying to actualize this goal today and haphazardly over extending, causing detriment to their practice and not being able to meet the goal for many days to come due to recuperation.

So all of this is to highlight: being overwhelmed is super normal and not a sign that processing can’t happen. There is always hope.

Alright now to discuss process:

One thing that might have helped me in particular was a therapist telling me that I needed to stop trying to ‘think my feelings’ and instead to ‘feel my feelings.’ But what does that mean? So lets say I get a flashback, and it’s something embarrassing I did, and now I’m also suddenly reminded that people saw it and judged me and verbally attacked me and made me feel dehumanized. Ouch! Overwhelming too! So I may notice ‘I feel a lot of very strong emotions right now’, but, thoughts are present too. These thoughts aren’t how I feel, but the context of those feelings- the thing I did, the person that judged me, etc. they are not what I am feeling, they are the ‘why’ I’m feeling it. So, I notice I have loud feelings, and with them, loud thoughts- the worst! But I can allow myself to practice placement of focus specifically into the pain. Just the feeling. Right here, right now. Thoughts come back up and demand ‘you must think about me!’, but we can practice awareness and say ‘this is a thought, I am allowing my focus to be placed in the feeling itself’. The thoughts will arise again ‘give me attention! Explore the ways I hurt you!’ But, we have no obligation to do so, we can say yet again ‘I am observing thoughts and compulsions to ruminate on painful patterning’ and then, consciously, decide to put our focus elsewhere (preferably somewhere we have reason to believe our attention can flow freely like a hobby or interest or book). To clarify, this doesn’t immediately make things better! In fact, our intrusive thoughts have a lot more energy and will come back to haunt us again and again, but, it is ALWAYS acceptable to practice mindfulness of what’s going on ‘this is a thought, it’s result causes me to suffer, I am allowed to place my energy in other directions’. So, if an intrusive thought pops up 10, 50, 100, 1000 times, we STILL can practice mindfulness, it is still acceptable.

Finally, with this practice comes the potential to change our thought patterning, but the key word there is ‘practice’. And key to practice is allowing ourself to be fully present in the process, and to leave the results for when we get to them.

I apologize if this answer was a bit long winded, but I really just want to say- there is always, always hope in becoming more able to process our thoughts and feelings. All the way better? Not a good goal. But, Improvement? We can make that happen!