Daily writing prompt
What strategies do you use to cope with negative feelings?
Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional, nor a professional of any medical field at all, so these thoughts are my own. Right, wrong, or indifferent.
Once again, I was up late enough to see this prompt at the turn of midnight giving myself time to think and digest how I wanted to respond. I put my phone aside, laid my head down on my pillow, and started running through potential openers and content.
The entire workday later, I have forgotten every word I thought up which means I get to stare at my monitor, falling in and out of my usual daydream like daze, as I try to start over.
Emotions, and positive/negative feelings are complicated and complex. No matter how we try to dissect and understand them, boiling them down to singular words to describe our feelings in as simple a form as possible, there is always the underlying complex nature of emotions. How we respond to them, handle and control them, will vary from person to person based on personal life experiences.
I’m not going to delve too deeply into this subject, but I wanted to at least address the fact that I have different measures for handling different emotions and negative feelings.
Anger: I try not to let things get to me. I do not anger easily, and as I’ve gotten older (and hopefully wiser) I have reached a point where it is really difficult to anger me. Someone makes a mistake that directly impacts me, hurting or setting me back, and instead of flying off the handle I take a moment to recognize as many factors as possible that led to current situation. I recognize that dropping everything to get angry, to expend that kind of energy, doesn’t fix things and only serves to hinder me. That being said, if someone REALLY crosses a line, to the point of hurting and outright disrespecting me, my family and friends, I can and will let the anger rise a little bit because sometimes I need to get a point across to prevent that line being crossed again.
Frustration and Helplessness: I’ve decided to lump these two together because I feel they go hand in hand. I try not to let myself fall into situations that could lead to frustrating outcomes by recognizing my limits and the risks involved. Preemptive measures, if you will, learned and earned through life. Although I am not very religious I do have a response for those times when preemptive measures fail, and that is the Serenity Prayer. You don’t need to be incredibly devout to recognize the simplistic power of an affirmation built on the Serenity Prayer. If you don’t know the Serenity Prayer, here you go. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.” I do not let myself get frustrated and feel helpless when things don’t work out or something fails. I take a step back to recognize that there may have just been something I couldn’t control, and move forward by reminding myself of the intent of that prayer.
I’m realizing that I could probably go on and on, and this post would become a self-help book, so I’ll leave it there because I feel like those are the most prominent negative feelings I usually have to deal with. I know I could share about things like sadness and depression, hate and fear, but a lot of times those are all handled under similar measures to anger, frustration, and helplessness. I feel those things, I recognize what caused them, and find a way to pull myself out of them so that I don’t do something stupid. I always want to be moving forward, and hopefully someone who stumbles across this post can find something that helps them move forward as well.
The Dragon's Grove 