We are all experiencing grief. Sometimes we hide it well, other times it grabs us and we’re afraid it will pull us under. When we stop to think about what we’ve lost we feel a sense of heaviness. We may be grieving different things, but we are all feeling it.
When I am overcome by a difficult emotion, like grief, I tend to respond with my long-standing strategies of distraction, avoidance, and numbing. I either ignore the feeling, resist it, or shut it down. But a part of me knows these familiar strategies are not going to help me move through my difficult emotions. The only way to get relief from painful feelings in the long term is to actually feel them. Self-compassion practices help me engage with challenging emotions by helping me be kind to myself even as I feel painful feelings.
Here are some things I try to do as I allow myself to feel difficult emotions:
- Name it to tame it – labeling an emotion can immediately decrease our threat defense response. I try to label the emotion with a gentle tone of voice and some validation or kindness: “This is sadness. It makes sense I’m feeling sad right now. Sadness is a part of being human”
- Feel it to heal it – Turning my attention to my body and away from my mind can help me work through challenging emotions. My thoughts tend to race and catastrophize, so shifting to the body slows things down a bit. I try to notice where in my body I feel the emotion, it may be a tightness in my chest, a tension in my neck, or discomfort in my gut.
- Soften – Once I have labeled the emotion and found it in my body, I try to intentionally soften that part of my body. I try to let the muscles release, and breathe into that space, to unclench and visualize that tension loosening a bit.
- Soothe – Next I place a hand on that spot in my body or over my heart and offer some soothing touch and soothing words. “I know this hurts right now. It’s normal to feel this way; it’s a part of being human.” I have found it helpful to say to myself “I care about you and I’m here with you while this hurts”
- Allow – Allowing is mental compassion. Instead of resisting, shutting down, or fixing the emotion, we are giving it the grace of allowing it. This helps take the sting out of the emotion and allows it to move through us.
These are just a few basic practices we use in Mindful Self-Compassion to help work with difficult emotions. Used over the long term, these practices give us some relief from painful emotions like grief.
Photo by Claudia Wolff on Unsplash
