Pervasive negatives emotions.

[jd2345]

Despite doing better for myself, I've been medication free for almost two years now. I've also moved out of my parent's household, which has been a life saver.

I still very often feel many negative emotions when given space to think. All the shame, anger and sadness paralyses me and I get stuck in loops for hours to days at a time.

I wonder if this is okay considering my circumstances. I've been traumatised multiple times throughout my childhood and teen years. I was bullied a lot in school both by peers and a teacher. Parents were stressed and could never communicate well when it came to emotions. I was medicated for most of my life, which numbed my emotions and as a result never allowed me to process traumas and emotions for a decade.

Nowadays, I keep myself busy by going to mental health groups, socialising with the help of a support worker and will soon be volunteering at a community garden. Despite the objective improvement of my life, I am still bitter and in despair.

Maybe I'm just grieving everything I need to grieve. But I have very strong emotions about the world I live in. Maybe I am disillusioned, or perhaps even just deluded. I could just feel powerless, I'm a bit unsure.

[therising]

Hi jd2345

You have done such an incredible job in raising yourself up to this point. So much hard work, far more than you perhaps imagine. To raise yourself through abuse, to raise yourself while the stress of home life challenges you in so many ways, to raise yourself through depressing experiences, through finding the groups and people who make some difference, through the horrible trial and error process that can come with finding the right med/s as well as trying to find new ways of managing without meds, through trying to gain greater self understanding and so much more speaks volumes when it comes to the kind of person you are. It takes a powerful person to raise them self through and beyond everything that works to bring them down. Can be such exhausting work, with so much painful self doubt at times.

From my own personal experience, I would have to say one of the most challenging things to do in life is manage emotions or feelings. There is just so much to them, so much to understand about them, so much skill development when it comes to working with them. There are so many individual incredibly telling emotions or feelings to come to know and work with. To know when to reign certain ones in and when to rely heavily on others and fully trust in them are a couple of factors that add to the challenge. As a gal who relies heavily on sensing what I feel, over the years I have managed to go from 'What's wrong with me?' (when I feel a certain way) to 'What is this feeling telling me?'. I suppose it's a matter of 'In the process of understanding and mastering emotions or feelings, I find how my 'compass' works'. For example, you know the kinds of people who lead you to feel what everything going south feels like, compared to sensing those who help you find your true north. The most sensitive of people will feel the needle shift, even in the slightest of ways. Based on this, 'You're super sensitive' goes from being an insult to a compliment that reflects a skill.

Trying to get an accurate feel for certain emotions is definitely a challenge. 'Am I feeling bitterness, despair, disillusionment, delusion, powerlessness? Am I feeling elements of grief, perhaps mixed with elements of confusion? Am I feeling rage, resentment, shame, sadness, a sense of feeling lost or something else?'. A mega challenge involves a huge mixed bag of emotions, where each one is pulled out and made sense of. Every single one is telling. Each one, for example, may tell us what we shouldn't have had to endure or tolerate or what was enraging at a time when we were working so hard to suppress our rage instead of expressing it or what was depressing when people were behaving in such soul destroying ways. And when you can look back and say 'While I faced the challenge of managing what was abusive, what was depressing, what was stressful, what was soul destroying etc, I worked the hardest out of all those who never accepted the challenge to change themself in some way', you may come to see you were the most powerful person you knew amongst them all.