Learning to manage our emotions can be especially difficult at the start. Emotions can be quite painful and you have a lot of experience of running and hiding from them.
How do you start? Where do you start?
It can feel like wondering how to breath cause people around you seem to do it so naturally.
Here’s a secret: everyone learns through practice. No one is born with it.
Non-ADHDers learn how to deal with their emotions through experience. They feel they hurt, they mend, and they grow.
When I first started feeling, it was ODD. Genuinely, emotions feel so strange when you’re not used to them. Especially as an ADHDer, as our emotions can be extra intense.
The first thing I had to learn to do was to let myself feel. Years of avoiding my emotions meant that I had learnt to subconsciously bottle them up. Usually by distracting myself.
Anytime I felt anything, I would distract myself. I didn’t feel as I didn’t know how to deal.
I had to stop myself from running. I had to let myself feel.
It was awkward. It was painful. I wanted to stop. No one likes feeling pain after all.
But in order to deal with my emotions, I had to first know what I was feeling. I had to learn to let myself feel.
I did so by getting myself comfortable and letting my mind wander. I wrapped myself up in my blanket, and let myself think and feel as it came to me. No running from my thoughts and no running from my emotions.
After some time, this became easier. I can now do it on the fly.
I love that you make the breathing comparison because for me, to feel an emotion and keep breathing through it is absolutely key. When something feels particularly intense I try to make myself sit down (assuming there isn’t any actual immediate danger that needs me to fight or run away, the correct assessment of which is a whole other thing!) put my hand on my solar plexus (which is where I tend to feel the pain of strong emotions) and *breathe*.