Brianna Wiest - The Mountain Is You_ Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery (2020)

192 BRIANNA WIEST
Instead, you probably experienced a bout of sadness then,
and then maybe the next day, and then maybe a week later.
The waves of grief came and went in varying intensity.
When you didn’t resist them, you cried and felt sad, or
maybe took a nap, a hot bath, or a day off from work.
And then, without much effort from you, the feeling
passed, and you felt better.
Once we have and acknowledge an emotion, it will often
go away on its own. If there is no course of action to
take—if all we really need to do is accept it—then we just
have to let ourselves be there.
The reason we don’t do this more naturally is because obviously
we can’t burst into tears at our desks every time we
feel bothered by something. Turning off the water valve is
perfectly fine, as long as we can go home and let it out later.
It is okay to control when and where we process, and in fact,
it’s better when we learn to do it in a more stable, safe space.
This can look like taking a few minutes to “junk journal”
each day, spending time by ourselves where we can simply
experience how we feel, without judgment, and without
trying to change them. It can be as simple as allowing
ourselves to cry before we fall asleep. We often think of
that as a sign of weakness, when really, the ability to cry
freely is a huge signal of mental and emotional strength.
It’s when we can’t cry about what’s truly broken in our
lives that we have a big problem.