10 Lessons From Therapy

Number one, accepting my emotions.

Now, I used to think certain emotions were... bad and that I should avoid feeling them or I shouldn't feel them.

I'm talking about things like anxiety, anger, sadness, and then fear.

I would feel worse about these bad emotions because I would think, why am I feeling like this? I should be over this by now.

But my psychologist taught me that emotions are not actually good or bad.

They're just information.

Surely some emotions are nicer to feel than others.

Some of the emotions I thought were bad are very uncomfortable feelings.

But at the end of the day, every single emotion is trying to tell us something.

feeling anxious doesn't automatically make you weak.

Feeling angry doesn't make you a bad person.

Feeling jealous doesn't make you a toxic person.

The emotion itself isn't the problem.

It's what we do with that emotion that then changes things and matters.

I used to spend so much energy suppressing my emotions, pushing uncomfortable feelings away.

The reality of that is that you're just delaying them passing by doing that.

They pass a lot quicker when you let yourself feel the emotions and when you let yourself process them.

I also think she taught me not to judge myself for whatever emotion I was having or whatever emotion I was feeling.

You can acknowledge your emotion.

You can get curious about it.

You can understand what it's trying to tell you, and then you can decide how you want to respond.

But It just changed how I looked at it in my head because instead of trying to fight what I was feeling, I was like, wait, this is data.

This is information.

I can learn and understand myself on a deeper level in a way that I could not do before I started therapy.

It was almost like I was detached from my emotions before therapy.