Ellipses… a small, special character.
Used by writers to slow down, create a pause, and indicate thinking.
[First, terribly sorry for the accidental extra email I sent yesterday. I just moved my newsletter to Substack and I hit “send” on an issue by accident. Funnily enough, that issue was about scaling back… of which I do not intend to do again soon.]
⚫️ 1 thought: Last night, I googled “Why am I so angry all the time?” 🪶
How do you call yourself a mental health advocate when you refuse to talk about your mental health while you’re in the thick of it?
The way to reduce stigma for mental health is to talk about it. Talk about the feelings we feel and the thoughts we have and the deep unsettling aspect of it. So, bringing to light the fact that things just aren’t going well for me helps level-set the experience that many of us go through often.
…It’s been a hard month for me. Boundaries crossed. Trauma wounds re-opened. Thus it seemed natural for my deeply-rooted anger to reappear.
According to the internet, anger stems from:
Lack of control
Expectations not being met
Stress
Intergenerational trauma
When you find yourself saying “YES” to each paragraph of an article about psychological anger in the middle of the night because your anger now wakes you up… you feel seen. But not in a good way.
I’m on the road to fixing this. But since insurance-backed therapy is impossible to find when you actually need it, I resorted to a guided meditation on anger that helped.
In the meditation, the guide asks you to think about an anger trigger, and then feel the feelings. Then say, “I see the anger.”
When you identify the strong emotion, you can start to distance yourself from it. The anger may start to dissolve immediately.
Let’s stare our Māra in the face and tell him we see him. This is our shadow self. That’s from my very loose understanding of Buddhism. I’m trying. I think it’s working.
I mean, it also helps to get out of my spiraling self-help, therapy-obsessed head and think about how sharing my experience may help you.
⚫️ 1 link + journal prompt: Proprioceptive writing helps you get more in touch with yourself
I discovered this post on Ness Labs with a more specific type of journaling: proprioceptive writing. It’s supposed to help bring focus and clarity and reduce rumination; it connects physical sensations to thoughts, giving us a stronger connection to our emotions.
Prompt: Write down all the thoughts or noise that comes to you for ~10 minutes. Then, dive into each thought with an intentional pause and see where that thought or belief stems from. Try to see whether a thought comes from the experience itself, or the story you’re telling yourself about that experience.
Thanks for hanging in there with me. I’m here to chat further on any of the above. See you next week.
Be safe and well,
🖤 Jenny