Helping our patients to process their emotions

I’ve seen a couple of teenage boys recently who have experienced great difficulties in processing their emotions. This is common in all folks to be honest, irrespective of age or gender.

They tend to avoid it and seek distractions to cope. They often don’t want to talk about it as it can be very triggering.

It’s very uncomfortable for them.

Their past negative experience is like a bad scene in a movie. It’s made up of the “scene/memory” and the “feelings” attached to that memory.

The trick is to gain enough mindfulness to hold space for that memory, process it, acknowledge the memory, acknowledge the story that they tell themselves, appreciate it, reframe the memory, and finding ways to reexperience it with a different set of feelings like compassion, acceptance, or forgiveness perhaps.

This will then create a new “evolved experience” from the old, or one can view it like a new “edited scene” with a new set of “attached feelings”.

Not easy but worthwhile.