How to Process Emotions Instead of Reacting to Them

It might sound simple, but knowing how to process emotions instead of reacting to them has been a huge part of my mental health recovery journey. My automatic instinct when I feel any emotion is to react to it with another emotion. Then I react to that emotion, and the cycle continues until I have gotten myself truly worked up and the original emotion has been buried beneath layers of confusion and shame. Clearly this isn't the healthiest method for dealing with emotions. Through therapy and journaling, I'm learning to process my emotions instead of reacting to them.

Why Should We Process Emotions? What's Wrong with Reacting to Them?

Reacting to your emotions prevents you from actually feeling your emotions. Instead, you try to replace them with a reaction that you feel more equipped to handle. For example, when I feel hurt or angry, I often react with self-loathing. I'm used to hating myself, and it feels safer than being angry or hurt with someone else. But I am doing myself a disservice by disconnecting from my original emotions and replacing them with this reaction. By reacting, I'm not allowing myself to truly feel my emotions.

When it comes to hurt and anger, this obviously means I'm not standing up for myself, which is a problem, but the even bigger issue is how this messes with my inner world. By reacting to my emotions, I am denying my own perception of reality. I really struggle to trust myself now because of all the years I spent reacting to my emotions in a way to make them go away, rather than simply listening to them.

How to Process Your Emotions

Processing your emotions, on the other hand, is a slow, painful experience where you feel your emotions, whatever they may be, and accept them and yourself at the moment. It is incredibly difficult to do without slipping into some form of reacting. For a while, I thought processing meant "explaining" my emotions, so I started reacting to my emotions by over-intellectualizing them. But this just disconnected me from my emotions as well.

Processing is really all about allowing your emotions to sit in your body, allowing them to take up space and impact you. For people who have spent their whole lives reacting, this can be terrifying. But it's absolutely necessary for healing and learning to accept yourself.

So how are you supposed to actually go about processing your emotions instead of reacting? That is an excellent question. I honestly have such a hard time with this, so I don't have a ton of advice beyond getting into therapy, if at all possible. Therapy is one of the only spaces in my life where I feel comfortable just sitting with my emotions.

My only other method for accepting and processing my emotions is journaling. When I write, I'm allowed to just feel what I feel, even if I'm not proud of it or it upsets me. On paper, my emotions feel validated and real, even if it's just for a moment before I re-read what I wrote and feel stupid. Still, one moment of real emotional processing is better than simply reacting.

What about you? How do you manage to process your emotions? I'd love it if you shared your wisdom in the comments below.