She said, "Imagine a wooden box with a lid that closes tightly. This is where your feelings will be most of the time. Every hour, stop and take them out for 5-10 minutes. Feel them in your body, cry or yell if you want to. Then put them back in the box and close the lid. Get on with your life for the next 50 minutes." This, my friends, is how to accept and honor whatever you're feeling without becoming lost in it. I hope it helps you when you need it most.

Likewise, and I am glad we came out of this tunnel. Happy holidays 🎄

I walked my yellow labs into Nature where no one else was around and landscaped aka beat the dirt with an old hockey stick and would walk back out into the world with white dried salt tracks on my cheeks so I could go hang chemotherapy and be there for my patients.

There’s so much “therapeutic” ju ju on line. Folks are naive and reckless, though no doubt well intended when they share wisdom about healing using quasi helpful anodyne metaphor and draw simplistic conclusions. Don’t practice without some sense of caution. Good for you if you are healing but for example is not evidence.

On a lesser scale, you can do this with anxiety too. If you’re a worrier, tell yourself you can worry about it (pick a time) and only then. It helped me with anxiety and needless worry.

I’ve mastered the art of disassociation. Started using it to control social anxiety. Now I use it 24/7. Very helpful after my divorce.

First, I’m sorry you went through this. But second, when raising children today we’re told constantly to validate their feelings—parents are never told about the skills required to get on with it, when it’s time to say enough is enough, and how to teach our kids that feelings are valid but they don’t always trump everything else. There’s a middle point between wildly out of control emotions and suppression. And adults are really just parents to themselves :). We all need lessons in regulating!