obsessing over past relationships or social situations

[Sab]

This is totally me...I can obsess/ruminate for YEARS.

Lately (with the help of making emotional intelligence my newest obsession lol...whether that's healthy or not I don't know) I've been working on actually identifying my difficult emotions (always a struggle for me. Everything painful was either anger or anxiety - in fact I have several anxiety disorder diagnoses which I wonder if I would have if I hadn't lumped every difficult emotion under the umbrella of "anxiety" for decades.) and also working on getting comfortable with difficult emotions (because I honestly find myself being afraid to be reminded of/feel something painful which only exacerbates the situation.) That, and mindfulness practice (mindfulness lite...lol I'm not to the point yet where my monkey brain will tolerate sitting for 20 minute formal practice but that doesn't mean I can't be present in my day-to-day life.) seem to be helping me get 'unstuck'.

I still ruminate daily, but I am not getting sucked down into a spiral where there's nothing BUT rumination. I stay on the surface as it were.

Hi! I relate to a lot of what you shared. I've also been making it a priority to identify my emotions better through mindfulness practice. I can relate a lot to anxiety being the main difficult feeling and struggling with seeing the nuances and subtleties and leaving space to all of the feelings. When you have a history of anxiety and/or depression, I think that any more difficult feeling can trigger a lot of fear (of going back to a that hard period of your life) and exacerbate the pain. I'm glad you found ways to have some distance when ruminating I feel like I overall deal better with rumination but still get some «shame attacks» where my brain obsesses on situations from years/months/days ago for days in a row and that affects my self-worth.