YES. Be kind to yourself. It doesn’t matter if anyone has it worse, (in your eyes) or it could be worse, or it’s over with or any other reason you might find to minimise your experience.
Emotional events are HARD. There is no ‘should’ to how you feel, how long you have felt, how long you feel that way, how you experience your emotions. You feel what you feel, and that’s okay.
As always however, there’s a boundary where we have to recognise where we’ve been triggered and perhaps our feelings are being amplified. That’s what therapy and increased self awareness helps with. Knowing our experiences and triggers helps us process emotion and understand it too
We also have to take responsibility for those triggers and responses. Recognise that sometimes we are feeling the way we feel because we have projected emotion from a past event onto a present one, and own it.
And the final boundary is recognising when we are in victim role, and making sure that we don’t use pain and experiences to excuse and justify our behaviours.
If you remember the drama triangle/winners triangle, the healthy role in the place of the victim role is ‘resourced’. So taking responsibility for your own emotional response and increasing your self awareness, so that when we are holding other people responsible for our emotions we realise that we have power and responsibility within that too.
Ultimately though, with the caveat of responsibility around triggers and processes, your emotions are valid, your pain is true and you’re allowed to struggle with it.
Be kind to yourself ❤️
