Legacy of things that used to be stressful

[jack]

I feel like I've succeeded in getting good at handling new complicated situations without entering a negative spiral. Yay me!

Unfortunately, it feels like everything I *used* to be stressed about over the last ten years are still scattered about my brain like landmines, and whenever I walk into one, I'm suddenly equally stressed, partly from long experience of expecting it to be doom, and partly from guilt at not having handled it better in the past. And the number *is* being steadily reduced as they become irrelevant or I prove they're not a problem. But each one requires a lot of tiptoeing around gently defusing it bit by bit by dealing with the practical problems and learning that "it's not so bad" and letting the negative emotions dissipate before it actually goes away.

I also feel like I've been doing a lot of introspecting recently, which has been pretty successful, but means I don't have anything to talk about in person or on LJ except "here's a bunch of complicated emotional stuff", which isn't very engaging.

But I resolved to blog three times a week about whatever I was doing at the moment, on the theory that writing high-flown interesting essays was unlikely to happen, but it was still a valuable way of keeping people involved in my life if I just talked about things I was doing without having to have a new and original thought for every post. And this is what I was thinking about today.

Comments

[kaberett]

There seems to be an audience for my emotional introspection; I perfectly well imagine there's one for yours, too :-)

[jack]

*hugs* Thank you. You do manage to make what you're currently facing interesting. I think I need to practice being more specific -- I think I tend to automatically generalise, which can be useful, but talking about what's actually happening to me right now is actually more informative, and adding any generalisations afterwards.

[kaberett]

The Things I've Learned From Counselling series is a pretty good example of generalisation, I'd've thought! I mean, yes, I contextualise it with reference to what got me there, but the one-sentence summaries are statements I think are generally true and the anecdotes are there as illustration.

Which aside, I would definitely be interested. :-)