I have had to learn several strategies to learn with negative feelings. As someone with bipolar disorder, I have had negative feelings on high volume. Anger, sadness, fear are all ramped up in a bipolar flare-up. I wasn’t medicated for years, so I had to manage things myself. Nowadays, the edge has been taken off the emotions, but they’re still there.
My first strategy is to take deep breaths. Breathe in to the count of five, hold to the count of five, breathe out to the count of five. This does a good job of taking care of fear and panic, especially when I have trouble sleeping at night.
The second strategy is to not block the feeling. Having the feeling and letting it flow through me helps to keep it from overpowering me. Sometimes the feeling doesn’t want to be banished, which takes me to strategy #3.
My most powerful strategy in the toolbox is cognitive journaling. In cognitive journaling, you identify the feeling and its underlying thought. Then you identify cognitive distortions or thought errors. These include mind-reading (thinking you know what someone else is thinking) or fortune-telling (predicting the future). Identifying errors reduces the strength of the negative emotions. This link will tell you more about cognitive journaling.
I highly suggest doing work on regulating emotions. Although we are all entitled to our emotions, we are not entitled to use them as bludgeons or overwhelm others with our needs. That’s what emotional regulation is about.
Words Like Me 