Wrath
We often hold our anger in check and consider it an emotion to hide from others. It accumulates, torments and gnaws at us from the inside, which affects our mood and well-being. And life is one, and it is extremely offensive to live it as a container for your own anger. There are many ways to work with this feeling - we offer you to try art therapy and techniques from the arsenal of body-oriented psychotherapy.
Draw this
You will need two sheets of heavy A3 paper (watercolour paper, drawing paper or white cardboard), gouache inks or finger paint, wide brushes, scotch (the one that glues, not the one that glues whiskey). Take a piece of paper the size of half a notebook sheet and try to depict your anger on it. Draw the feeling you have for a particular person or reflect your typical anger experience. Use the paints that you can reach out to. Draw as you draw, because the task of "making it beautiful" is not in front of you. If you feel that you do not have enough space, use a scotch to stick an angry sheet in the middle of a clean A3 sheet and continue. Perform the task until you feel that your anger is depicted accurately and completely, even if you need to glue another sheet. Look at the image: what does it remind you of? What associations are born, what stories come to mind? How can you respond by looking at the "rubbing" of your anger? Write down the story. After that, you can make something else out of the resulting picture: launch it with a plane or hang it in a dark corner, use it as a background for a new picture, cut it or rip it into small pieces - attract your imagination. If you manage to do something useful, it will be great, because we usually have a lot of energy in our anger, and this energy can be extracted and implemented for good purposes!
Show your teeth
Where an animal not burdened with frontal lobes would have already entered the offender's teeth, we humans only clench our jaws tighter and, while we are moving away from the place of intellectual struggle, invent witty and accurate replicas that could save our face and ego. And animals' reactions do not go away - the tension in the facial muscles and jaws, caused by anger and anxiety. With no way out, a tabooed feeling is transformed into headache, fatigue, irritability. Even if you are not angry at anyone now, do the following exercise: open your mouth and "bite" the air as if it were, um... your enemy's unprotected neck. Or just something dense and resistant to the bite. Bite the power, slowly and tastefully, until you feel that the neck and face stretch well. Well, how do you like it?
Jealousy
It's an agonizing experience of not being able to achieve what you want while others get it without effort or are more lucky than you are. This feeling is literally poisoning life because there are always those around us who are better and faster at something that we are not very good at. In some cases, envy can motivate us to act, but it's more of an exception than a rule. Most often it takes away strength and self-confidence, and that's not okay, is it? We work!
We create a distance.
Our exercise also does not require any special training or "props" and will take you 5-7 minutes, if you do not particularly enter the taste. It is designed to cope with the destructive feelings (envy, resentment, anger) towards a particular person that prevent you from focusing on your affairs and concerns. Imagine the object of envy in detail, but "rejuvenate" it, say, to the age of five years. Here he is, five years old, in tights and t-shirts, stained with porridge. Or, on the contrary, all dressed up with a tie or a huge bow on his head. When you present him from the top to the heels and fix this image in your imagination, try to keep him a little away from you. Let him stand far away or far away. After that, bring him closer so that he is very close. After making this manoeuvre several times, allow yourself more pranks: rotate the crumb around your axis, make it fly from corner to corner or launch into space. It is not necessary to imagine it in hellfire, just zoom in and out of this image until you find that you enjoy playing, forgetting about your emotions to this character.
HAPPINESS
One of the most desirable and forbidden experiences of our lives. We constantly wish each other happiness and all the benefits, but we are afraid to rejoice openly and to the fullest extent. Look at what happens to you at the end of the day: you've done a whole bunch of things, but a good dozen "birds" in the weekly journal and immediately took on the next ... And where is the experience of triumph? Where is the jubilation? Where is the pride that you are such a (good) man?! The feeling of joy and self-satisfaction literally collapses, and you buckle into new things, not having completed, in fact, the old ones. And this, by the way, accumulates stress and tension, develops different psychosomatic suffering. Because our nervous system is not easy to cope with the new load, without "putting an end" to the previous process.
A bird of happiness.
The feeling of joy is the end, which would give a feeling of self-proudness, experience of the right to rest and readiness for relaxation. Therefore, when you have coped with any task marked in your diary or head as important, take a deep breath and:
- put off other things for exactly 5 minutes;
- Praise yourself clearly (if possible, out loud);
- record your feat - draw a crown against a diary entry, brag about it on a social network, or call your mother (partner, friend) with the news.
In no case, do not allow yourself to pass by your own successes and achievements. It's okay to celebrate a well-deserved victory and what's more, it's necessary! And even if you do something by accident or easily, without blisters and sweat - it should also be noticed. At least because rejoicing is good and pleasant in itself. There is a very simple way to separate useful and important feelings from those that you experience "by habit", because "this is the way it should be" or because you have never thought about the content of this process.
If you are really tormented by a feeling, ask yourself a few questions:
- How does this feeling help me to achieve my goals (it may be unpleasant, but it is good to encourage and motivate me)?
- How does this feeling help me in my relationship with myself (it can help you better understand yourself)?
- How does this feeling help me in my relationship with others (can it encourage you to behave correctly or, on the contrary, warn me against risky behaviour)?
If the answer to all three questions is "Negative" - you are dealing with a destructive experience that you should get rid of - for example, using one of the above techniques.