Reply to S/O: Does talking about negative emotions help you?

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Reply to "S/O: Does talking about negative emotions help you?"

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[quote=Anonymous]To the people who complain about when people "go on and on" about their negative feelings or the underlying situation, a tip.

If your response to a loved one's expression of negative emotions (or just relating a bad situation form their life) is to push back, they are going to feel like they need to "prove" to you that the problem is real or that their feelings are valid. So they might keep talking and explaining (this is called "over explaining") because by pushing back on them you've invalidated their feelings or experience, and have become the arbiter of whether it's okay for them to feel as they do. A poster upthread demonstrated this really well when they said they have trouble "pretending a little thing is a big thing." That's exactly the kind of value judgment that is going to put someone on the defense and keep trying to convince you that their thing matters.

So my advice is: don't be the arbiter. Practice non-judgment. That might actually be easier than practicing validation, which can look different for different people. But judgment is easier to identify and avoid. Practice hearing a loved one tell you about their experience or their feelings and just accepting it as the truth and not trying to reframe it in any way. People really struggle with this, so I think it's worth practicing.[/quote]

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