Sorting Laundry

     Sometimes I just feel too many things all at once, particularly with negative emotions. The emotions happen all at once, or so quickly that it feels like they happen all at once, and then I'm just left with this overwhelming ball of negative things. I can't even separate the feelings to figure them out most of the time. The overwhelming feelings also create more anxiety, and everything piles up. I call it emotional overload.
     Prior to therapy, I could push the emotions down and bury them so I couldn't have to feel them. Since I've been in therapy and have opened myself up to my feelings, I can't just bury them anymore. I had to figure out a new way to process and deal with all my negative feelings when I experienced emotional overload recently. I didn't want to just cry about it, and after emotional overload had made it hard to sleep the night before, I was super frustrated.
     As I lay there at 6:30 A.M., after only getting three hours of sleep the night before, I had tried everything. I tried deep breathing. I tried my mindfulness meditation. Nothing was really working, and more feelings and anxiety were piling up. So, I came up with what I've started to refer to as the Laundry Basket Technique.
     I imagined that my emotions were all pieces of laundry that had just been dumped haphazardly into a big laundry basket. The laundry was all balled up and wrinkled. Then I imagined myself taking out the laundry in the basket (my negative feelings) one piece of laundry at a time. I would pick something out of the basket, and I would identify it (Oh, this is guilt...). I would smooth it out, and would then fold the piece of laundry and put it in the stack where it belonged. I didn't toss anything away or fight with the it. I just folded it, and I put it in its stack. I did that with each piece of laundry in the basket until the basket was empty.
     The Laundry Basket Technique was effective, and I felt better. It worked because as I had to separate the laundry AKA my feelings, I could pull out one feeling at a time and recognize it. As I folded the laundry, I had to think about what about the situation brought out that feeling. Then, as I put the piece of laundry AKA the specific negative feeling that I was looking at in its stack, I allowed it to exist in a space that I made for it. When I allowed the feeling to exist, I could feel it for a bit, and then move on to the next piece of laundry. (Moving through a feeling is much easier when you don't fight the feeling.) Also, viewing the feelings as laundry allowed me to view my feelings as less intimidating things.
     If you want to use a similar technique to deal with your feelings, you don't have to use the image of laundry in a laundry basket. You can come up with whatever image you need to use to make it less intimidating. The whole object is to separate all the jumbled up feelings so that you can recognize them individually and then allow each feeling to exist in a space that you create for it.
     I'll end with this: It's okay to feel whatever you feel about any situation. I know that sometimes feelings, especially lots of feelings at the same time, can be scary. When lots of feelings happen at the same time, the only way to move through them and move on is to take a step back and pull all the feelings apart to deal with them one at a time. Dealing with them is always better than burying them or pretending that you don't feel them.