Feelings are not facts
A letter for when you're in it
Dear Therapist: How do I stop being so bad at everything? I feel like I suck and I should go hide under a rock forever.
When you’re in the middle of feeling depressed, there is not a lot you can do. You are tired, you hate everything, and you probably hate yourself or your circumstances. If you are like me then when you’re upset, your walk is a stomp, your sentences short and everybody is an acquaintance all of a sudden. “I’m not bad? You’re just saying that because I asked”
Your feelings are strong like the winds of a storm and you are the lone 2-month-old tree sapling trying to stand tall. Your feelings are heavy, like a bag of stones that you must carry around while you go about your daily life. The general advice of cognitive behavioral therapy is to analyze your feelings and see if you’re falling into a trap. But with feelings of that scale, the mere existence of the feeling - despair, worthlessness, whichever feeling is your drug - is so convincing that questioning it feels like gaslighting yourself. Asking yourself “Okay, is what I’m thinking a distortion?” not only feels like invalidating your initial sadness but it also makes you feel dumb for believing the thoughts that made you sad. And not to mention, you probably don’t have the capacity to psychoanalyze yourself at the moment. Investigating yourself in the middle of a depressive episode is like trying to figure out who planted the bomb while diffusing it - it almost never works.
Having said that, I find it empowering to remind myself of this statement - your feelings are not facts. Your feelings are valid, but they’re not facts. You feel horrible and whatever story you tell yourself is a sad story I’m sure. But it is not a fact about you. Your performance, your social circle, and your daily interactions are not you. When you tell yourself the story, it is important to remind yourself of this distinction. Whatever the trigger was, yes it is a bad event, it made you question some things or your methods or everything around you but it wasn’t a definition of you.
Our experiences are the things that happen to us or they are actions that we take (or did not take), but they are not who we are. Just because you were late, doesn’t mean you are bad. You’re stressed for being late and the feeling is bad, but that doesn’t make you a bad person. You did not deliver something that was expected of you, or maybe you are doing a bad job - none of these things are tied to your identity. They’re all events and events are not identities.
Observing the events from this sort of dissociation also helps develop more agency to deal with the problem. If you shut down and hide, there is little you can do to make things better. When you think about problems impersonally, you can see a hundred ways to solve them.
So when you’re in the middle of it all, remember, it isn’t you. They’re just feelings, you give them enough time and they pass. They don’t regulate your identity. You can still change the course of the remaining events and make things better than they would’ve been.