ANGER

We often hold anger, consider it an emotion that should be hidden from others. It accumulates, torments and gnaws at us from the inside, which affects our mood and well-being. And life is one, and living it as a container for your own anger is extremely insulting. You can work with this feeling in many ways – we suggest you try the art therapy method and the technique from the arsenal of body-oriented psychotherapy.

draw it

You will need two sheets of thick A3 paper (paper for watercolor, drawing or white cardboard), gouache paints or finger paints, wide brushes, adhesive tape (the one that glues, not the one that whiskey). Take a sheet 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 experience of anger. Use those paints that your hand will reach for. Draw as it is drawn, because the task of “making it beautiful” is not before you. If you feel like you’re running out of space, tape the “anger-filled” sheet into the center of a blank A3 sheet and continue. Do 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, looking at the “portrait” of your anger? Write down the resulting story. After that, you can make something else out of the resulting picture: launch it with an airplane or hang it in a dark corner, use it as a background for a new picture, cut it or tear it into small pieces – attract your imagination. If you manage to do something useful, it will be completely fine, because in anger we usually have a lot of strength, and this energy can be extracted and used for good purposes!

Show your teeth

To complete this exercise, you do not need anything, only three minutes of solitude. Where an animal, not burdened with frontal lobes, would already sink its teeth into the offender, we humans only tighten our jaws and, while moving away from the place of intellectual combat, invent witty and well-aimed remarks that could save us face and conceit. And animal reactions do not go away – tension in the facial muscles and jaws, caused by anger and the experience of danger. Having no way out, the taboo feeling is transformed into a headache, fatigue, irritability. Even if you’re not angry at anyone right now, do the following exercise: open your mouth and “bite” the air as if it were, um… your enemy’s unprotected neck. Well, or just something dense and resistant to bite. Bite hard, slowly and with taste, until you feel that the neck and face are well stretched. So what do you think?

ENVY

This is a painful experience associated with the impossibility of achieving what you want while another gets it effortlessly or someone is more lucky than you. This feeling literally poisons life, because there will always be those around us who do better and faster something that we ourselves do not do very well. In some cases, envy can serve as a motivation for action, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Most often, it takes strength and faith in oneself, and this is a mess, right? We are working!

We create distance.

Our exercise also does not require special training or “props” and will take you 5-7 minutes if you don’t especially get into the taste. It is designed to deal with 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 full detail, but “rejuvenate” him, say, to the age of five years. Here he is, five years old, in pantyhose and a T-shirt stained with porridge. Or, on the contrary, all dressed up with a tie or a huge bow on his head. When you imagine it from head to toe and fix this image in your imagination, try to move it a little away from you. Let him stand far away or very far away. After that, bring it closer so that it is very close. After doing this maneuver several times, allow yourself more pranks: rotate the baby around its axis, make it fly from corner to corner or launch it into space. It is absolutely not necessary to imagine him in fiery hell, it is enough just to bring this image closer and further away until you find that you are playing with pleasure, forgetting about your emotions to this
character.

JOY

One of the most desired and forbidden experiences in our lives. We constantly wish each other happiness and all the best, but we are afraid to rejoice openly and to the fullest. Look at what sometimes happens to you at the end of a working day: you have redone a whole bunch of things, put down a good dozen “birds” in the weekly and immediately took up the next one … And where is the experience of triumph? Where is the jubilation? Where is the pride from the fact that you are such (such) well done?! The feeling of joy and self-satisfaction literally collapses, and you harness yourself to new things without, in fact, completing the old ones. And from this, by the way, stress and tension accumulate, various psychosomatic sufferings develop. Because it is not easy for our nervous system to cope with a new load without “putting an end” to the previous process.

Happiness bird.

The feeling of joy is the end, which would give a feeling of pride in oneself, the experience of the right to rest and readiness for relaxation. So when you’ve completed a task that’s been marked in your diary or in your head as important, take a deep breath and:
– postpone other things for exactly 5 minutes;
– clearly praise yourself (if possible, out loud);
– fix your feat – draw a crown opposite the entry in the diary, show off on a social network or call your mother (partner, friend) with this news.

In no case do not allow yourself to pass by your own successes and achievements. Rejoicing at a well-deserved victory is normal and, moreover, necessary! And even if something happened to you by accident or easily, without corns and sweat, this should also be noticed. If only because to rejoice is in itself good and pleasant. There is a very simple way to separate useful and important feelings from those that you experience “out of habit”, because “it is necessary” or because you never thought about the content of this process.

If a feeling is really bothering you, ask yourself a few questions:
– How does this feeling help me achieve my goals (it can be unpleasant, but it’s good to spur and motivate)?
– How does this feeling help me in my relationship with myself (it can help you understand yourself better)?
– How does this feeling help me in relationships with others (can it push you to the right behavior or, conversely, warn against risky)?
If the answer to all three questions is “no way”, then you are dealing with a destructive experience, from which is worth getting rid of – for example, using one of the above techniques.