DEALING WITH DREAD
Sometimes our fear of what may happen can be overwhelming
SENSITIVE
This section is about being highly sensitive, written in a way (I hope) that helps HSPs, and informs not-HSPs.
I’ve been feeling a lot of dread since the November elections. Many of us have - as I’ve written before in this newsletter, you don’t have to be highly sensitive to understand at a gut level that things are terribly awry.
So we all feel dread, it’s just that HSPs feel it more and process it at greater depth. Therefore, dread affects us more. As an HSP, simply understanding that fact helps me get perspective on my feelings of dread.
Getting perspective means naming our emotions, and not denying, avoiding, or ignoring them. It’s best to admit we’re in dread. Give it the name! Naming it takes away some of its power.
After naming it, we accept that we’re feeling dread.
This may seem elementary, but many of us are pretty good at denying or avoiding our feelings. In a society that elevates thinking and intellect above all else, emotions and feelings are disrespected and criticized. This is so not helpful.
There’s no shame in having a strong, even overwhelming, feeling of dread.
Name the dread, accept that you’re feeling it, and examine it. Reflect, journal, draw, paint, walk in the park … whatever helps your honest, compassionate examination of your feeling.
Where in your body do you feel dread? What other feelings go along with it? Does it remind you of another time in your life when you felt similarly?
When you’re ready, there are ways to manage dread.
WELL
Tools for managing dread:*
1. Some of your dread will be related to stories you’ve constructed in your mind. Some will be related to what is actually here and happening. Separating what your mind has conjured from what is fact can help mitigate the dread.
2. Recognize that some of what’s here and happening is out of your control. This is another place to practice acceptance. Can you accept that things are not yours to control, then step away from them?
3. Here and happening dread causes us suffering. Stories we tell ourselves, worried imaginings about future possibilities also cause us suffering. Why add to your very real here and happening suffering with suffering from what’s in your imagination? In other words: your dread is real; your worried projections and stories are not real. Take that extra layer of suffering away!
* adapted from THIS ARTICLE in UC Berkley’s Greater Good Science Magazine
LOOKING AHEAD
Managing dread during this terrible time of upheaval in America will help free us.
Free us for creative and energetic response to the trump regime and its hateful, anti-democracy words and actions.
Free us to accept reality and understand what our role is in fighting for America.
Free us to share our genuine feelings about the here and happening, rather than wasting time arguing or fearing what may or may not come to pass, over which we have no control.
We have power only over our own reactions to events that are far beyond our sphere of control. Handling our feelings of dread well and with self-compassion can make a big difference in how we show up for the fight.
Thank you for reading Sensitive, Well, and Looking Ahead.