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Advice
On Emotional Processing
A skill not everyone learns in childhood, but that everyone still needs.
Emotional processing is a skill that has to be learned as a part of growing up. Unfortunately, not every parent is equipped to teach this skill to their kids — and this tends to be particularly true when neurodivergence runs in the family, because neurodivergence can greatly complicate emotional processing. ADHD, Autism, and Bipolar, to my knowledge, directly impact emotional processing. Emotions are senses, and can be subject to sensory overload just like vision or hearing. Feeling too much can be genuinely painful for us, which means we have to learn to work through the pain to process our emotions successfully.
Simply put: neurotypical people assume everyone just learns how to process their emotions, but not everybody had that education. If you didn’t, here’s a primer that may help you get started.
Note: this is HARD at first, it can be REALLY SCARY and it can feel really pointless. I promise, as someone who has gone through it, that it’s worth it.
Processing looks like this:
I wrote above that emotions are senses. Unlike the traditional five senses, though, they’re pointed inward and they’re giving you information about your inside reality instead of your outside reality. Each emotion has meaning, and once you learn how to read them you’ve got step one of processing down. Let’s look at a few examples:
Emotion Meanings
Emotion
Meaning
Notes
Relevant Essays
Anger 😠
Someone has wronged you
Anger is telling you that you didn’t receive what you were owed, that someone endangered or harmed your loved ones, that someone is taking advantage of you. When you feel anger you can begin to process it by asking yourself, “In what way do I feel wronged?” Then you can decide whether or not that’s a valid response to the situation.
A lot of people with a lot of privilege tend to struggle with anger because they feel entitled to things that everyone else has long since accepted are contingent. If this is you, it’s not a moral failing, it’s just a part of your role in the giant late capitalist hellscape we’re all living through, but it is your obligation to work through it so that you can lead a richer life and stop scaring the other people in your life.
Sadness 😦
You’ve lost something
Sadness is telling you that a part of you is no longer there. People, places, objects and ideas all become a part of us when we engage with them, and when they mean a lot to us they become important parts of us. Losing them — through death, estrangement, relocation, misplacement or growth — is painful, because it’s losing a part of ourselves.
Sadness is just trying to make sure we know that this has happened. We can process sadness by asking ourselves “What have I really lost?” and then deciding whether or not your emotional response is appropriate to the situation.
There are no rows in this table
This stuff is hard and it’s extra hard when you feel everything with 300% intensity. But I used to completely ignore my emotions, and they grew to be overwhelming. Now I understand that if I just accept the message the emotion is trying to give me, and thank it, the emotion goes away.
It’s an internal messaging system, and when you ignore the messages the mail gets backed up. That’s all it is.
So by learning to accept the messages I release the emotion to go back to a resting state, and I’m able to get to a more regulated place more easily while at the same time having a much richer set of information about myself and my world to work with.
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