Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It

by Jennie Allen

Whether the thing you don’t want to deal with is feeling like you’ve let someone down, or feeling like you’re not measuring up, or feeling like you’ll never be able to change, or feeling like your life is destined to be disappointing, or feeling like you’ll always be misunderstood, or feeling like you’ll never find a friend group that will stay loyal to you, or feeling like you’ll never be worthy of love, or feeling any of a million different doom-forecasting feelings or things that are even more concrete and inescapable… What I want to say to you as someone who has been emotionally stuck in life more times than I care to count—as someone who still today occasionally gets twisted up in her emotions, as if she’s tangled in the leash of an especially rambunctious dog—there are times when simple awareness can help us straighten things out and extricate ourselves. And there are times when more help is needed.