They Dumped Their Mood On You? Try This
No doubt you’ve experienced how difficult it is when someone is going through a difficult time and transfers their frustrations to you. You’re then left to carry their emotion and not transfer that mood on to someone else.
The reality is we can’t immediately get rid of these emotions. They were kind of forced on us. Ideally though you:
(i) don’t want to carry them too long
(ii) don’t want to transfer them to someone else.
So, what do you do?
According to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy there are two steps.
Step One: Accept that the feeling is going to be with you for a bit of time. Rather than get angry that you’re now the holder of the feeling, or that you can’t get rid of it immediately, or that you have to spend your time and effort focusing on distinguishing the feeling. Rather just go OK this (fill in the feeling) will be present with me for a little while.
The idea is to understand that you can still take actions throughout your day, whilst you experience a range of emotions and thoughts. The key is to focus on the actions you want to take.
Step Two: Remind yourself, and your mind what meaningful actions and values you have today. For example, I pride myself that overall (I’m far from perfect!) I’m driven to be the sort of person to lift people up and congratulate them on their talents. So, I remind my mind, that even though someone dragged me down, it’s meaningful to me to raise people up. The more I do that during the day, even when I’m feeling frustrated or sad, the more my mind will realise what I’m trying to achieve and slowly the feelings of frustration and sadness will dissipate to allow for this.
If you continually act out your meaningful actions, then at the end of the day, regardless of your feelings and thoughts you achieved what was purposeful for you. That’s the whole aim of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Not how happy you were throughout the whole day but what actions did you end up taking that were meaningful for you.
Kelly Perry
BAppSc, PostGradCertBusAdmin, PostGradCertPolSt, DipCounselling
Author of The Counselling Edition (2024)
The Counselling Edition by Kelly Perry
