Acknowledging and accepting

There have already been signs that people's mental health is being affected by self-isolation. It's quite apparent that the feelings are mostly connected to a sense of loss (freedom, income, certainty, etc.), apart from the obvious potential threat to survival.

This feeling of loss often changes our relationship with others, and how we relate to ourselves too. Our attachment to people and things now absent becomes a source of pain and suffering for us. We try to hide or lock away our suffering as an unconscious process, failing to realise that this gives our feelings more power.

"I shouldn't be feeling this way." The exact words we use to say this don't really matter. The message we send ourselves is essentially the same. We try to deny our emotions, our humanity, but like a child pulling at a trouser leg to get attention, our feelings remind us of their existence.

Acknowledging how we feel is, in the longer term, how we learn to accept and integrate difficult feelings into our existence. Once we make the feeling a part of our conscious awareness, we are more able to decide how we engage with the feeling. For many of us, this first step involves talking to someone we trust about how we feel.

We can no more avoid what we feel than we can avoid being human, and it is our attempts to avoid, rather than accept, what we feel that create the greater part of our suffering. However we come to acknowledge what we feel, it is our first step in accepting the feeling as a part of our experience and limiting its power over us.

There is more to be said, but maybe I have said enough for now.