Sarah
Sarah has had a difficult time with colleagues in her workplace, and she has become angry and cynical. She makes a counselling appointment and asks for strategies she can use to stop thinking about what her colleagues did, and how hurt she feels by their actions. She says, “I’m just angry. I trusted them and they let me down. I can’t let that go. It just goes round and round in my head. I want it to stop!”
Sarah says she uses a gratitude journal, and she is compassionate towards others. She also says, “I get enough sleep, eat well enough, exercise, and sometimes I’ve tried meditating. But it doesn’t seem to help stop my brain from thinking about what happened, all the time. I feel angry and hurt, and then, after a while, I think it must be all my fault.”
Sarah is doing many useful things to help her cope emotionally.
If you’re looking for the recipe for feeling better able to manage your emotions, and to control your state of mind, then sleep, diet, exercise, meditation, gratitude and compassion are all excellent ingredients.
But what Sarah is saying is that while she has good ingredients, she doesn’t know how to use them. She has no framework to bring these ingredients together so that they work for her.
If you’re making a cake, you need flour, a sweetener of your preference, some liquid such as milk, and something to bind the mixture together. But without a recipe to tell you how to bring these ingredients together, you don’t know how to make the cake.
