Emotional Processing Quotes

I think about all my successes and failures, and sometimes the failures stick in your head as much as the wins. But you do move on.

We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.

Every woman has a mother, and every woman will have an issue with that mother and things that mother did or didn't do. It just depends on how you choose to process the lessons that you learned from your own mother.

I don't really write for catharsis; I get that kind of work done in therapy.

Your trade becomes very much impacted by the quality of your life experiences and your capacity to process them.

The human brain works in, so far, mysterious and wondrous ways that are completely different than the ways that computers calculate. Things like appetite or emotion, how do those function in the brain?

Our music's kind of about taking something ugly and making it beautiful.

Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me.

We don't ruminate during a fight. Maybe in a bath, or driving a car, or as we take a walk. But not right smack in the middle of a dramatic moment.

I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience. No matter how weird or disturbing or upsetting to me personally, it all finds its way in there.

You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.

I find it easier to write about stuff that is frustrating.

I swear, you are the only person I know who makes decisions based on what will provide the best material for a diary.

I think intellectualization is what's killing most people.

I definitely think that females have a harder time. It's a lot harder to be a girl because you're always in your head. I've heard my brother go and take it out on the football as he says. Whereas girls would rather sit down and over think things.

We won't let ourselves feel our anger, rage, and pain. We push it down or anesthetize it through drugs, alcohol, shopping, or whatever we do in order not to feel it. When that memory and the associated feelings get lodged down there in our soul, the feelings are still there. They don't just magically go away. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to feel them.

If we had a hard time, my mother would sit me down and we would talk about it, and she kept talking and kept processing until we started to laugh about it.

I'm pretty good at remaining calm during an emergency. My house burned down when I was 12, which made me really pragmatic about what needed to be done. But I can be bad in that I compartmentalize a lot of emotions and push them away to deal with them at a later date.

When I have a lot of emotion going on, I'll write. I write letters to my family, my boyfriend, anyone I'm trying to get my point across to. It's easier for me to express myself.

I guess I just process death differently than some folks. Realizing you're not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life, and then the happiness and the sadness get all swirled up inside you.

Your present negative beliefs were formed by thought PLUS feelings. Generate enough emotion, or deep feeling and your new thoughts and ideas will cancel them out.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid.

Having my son made me grow up. I'm keeping my dangers in the movies.

When faced with emotional pain, I become still for hours, sometimes days, doing absolutely nothing. It helps me get to the truest source of my suffering.