Word. And I appreciate your thoughtful response. Emotions aren't easy - they're work. Like with many things though, the work pays off over time.

The most surprising part of therapy to me was just how rational, analytical, and logical it all is. Like, things start to make sense which didn't before. Therapy has many components but identifying irrational distortions in our own thought processes is a huge part of it. Which strengthens our ability to rationally assess and interact with our own feelings as they arise.

Thus, counterintuitively, embracing emotional work actually decreases the discomfort/negative impacts of the unpleasant or negative emotions we wish to avoid. Unfortunately, avoidance actually makes it worse.

And therapy often feels unpleasant, but, so does exercise. And therapy's a lot less unpleasant than whatever motivates one to engage in therapy to begin with ;).

LOL FWIW I've basically found that personal growth is a process of discovering my own backwards/inverted internal logics. : /.

If the stuff I said before resonates, FYI, it's all basically cribbed from Buddhist thought or research on mindfulness (UCLA has a pretty good center doing mindfulness research & this is a good book: https://www.uclahealth.org/marc/fully-present).

I got lucky enough to be able to do (still do) a significant amount of therapy w/a skilled shrink (psychologist with Phd with at least some cognitive-behavioral background work, ideally having significant clinical experience) which has been a huge help to me. I also got lucky and the shrink in question had excellent judgement and was the right kind of person for me, which is critical. Seen bad shrinks too.

Lol so all this means I'm definitely biased from my own experience.

FWIW I hope you find opportunities to cultivate the good emotions as they arrive in your life, from a simple cup of coffee (or whatever you like) to whatever. In addition to it's own benefits, this has been shown to improve our ability to manage or mitigate negative emotions in a healthy way.

I don't do it enough but there's significant amounts of research showing that writing in a journal (about anything) about ten minutes a day has really positive mental health outcomes, as does making a daily short list of 2-3 small things (like coffee ; ) to be grateful for.

And of course stuff like exercise, yoga, some kind of physical activity. Sorry if I've gotten preachy - as you can tell it's something I have strong feelings about, hah, pun intended.

Point being, while I can't speak to your circumstances, as a general rule it's actually very simple and straightforward to apply (but simple isn't the same as easy! Doing 101 pushups - simple, not easy) all the good science around specific, straightforward techniques for increasing genuine and healthy positive emotions, and mitigating the discomfort of negative ones or sort of neutralizing them altogether.

And all of this eventually helps one cease any self-destructive coping/self-medication behaviors (which I have done/do) - drugs, alcohol, computer games, overwork, etc, which, in this context, beyond their moment of actual use, make negative emotions worse and make it tougher to experience positive emotions.

Like mastery of any skill it takes patience and time but pays off in a big way.

peace! :)

-a