Dear Koala:

You are welcome. Regarding “recognizing unhealthy and anxious behavior” meaning, your tendency “to react instantly to (your) feelings”-

1. Once you are filled with an intense emotion, you will need to lower the intensity of that emotion. When a person is overwhelmed with emotions, the person is likely to react impulsively, without thinking, in a desperate way so to relieve the overwhelming emotions as quickly as possible.

As part of psychotherapy or outside of it, certain guided meditations can help. The all start (or should start) with focusing on breathing. First guided meditations would be focusing on sounds/ one or more of the senses, which gives you a break from thinking and feeling. Following guided meditations will guide you to pay attention to your bodily sensations, feelings, thoughts. This practice of Mindfulness (paying attention to senses, sensations, feelings, thoughts)  will take a long time, but the more you practice, the more you are able to tolerate emotions without automatically/ impulsively reacting to them.

2. You will need to learn being assertive. Here is your sentence from a previous post on this thread: “I have had these outbursts of my feelings eventually when things have built up so much and I am tired or if I have been drinking I seem to get more courage to say to him how I feel.”- the outbursts follow being overwhelmed by intense emotions (#1). But you will also need the courage to assert yourself before “things have built up so much” and without drinking first.

anita