Hi Bella,

You must be feeling very stuck and overwhelmed right now.  You’ve had a new experience of being emotionally open to someone like never before but got too dependent on him.  Now even though you’ve gone back to your regular way of being (closing off on your emotions), they sound like they are leaking out or building up to bursting.  In fact, I sense that you might have developed a different kind of relationship with your own emotions.  Previously when you were closed off, your relationship with them might have been a distant one.  After opening up, your relationship to them seems to have become one of fear.

My sense is that it’s a toughie but here are a few things you can do:

1) consider seeking a mental health professional for help – because I sense that you can’t do this alone.  In fact, you seem to also sense the same thing as you said you need someone to cry to.  It is precisely in a warm and supportive relationship that you can learn (with the therapist acting as training wheels) to tackle your many emotions.  Really ask around to see if you can find a warm and relatable therapist.

2) By yourself, what helps is to have a way of discharging your emotions in small, manageable amounts (sorry if I sound so clinical).  This has worked well for me.  One way is to consider which methods of emotional expression helps you stay in control, while allowing yourself to express whatever amount of emotion you want.  I would recommend writing – putting your feelings into words helps pin them down and download them (like a USB drive).  I’ve found that putting a time (e.g., 20 minutes) or page limit (e.g., 3 pages) helps your emotional expression stay contained.  Also, you can choose to write about the smallest or least difficult emotions for starters, and you need never write about the too-big emotions.

3) Use some physical methods to help you take the edge of your emotions.  Emotions happy mainly in our bodies – I call it “carried in our bodies” – and it helps to use a body-oriented method or methods to calm them down.  Regularly do some yoga, go for a walk, swim, engage your five senses to ground you in the present moment and anchor your awareness in the emotional storm that might be going on inside.  Even just doing things to make you feel physically comfortable (like a cuppa of hot chocolate or a foot bath) helps heaps.  When I get overwhelmed, I usually go for a walk and boy do I walk!  I walk until I break into a sweat and feel the strong emotions in my chest calm down.

4) When you are ready – after spending a lot of time on the first three suggestions, then you might maybe take small risks to open up bit by tiny bit to different people.  One possible reason you might have become so dependent on your ex could be (I’m really just guessing here) because you opened up all at once to him (as he made you feel so comfortable).  The fact that you needed some level of comfort to open up emotionally (which is a vulnerable thing for any of us to do) suggests to me that you might have needed to do it in small and gradual amounts.

Hope this helps a little bit.  Stay strong!  Eric