Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family

therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized

nuggets of health. I recently got asked this great question and I wanted to answer it and I think that this question and the answer is a really great interlude, you know, in between these sections on this course, the section that we just finished on how your body impacts your mind and how to soothe your nervous system through your body.

And this next upcoming section, which is all about how to change how you feel by changing how you think. So I got asked this question recently. I thought it was a great question, right?

Someone asked me, I think about and talk about my emotions all the time, but I still feel terrible.

I still feel upset about the past. No matter how

much I try to work through my emotions or my memories, they just keep coming back. I can't let go.

And the more I think about them, the worse I feel. Now, people say that time heals, but if you ask

someone with severe anxiety or PTSD, they'll tell you that it doesn't. Or if you ask someone with severe anxiety or PTSD, they'll tell you

that it doesn't. Or if you ask someone with depression, if thinking about their emotions or their

thoughts helps, they'll often say that it just makes them feel worse. So here's the thing. Usually what's

causing our mental block is that instead of processing through an emotion and coming out the other side,

something that we're doing is leaving us cycling, going in a circle and constantly getting stuck.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

So just doing more thinking doesn't help us resolve problems. It tends to

reinforce a problem. Now, if this doesn't make sense, let me give you a couple of examples. So with

anxiety, it's common to avoid the things that make you anxious. So if you're afraid of dogs and you

avoid them, that sends a message to your brain that the only reason you survived those

dogs is because you avoided them, which your brain takes as a signal to make your anxiety

worse around dogs. The more you avoid something, the more anxiety you feel. Avoidance keeps you

stuck in that fear response. So when you avoid something, you just start cycling, right? Let's do an

example with depression. If every time you make a mistake, you then call yourself a failure,

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