This article, written by clinical psychologist Beth Kurland, shifted my perspective on the necessity of processing raw emotions. She describes sadness as "a bit like food that needs to be digested in order to move through you. When left undigested, it can sit there for a long time and cause unintended consequences”. The author provides six powerful "views" or vantage points to help process these heavy emotions. The one that works best for me is the Audience View, which helps to loosen the grip of the story I've attached to the emotion. The practice involves imagining yourself as an audience member observing your experience and then distinguishing between your raw emotions and your thoughts. For example, you might say: "There is sadness, and I am aware of thoughts telling me that I should be over this by now." This helps me label emotions as emotions and thoughts as thoughts, recognizing that neither of these are facts, but rather "food" to digest. — CD

If you're feeling low or need a pep talk, you can share your feelings and rant to this AI bot. It's designed to sweetly reflect back what you're feeling and offer encouraging "compliments." It never fails to make me smile. (Discovered through the most recent issue of WIMN.) — CD

I recently stumbled across an interactive wheel designed to help explore the complexities of human emotions. This wheel displays eight basic emotions and illustrates how they relate to each other, intensify, and combine to form more complex feelings. Although I don't know much about the organization behind it, Six Seconds is a non-profit organization whose mission is to increase the world’s emotional intelligence. What I found most fascinating and useful is learning the typical sensations that one feels in the body based on the emotion, because that is how I tend to recognize an emotion before naming it. It's a great tool for anyone looking to enhance their emotional literacy or better understand the nuances of their own feelings. — CD

If you’re ever feeling rejected, anxious, or insecure, at AreTheyMadAtMe.com you’ll find a wall of comforting messages from anonymous posters to remind you that you are not alone. Uncertainty can make me feel lonely or disconnected from other people, and this is a good reminder to not make assumptions about how others might be feeling toward me and practice some self-soothing. — CD