Altered State, sorry you feel so crummy I hope you don't put on your "everything's fine" face if you're unhappy. Some of the trick of "fixing" things so we're happier is to work to get feelings and their expression to match and for that to be okay. If we don't allow ourselves to be sad when we're sad or anxious when we're anxious, angry when we're angry, etc., things can get all confused and what we're feeling will still come out but in the wrong place or at the wrong intensity because it's been detoured or sat on.

When I'm a mess, I try to relax and be the best mess I can be :-) Letting it out relieves some of my "need" for messiness and eventually I can move on to a different mess or will have expressed enough that I can do something else for awhile. Nothing stays the same, you can't cry forever (my T pointed out it is physically impossible, along with crying one's self to death, I use to wish I could do that) and eventually being "confused" gets to be too much for one's body too and you "cry yourself to sleep" or come to a hiccuping halt?

You know the expression, "can't see the forest for the trees?" That's the way I feel when I was in the middle of something I don't understand. Sometimes it helps me to just "stop" and "wait." Wait for the next day or next person and that conversation or next meal even. Wait for something to shift and then I can pick it up and it will be a slightly different viewpoint. I don't think it's possible to get a "birds eye view" when we're in the middle of a struggle, in the middle of the forest. We have to get out of the struggle and climb a tree for a bit and only then can we see how far we've come and that we're almost to the end of the forest (or going in a wrong direction or whatever). But we can't stay in the tree, we have to come back down and struggle on some more through the brambles and briars and past the scary bears and other things. Eventually we'll find a much better place to be, when we get out of the forest, and we'll know a heck of a lot about forests, but only because we actually were in the forest and struggling to get through. My favorite favorite favorite "idea" of all time comes from Peter S. Beagle's book, The Last Unicorn, where the hero points out, "The happy ending can't come in the middle of the story." It seems so obvious a thought but one I spent a long time overlooking. But now I use it any time I'm discouraged -- I check with myself, "Am I happy?" "No?" "Then keep working, Perna, you're not finished; there's still time; it is going to get better."