I wrote about feeling your feelings as an important piece in developing a healthy emotional gestalt. Some suggestions for dealing with negative feelings or emotions include allowing yourself to feel them, and reapprising your interpretation of them, to name a couple.

But there is a dark side to feeling, and it involves rumination, which is associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

What is rumination? It is effectively dwelling on a theme or thought.

I found a site by Dr. Michael Greenberg about the topic, and his advice flies in the face of more common "cures" (I’m looking at you, Mindfulness.)

When I talk about rumination, I’m talking about any type of mental engagement with the problem; put another way, I’m talking about shifting into problem-solving mode.  This includes analyzing, mental reviewing, mental checking, visualizing, monitoring, and even directing attention toward the problem.  Crucially, all of these mental processes are controllable.  They don’t happen to us; we do them on purpose.

Rumination comes in a number of insidious flavors:

• trying to figure something out
• directing attention or monitoring
• keeping up your guard
• pushing thoughts away
• using mindfulness (aka "bad distraction")
• engaging in self-talk

There’s a lot to write about Greenberg’s conception of rumination and its consequences, but I want to focus on three aspects: problem solving, directing attention (or just stopping), and the Core Fear.

Problem Solving

This is the root of your suffering if you are prone to ruminating. As mentioned above, shifting into problem-solving mode is " analyzing, mental reviewing, mental checking, visualizing, monitoring, and even directing attention toward the problem" Having thoughts isn’t rumination (you can’t help having thoughts), but trying to figure out what the thought means is. Neither is having a problem or a question. But trying to solve or answer it is.

For Greenberg, this is the cornerstone of OCD (and anxiety): controlling mental processes that you can’t control, while failing to control those you can.

So what processes can you control?

Directing Attention

Greenberg is critical of mindfulness-based strategies because they, by their design, either attempt to distract you or encourage you to stay in problem-solving mode. And his simple exhortation, challenging in practice, is to just stop directing your attention to the problem you are trying to solve.

So what are you supposed to do? Nothing. Greenberg writes that "instead of looking for an antidote, just stop eating poison." To stop ruminating, you don’t have to do anything. You just have to stop ruminating. Don’t direct your attention to the thought. This is where I think the feeling your feelings angle comes in, because not directing attention doesn’t mean thought stopping or trying to force yourself to stop feeling a certain way. You can’t do that. But you can make a simple choice: to not direct attention to the thought. Here’s how.

The Core Fear

Greenberg attributes the Core Fear to Dr. Elna Yadin. Examples include:

• Feeling judged, ashamed, or rejected
• Feeling disconnected, untethered, alone, or abandoned
• Feeling hopeless, helpless, or trapped
• Feeling contaminated, uneasy, or ‘off’
• Feeling inferior, not good enough, worthless, or like a disappointment
• Feeling how I felt when X happened, when I was abused, etc.
• Feeling vulnerable (e.g., to shame, rejection, or harm)

OCD symptoms are strategies designed to help the person avoid ever feeling the Core Fear. For Dr. Yadin, there is one most common Core Fear: being a bad person. (Others include fear of dying, suffering eternally, ruining one’s life, and remaining alone).