One of the points my counselor friend reminded me of when she gave me this CBT packet was that life is always going to be hard. We are always going to have challenges.
My goal is to learn how to deal with these challenges in a healthy way so that I’m not in a constant state of emotional pain.

Another reason this was a good reminder for me is because I tend to focus on self improvement when I happen to be feeling good and I let it slide when life gets hard.
But when things get difficult that’s exactly when I need it the most.

I’ve been making these posts to hold myself accountable for doing the work and I just realized that I skipped over making a post for week 5 which is a prime example of letting things slide and allowing myself to get too overwhelmed.

I’ve been having a very difficult time because my eldest cat has been sick and it looks like his only option now is to have surgery.
I also found out last week that a dear friend received a very severe cancer diagnosis.

So, I’ve just been in a constant state of worry and sadness. I was talking to my friend Hive account@tremendospercy and he reminded me that worrying accomplishes absolutely nothing.
It’s a great reminder to have and it helped to hear it when I was swirling in the vortex of self-created despair.
I’ve since been dealing with the worrying part ok, but the sadness is harder to cope with.
Seeing someone that you love in pain and not being able to alleviate that pain is a hard feeling to deal with.

I’m so disappointed in myself for basically spending the entire weekend in such a low vibrational state and falling back on the old patterns of black and white thinking and catastrophizing.
I guess you could say I fell off the wagon.

This week I’m going to re-assess the SMART goals that I made.
One of the things I tend to do is design unrealistic goals and then feel bad about myself when I can’t accomplish all of them.
After I create smarter goals, I’m going to enter them into my phone so they are easier to follow.

I still don’t know what to do about this feeling of sadness that is weighing on my chest, but I’m going to try my best to not let my thoughts send me into a whirlwind of negativity and despair.