Shame, Sadness and Anxiety

I am an anxious person generally speaking. That is my ‘safest’ negative emotion. It is my home base. But I have been learning about the other negative emotions as I try to heal some of those parts of me that cause anxiety because anxiety is running me ragged. And when those other emotions arise, I have no idea what to do with them. I'm like a baby giraffe trying to walk. Not knowing what to do with negative emotions sometimes means they get stuck. And prolong someone's suffering. Most emotions don’t last long, but you have to be willing to sit with the discomfort and let go of the negative stories about them. Lately I’ve seen that underneath my ‘go get em’ attitude is someone who was at some point very scared at the loss of something. And resolving the anxiety brings out sadness. Sadness, or depression, without an external immediate cause like a death of a loved one or a tragedy feels very difficult for me to move through. I find that I feel the need to cry, but the inability to. I feel the need to be with myself but the anxious avoidance of it. I don't feel I know what the hell I’m doing. And I don’t see examples of how to deal with it. The other morning I woke up and dropped into my body with meditation and I could feel multiple emotions at once - anxiety (the most familiar), sadness and shame/embarrassment. At the time I thought, that's weird, why am I feeling shame? I’m alone. But I realized that I think the shame of being sad might be keeping my sadness trapped in my body. Along with my anxious buzzing around - likely there from habit but also trying to protect me. I know shame is sort of ‘blame turned inward’. And sadness is kind of ‘anger toward inward’. No wonder anxiety showed up to keep me from noticing. 🙂But the work is internal so I need to figure out how to get in there. But if I am honest, I do feel shame. I don't feel it's okay to be sad. At least right now. I don't know where it comes from. I could hypothesize all day but everyone feels sad sometimes. It's not a character flaw, it's a sign of being human. I do find that crying is a very self compassionate act, if you get there. But even just sitting with sadness is good, if I can manage to not get anxiously avoidant of it or judge myself for being sad. I found this flow diagram interesting, it made me think about how layered emotions can become. I bet it would work with other negative emotions too. Basically, perhaps, at one point you went to someone for help (or even just google) with an emotion and they didn’t realize that they were instilling you with ‘values’ or ‘traits’ that you would then use against yourself. It's wild how simple it is to be with someone who has negative emotions. You just have to be there. And signal its okay and you believe they will get through it. (I don’t think google works here but maybe AI can in the future ;)) But it's so dang hard for us to tolerate it in each other. We are like “okay problem solved… no need to be sad you have/are X, Y, Z”. That isn't the point. Emotions aren't really problems to be solved. I dono what I am saying except I felt like maybe someone out there is also struggling with a negative emotion. And I'm rooting for you. It's a very human experience. It's okay and if you let yourself feel it, and love yourself through it, it passes. Also maybe I’m saying this to myself, that it's okay to feel sad (or anxious, or mad…etc) at times. There isn’t a need to shame myself about it.