How To Stop Identifying With Anxiety & Depression

Carl Jung’s psychology, parts work, and a simple two-chair exercise to talk to your inner self

9 min read

Just now

In the English tongue, we do a strange thing with our feelings. We fuse with them like a chap who’s had two too many pints and decided the first stranger he meets is his sempiternal soulmate.

I am hungry. I am angry. I am embarrassed.

We speak as if the emotion has annexed the whole of Greenland, planted its flag in the mind, and now demands tribute from the locals who didn’t even know you’d existed until you landed on the beaches.

But in Irish, the beautiful, poetic, and ancient language our colonizer and the Catholic Church tried their damndest to take from us, you don’t become the feeling. You have it on you. It visits. Like your cool uncle does, and the odd time he does that sneaky handshake where he palms you fifty quid.

In the Gaelic lingo, feelings hang around like rain on a jacket, real enough, aye, annoying enough, for certain, but they don’t nestle themselves in deep down in the marrow of your bones.

Tá ocras orm (pronouced: Ta’h uk-ras or’m), I am hungry, but the sense is closer to hunger is on me. Tá fearg orm (Ta’h far-ug or’m), I am angry, but again it’s more akin…