Our minds can be both our best friends and our worst enemies. Often, what a stressful event happens, one of the things many of us do is spend a lot of time thinking about the event. This makes a lot of sense, as thinking is often our primary way of organizing our experience. If something happens to us, we generally want to find some way of understanding it, coming to terms with it, and figuring out whether and how it might happen again. For example, if you were to lose your job, you would probably feel the need to understand why, figure out what to do now, and determine whether this is likely to happen again. This process, while normal, can go wrong in so many ways. Often, when we are processing difficult events, we might slip into rumination. Rumination basically involves perseverating on why the event happened, our role in the event, and what is so bad about the event. Much like worry, when we ruminate, we might actually feel like we are getting something done. It sort of feels like we’re actually figuring out the problem. The problem, however, is that rumination is a lot like pressing harder and harder on the gas when your car is stuck in an icy parking spot. You don’t move anywhere, and you simply end up getting increasingly frustrated and perhaps afraid. We all ruminate from time to time. Sometimes, when a stressful event happens, I catch myself ruminating for a period. This is despite all of the efforts I’ve made to help teach my clients to steer clear of rumination. Then, sometimes I find myself ruminating about my ruminating! I’ve been practicing mindfulness regularly for over 15 years, I spend a lot of time teaching people new and effective coping skills, and still I fall prey to rumination. When this happens, I find it very helpful to practice accepting that I am ruminating. I tell myself that maybe it’s OK that I’m ruminating; it might just be part of the recovery process. While it is certainly painful to be caught in the process of rumination and emotional suffering, this process is not entirely under our control. I often find it helpful to tell myself that it’s quite possible that I might end up simply ruminating about this topic for the next few days. I’m probably going to feel stressed, sad, anxious, and so on. And, in my experience, the pain and the rumination will start to fade. Somewhat counterintuitively, this process of letting go of the need to cope really effectively or recover really quickly seems to ease my recovery from stressful events. Try this out. Don’t put a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself to cope well, always do the most effective thing possible, avoid worry and rumination at all costs, etc. Practice accepting that, following difficult events, you might simply need to go through the process of pain, suffering, and rumination for a period before you can start to see things more clearly and feel a little more at peace with what has happened. – Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.