Why does negative emotion stay in my brain way too long. and fight back if I fight it, that is, if I have a problem-solving response (psr) to it?  For example, if I try not to be angry, I get more angry. Same with the pain of failure.

Answer: It’s a survival mechanism. If, for example, I could get rid of my fear of falling, I wouldn’t try to resist gravity’s downward pull and I’d fall constantly without putting my hands out. Result: death by head injury.

Here’s why I do the Seeing Sequence

Since I don’t want to die or get hurt, and because I have only 2 directions to go with my feelings, I need to stop going in the direction that doesn’t work – fighting them, and go the other way, go with them.  I fight positive feelings. I fight negative feelings. The opposite, going with them means “bitching and complaining”,  or “flow”, or “go with”, or “the bitch”, or “b&c”. These words distinguish the act from everyday complaining, which is a form of fighting or solving my feelings.

There appears to be an exception, but it proves the rule above. Complaining to a good listener, that is, someone who approves of my act of complaining, and, I imagine, approves of my complaints, does make me feel better. After all, I never complain to someone whom I think will disapprove.

And I’m not complaining to solve a problem. I’m only doing it to get approval. It distracts me from my anxiety. I then feel the positive feeling of relief.  But my relief is brief. Then my anxiety returns. The result is that everyday complaining, including to myself, works too briefly to prevent me from becoming unhappy and unable to function. Plus, it’s exhausting. It’s mostly why I get tired so easily when I get anxious.

What causes me to have prs’s (see them here The Database of Psr’s, ) responses that solve and thus fight my feelings, instead of me flowing with my feelings? See Why the Seeing Sequence works