I stumbled upon this quote today:
Our ruminations provide our suffering with empathy, which so often it doesn’t receive from those we most want it from, those we think have created our pain or should care. To stop revisiting our hurt can feel like we’re moving on before the hurt has been properly heard, validated, or soothed. In this way, our attention (in the form of thinking) can feel like a salve to our wounds.
Nancy Colier, Can't Stop Thinking: How to Let Go of Anxiety and Free Yourself from Obsessive Rumination
This is the first time that I realised there might be something good about rumination, like for example the fact that it makes me feel like I am attending to myself, like I am trying to figure it out and, as she says, give myself the attention that I don’t feel like I’m getting from others.
Usually when I catch myself ruminating there’s a lot of self-judgment that comes up because I think rumination is not very helpful and makes me catastrophise and distort my reality.
But maybe it also seems worth to acknowledge the role it’s playing and that it’s not without a reason. I believe that the way out of these patterns is probably by being more understand and compassionate towards them.