Wallowing vs. Processing: How Do You Know Which One You're Doing?

Apr 19

Table of Contents

The Core Distinction
Signs You're Stuck in Rumination
Signs You're Actually Processing
From "Why" to "What"
What the Expressive Writing Research Actually Shows
When the Question Itself Becomes a Loop
Further Reading

"Am I processing this, or am I just wallowing?"

People ask me this all the time, and the question usually comes with guilt attached. "I keep going over what happened with my boss and I can't tell if I'm working through it or making it worse." The guilt is a giveaway that they've internalized a message - maybe from a therapist, maybe from Instagram - that some kinds of feeling are productive and other kinds are self-indulgent.

This question shows up in two ways:

There's the person who's worried they're wallowing - convinced they should be "over it" by now, judging themselves for still sitting with something painful. (Or sitting with it at all, not just still.)

And then there's the person who is genuinely stuck in rumination but believes they're "doing the work" because it feels like they're engaging with their emotions or working hard to “figure it out”.

They're not wrong that there's a real difference. They're just usually wrong about where the line is.

The Core Distinction

The most useful framework I've found comes from Edward Watkins' research on repetitive thought. He showed experimentally that:

how people think about difficult emotions matters more than

whether they think about them

Abstract, evaluative thinking - "Why do I always feel this way? What's wrong with me?" - worsens mood and maintains depression.

Concrete, experiential thinking - "What exactly did I feel in that moment? What was happening in my body?" - tends to be adaptive.

These sound like two versions of the same thing from the outside. They're completely different cognitive operations.

Four things get lumped together here, so let me help pull them apart:

Rumination is past-focused and analytical. It's the "why" machine. Why did that happen, what does it mean about me, why can't I get past this. Very heady. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent her career studying this - her response styles theory remains the backbone of how we understand it. Her research showed that this kind of passive, repetitive focus on symptoms themselves and their causes worsens depression, degrades problem-solving, and erodes social support. It's the engine of depression.

Worry is future-focused. It's "what if." What if this goes wrong, what if I can't handle it, what if it happens again. Worrying about the thing keeps you from feeling the thing. Same trick as rumination, different time orientation. Engine of anxiety.

Wallowing doesn't have a clean clinical definition, which is part of why people use it as a catch-all self-criticism. If I had to place it, it's passive immersion in the affect without making sense of it or moving through it. Less analytical than rumination, but also not the engaged meaning-making of processing. Just... marinating. Sometimes we have to start here though - you don't always have to reach for the Olympic emotional movement gold, and it takes time too. Wallowing more describes a trajectory over time that has no movement. Sometimes it's what people call rumination when they're judging themselves for it. Sometimes it's what people call processing when they haven't been introduced to what processing actually looks like or just in the first few moments of processing (then they get scared, back out, and judge themselves for even touching emotions, and call it “wallowing”).

Processing involves felt experience of bodily sensations AND sense-making. Body and narrative working together. It's the only one of the four where something actually shifts.

So to summarize: rumination is thinking without feeling, wallowing is feeling without thinking, worry is thinking about the future to avoid feeling in the present, and processing is feeling with awareness.

Signs You're Stuck in Rumination

The word rumination comes from cows chewing their cud (a grass spit ball, yum) - the same one, over and over and over again.

Get the analogy?

The content loops. Same thoughts, same conclusions, same dead ends. Maybe like scratching a mosquito bite - it feels good, maybe even relieving, you're doing something, you think you’re getting somewhere, and maybe you do. For a moment. Maybe you get relief. For a minute. A day. But it comes back. You just need to think a little harder, a little more. But no new information is being generated, just replayed. Does it sound basically the same? If you've had the same internal conversation fifteen times and arrived at the same place every time, that's probably rumination.

It's dominated by "why" questions. Why me, why did this happen, why can't I get over this? Nolen-Hoeksema's work on response styles showed that these abstract causal questions are the engine of depressive rumination. They feel productive because they're effortful and looking for answers/solutions, but they rarely arrive anywhere. That’s important to ask: where did this actually get me and did it stick?

Negative emotions increase or stay flat rather than shifting. You feel worse after an hour of it, not different. If you've spent an hour "processing" and you feel heavier, more hopeless, or more self-critical than when you started - probably rumination.

It's happening mostly in your head. Very verbal, very analytical, pretty disconnected from the sensations in your body. Oops, forgot I even had a body? Probably rumination.

And here's the sneaky one: rumination can actually function as emotional avoidance (or rather, protection).

(Which is sometimes what part of us wants! Sometimes a part of us is protecting us from - fill in the blanks - overwhelm, chaos, uncertainty - by ruminating! Yes, even if it makes us feel worse. Its job is short-sighted protection from the bigger thing, not whole-system wellbeing.)

Watkins and others have pointed this out: Staying in the analytical layer keeps you from making direct contact with the emotion/sensation itself. It feels like you're engaging, but you're actually orbiting around it. You're running sophisticated analysis on the feeling rather than feeling it (notice we use feelings because emotions are body sensations mainly).

Treynor and colleagues (2003) distinguished two subtypes of rumination: reflective pondering and brooding.

Brooding - the passive comparison of where you are versus where you think you should be - is the particularly toxic form.

Brooding sounds like:

"Why can't I just do a normal presentation like everyone else?"
"I should be past this by now. I've been working for twelve years."
"What is wrong with me that I still get this anxious? Other people just... do it."
"This is the same thing that happened in grad school. I'm never going to change."

The brooding questions are all asking unanswerable "why" and "what's wrong with me" questions. They compare you to a standard you're failing to meet. They feel effortful, but if you checked back in an hour, you'd be in the same spot.

Reflection sounds like:

"When exactly did I lose the thread? It was right after the VP asked that question. Something about her tone."
"I notice I'm calling it 'freezing' but what I actually felt was a hot rush in my face and then my mind went blank - like the words were there a second ago and then just... gone."
"This reminds me of how I used to feel when my mom would put me on the spot at dinner. I wonder if that's part of it."
"What would I actually need next time? Not 'be less anxious' - that's not actionable. Maybe I need a physical anchor, or a different way to prep the opening."

The reflection versions have concretespecificity - a moment, a sensation, a memory, a concrete next question. They might not feel better. The one about mom at the dinner table might feelworse. But they're generating new information - insight, invitation to process, moving through.

And here's something worth pausing on, because it's the opposite of what most people assume: reflection was positively correlated with depressive symptoms at the time of measurement but negatively correlated with depression at follow-up. Meaning: people who reflected more actually had fewer depressive symptoms down the road. Processing can feel bad in the moment and still be doing something useful. A lot of people think "if I feel worse after thinking about it, I must be doing it wrong." Sometimes the opposite is true.

Signs You're Actually Processing

Emotion shifts during the process - sometimes due to time, sometimes due to technique. You're not necessarily "feeling better" (and that GOAL can get in the way). But the emotional texture changes in some way. You might move from numbness to sadness to something more specific and nameable. Movement (any.) matters more than direction.

You might come out with new meaning, connections, or perspective, even small ones. Maybe you notice something you hadn't noticed before. Maybe a memory surfaces that recontextualizes the thing you've been stuck on. This doesn't have to be dramatic.

There's bodily engagement.Les Greenberg's emotion-focused therapy research emphasizes this consistently: real processing involves felt sense of sensation inside the body, not just narrative. You feel something in your chest, your throat, your gut - not just in your thoughts.

This is already happening organically for some people, and in good psychotherapy. Brainspotting and somatic therapies make it a more explicit, invitational guided process. And psychedelics, well, they sometimes force you into it (in a good way). I used to joke to people who said they wanted to try mushrooms "to feel happy and have fun": Maybe! But also are you ready to maybe be locked in a room with your deepest darkest fears and feels with no escape for hours? Because that can happen too, and it can be healing. Just be prepared.

Things become more concrete than abstract. "I felt abandoned (state word) and sad (emotion word) when she didn't call after the surgery (something you can see or hear at a particular time and place)“ versus "Nobody ever really cares about me” (check out the Unhelpful Thinking Styles here: at least globalization, black-and-white thinking, emotional reasoning, and mental filtering). The first has a who, a what, a when. The second is a global conclusion masquerading as an observation.

There's a natural arc. Not necessarily clean or tidy. But you're somewhere different at the end than where you started, even if "different" just means "more tired but less clenched."

Maybe most importantly, you develop a tolerance of not-knowing. Rumination is often an attempt to feel in control - if I can just figure this out, if I can just understand why, then I'll know what to do (I’ve been super guilty of this in the past). The brain reaches for analysis because analysis has worked in other domains, or it prevents us from actually feeling the sensations, or because it feigns that it will work, or because….). But emotions don't usually respond to analysis the way a work problem does. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is let yourself feel terrible for a while - specifically, concretely, in your body - without trying to solve anything at all.

Processing can sit with ambiguity, while rumination demands answers.

From "Why" to "What"

When I suspect someone is stuck in rumination (including myself, to be honest), the single most useful redirect I've found is shifting from "why" to "what" and "how."

"What did you actually feel?" and ”How did that land in your body?" "What specifically happened right before you felt that shift?"

It's the old tired therapist trope: "and how did that make you feel?" It's so tired I hesitate asking sometimes. But there's a reason forit. And we find new and creative ways to guide people along this process. I noticed in psychodynamic training that they were trying to guide us to do this, but more obliquely - it sort of happens gently, organically, when the person is ready. But while I agree the person is best ready and willing, I do prefer processes that make what we're doing and the goal more explicit.

The move from abstract to concrete is where processing begins. It sounds almost too simple (and simple is not easy), but it's well-supported by Watkins' research and it maps cleanly onto what I see. The moment someone stops explaining their pain and starts describing it - and feeling it - something changes. The old saying is "you have to feel it to heal it."

Expressive Writing Research

You might have heard that "journaling helps." It can! But when is it helpful vs. not?

Pennebaker's expressive writing research is relevant here - People who wrote about the same painful event the same way repeatedly - pure venting, no new angles - didn't show health benefits.

People who constructed increasingly coherent narratives and found new perspectives over their writing sessions did.

—

Everyone in Pennebaker's studies got the exact same prompt: "Write about your deepest thoughts and feelings about the most traumatic experience of your life." Same instructions, 15 minutes a day, four consecutive days.

The meaning-making finding came from analyzing the writing afterward using his LIWC software (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count). He found that people who naturally shifted toward using more causal words ("because," "reason," "cause") and insight words ("understand," "realize") across their sessions showed better health outcomes. People who wrote the same thing the same way all four days didn't.

Some people just did it and some didn't. Is this because the people who are doing worse think like this more? Or thinking like this keeps people worse/stuck? Is therapy just the “gift of narrative” (partly! narrative therapy is a thing for a reason!).

Pennebaker even said: "One person's meaning may be another's rumination."

BUT - and this is the clinically useful part - later researchers tested whether you could nudge people toward it. Rude and colleag ues developed an "acceptance-enhanced" version that added instructions about self-compassion and the universality of distress ("Emotions come and go for everyone... try to express the same sort of kindness toward yourself as you would toward someone you are close to"). That version outperformed both standard expressive writing and the control condition - but only for people who were engaged enough to write longer essays (Everyone had the same 15 minutes. "Longer essays" just means they kept going rather than running out of steam or willingness to stay with it. The researchers controlled for baseline depression, so it's not simply that less-depressed people wrote more and also happened to get better.)

Pennebaker himself has noted that some people get stuck telling the same story forever and need a redirect. He's suggested prompting people to shift perspective without forcing it too hard: write about it from someone else's point of view, or write about what you learned, or write about how you're different now.

So it's not just ”better people get better." It's more like: the capacity to shift perspective can be scaffolded, but the person has to be willing to engage. Which maps pretty cleanly onto what happens in therapy. You can guide someone from "why" to "what" and "how," but you can't do the feeling for them.

If You Want to Give it a Try:

Start by venting! Seriously, it’s okay. Write the messy version first for 15-20 minutes, without worrying about whether it's "productive." Get it out.

Then, on a different day, try one of these prompts to nudge yourself toward something new:

Acceptance and self-compassion: "Emotions come and go for everyone. Try to express the same sort of kindness and understanding toward yourself as you would toward someone you're close to. You aren't alone in your experience." Basically, what would you tell your best friend?

Perspective shift: Write about the same event from someone else's point of view. A friend, a family member, even a stranger who witnessed it. What did they see?

What changed: Write about what you learned, or how you're different now compared to before this happened. Not "what good came out of it" (that can feel forced and invalidating). Just: what shifted, over time? What subtle differences are there from now versus then?

The concrete move: Instead of writing about why something happened, write about what you actually felt in your body in that moment. Notice - when a lot of people are asked what they felt, they'll use emotion words: "sad, anxious." That's okay. Write the emotion words. They're important. And then separately, write the body sensations: heavy sinking feeling in the chest, fuzzy numbness in the belly, shoulders tight, fists wanting to clench. Where were you? What did the room look like? What happened right before the feeling hit?

Letter you won't send: Write to the person involved. Say everything. You're not sending it. (Some of my favorite processing happens in letters that never get mailed) Bonus: notice your body sensations as you write it. Add ritual: burn it, send it out to sea.

The point isn't to land on a tidy resolution. It's to keep the writing moving rather than looping. If you notice you're writing the same paragraph you wrote three days ago, that's a cue to try a different angle.

When the Question Itself Becomes a Loop

The "am I wallowing?" question can become its own layer of rumination. Judging yourself for how you're grieving, monitoring whether you're Doing Emotions Correctly - that's just another loop.

Processing doesn't look productive from the outside. It's not linear. It doesn't follow a schedule. And sometimes what looks like wallowing from the outside is actually the early, messy stage of processing that hasn't found its footing yet. Give it a little time before you judge it.