Many people struggle with rumination and constant worrying. Rumination is often about the past, what happened, what you should have done differently and how to solve problems you are in. Worry revolves around the future, where you are looking for you terrible things that can happen in a kind of desperate attempt to try to get control over something that you actually can’t control.
Rumination and worrying is exhausting and demanding in the long run, and you become less present in your ongoing life. A lot of therapy revolves around challenging the content of the rumination and worry, or to teach you techniques and tools to deconnect with rumination and worry.
In Emotion-Focused Therapy, rumination and worry is seen as attempts to deal with difficult emotions which you may not be fully in touch with. For example, you can try to ruminate in order to deal with feelings of shame, guilt or grief from the past, or you try to worry about the future in an effort to avoid painful feelings in the future.