Another random thought. When I'm sad about something in my life, I usually can make myself feel much better by simply saying, in a sentence, why I'm sad. I don't know why this works, but it seems to make the emotion abstract, as though it happened to somebody else.

I don't think that works for me. I often can't identify a specific cause of my sad feeling, and when I can, thinking about it often makes me feel worse rather than better.