What exactly are these strange sensations we call emotions and feelings? What purpose do they serve, and why won’t they leave me alone? It’s ironic that in an era where we have gone to the moon, harnessed and controlled the resources of the earth, and mastered the art of communicating with anyone on the planet within seconds, that we are still confused by these powerful sensations.
The words ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ are commonly used interchangeably, but they are, in fact, very different. For the purpose of this book, let’s define a feeling as the most honest and immediate expression or response to what you are experiencing in the moment. We will define emotion later.
Remember when you were a child? You felt excitement, happiness, or sadness directly and openly. You didn’t hide or try to lie about what you were feeling. When you felt sad, you simply showed sadness; when you were happy, you openly expressed happiness. Feelings can be said to be the language of the heart and your direct connection to the truth at the time.
Virtually every one of you were taught at an early age that is was inappropriate, weak or wrong, to show your true and immediate feelings. The adults around you probably responded: “Calm down”, “Behave yourself”, “Stop making such a fuss”, “Children are better not seen or heard”, “Suck it up”. Again and again, both at home and at school, you were told that you should feel. “What are you crying for?” "Stop you’re crying", “I’ll give you something to cry about!” Over and over, you were given the message that “feeling” was not acceptable. Eventually you lost the ability to trust your inner voice, you doubted the information that your heart was giving you. Eventually you were left with trusting your mind and its version of be quiet to survive.
What was even worse, you interpreted the adult disapproval not simply as an indication that your behavior was inappropriate, but that you yourself were. You said to yourself some variation of “I am not acceptable,” “I am not good enough,” or “I am not lovable.”, I don’t deserve love when I am hurt, sad, alone or feeling powerless.
To a small child this is shocking news. Your very life depends upon these adults; your very survival on their love. It is understandable then that you modeled what you saw after the behavior of the adults around you and learned to “hold in, suppress” the free expression of your feelings. For example, your father yells at you and accuses you of something that you did not do. You are hurt and frightened, but to show those emotions would show your vulnerability. So instead you lash out with anger, or run inside and shut down even more. What your father sees is not the real you, he does not see your hurt, instead he only sees your self-preservation tactic.
The problem is not matter how many years go by and how good you get ant trying to push down your feelings, you cannot stop them from arising any more than you can stop your breathing. As long as you are alive you will continue to feel. It’s true that we have all met people who appear to not have any feelings; however this does not mean that they do not experience, or do not have, feelings. It simply means they have become very skilled at not showing them.
Instead of listening to the emotions as warning signals and using them to look inward to discover what is going on, you learned the trick of bottling up your feelings. Unfortunately, like a simmering volcano, they will eventually erupt. That is why you will find that everything is going along just fine and then suddenly you blow up inexplicably and scream obscenities at a driver who cuts you off in traffic. Or, you say nothing when your boss reprimands you for some small error, but you lose your temper at your spouse when you get home.
Even more alarming, you become so adept at the game of suppression that over time you become disconnected from your natural feeling responses. This switches off your ability to express your feelings or even know what you are feeling. Sometimes you can’t interpret the emotions of other people. In short, you've become numb. You had a fight with your husband, for example, and you avoid the inner turmoil by watching television while polishing off a tub of ice cream. This is the NUMBZONE it may have once provided a safe place when you were a child but as an adult it is nothing more than a distraction from an action, and a delay from being happy.
Managing your feelings can be a conscious action, such as masking your discomfort about not knowing some apparently vital piece of knowledge during a job interview. It can also be an automatic or subconscious mechanism adopted when you were young in self-preservation. If you were sexually abused by your father as a girl, you may have an automatic distrust of men but may not actually know why you respond with anxiety or fear whenever a man tries to become intimate with you. Sometimes people make a conscious decision that later becomes an automatic reflexive response: all my girlfriends have hurt me therefore all women are hurtful. All men are not trust worthy. The list goes on, the hurt we experience as a child will overlay and carry itself forward into almost every present day experience without a feeling to help.
I call these learned responses, emotions. Your feelings are your direct connection to truth and come from your heart. They are your truest expression of what is happening in that moment. Emotions, on the other hand, are cover-ups of your vulnerable feelings. They are your mind’s protections of the feelings. Your mind creates them because it observes that whenever you are open, you get hurt. Although the mind is trying to protect from you from reliving a hurt, the effect of suppressing feelings results in a variety of symptoms such as stress, chronic disease the inability to every really trust or love.
This is why the first step is to learn how to feel, one of the initial tasks that I ask all my patients to start is called , How am I feeling, for instance every morning asking yourself “how do I feel, “Do I feel good, not good or numb?” These are, in fact, the only two ways you can feel. Just because we have thousands of words for feeling crappy such as angry, irritated, depressed, slighted, sad, jealous, frustrated or guilty, at the end of the day they still feel NOT GOOD.
Input feeling = correct emotion | I feel hurt or sad = I show hurt or sad. |
Input feeling = incorrect emotion | I feel hurt or sad = I show anger then sadness (usually alone) |
Input feeling = avoidance or no emotion | I feel hurt or sad = I distract and show nothing, then sadness alone |
Bottom Line - you sense or feel your feelings, and you show or emote emotions. With a completely open and trusting person there is no separation between these two: they always show exactly what they are feeling. This would be called emotional integrity, you feel what you show and you show what you feel. However when an emotions and feelings are different, a conflict is created, a past hurt is reinforced and a protective reflex is allowed to continue affecting every part of your life.
What’s the point of all this feeling?
At the start these feelings and emotions can seem uncomfortable, but they are here for a purpose. Whenever you feel bad, or not good, you know that you are doing something or acting in some way that is not in-line with what is true. For example, anger is a powerful emotion and as you are shouting at someone you may feel empowered and righteous, later however, you feel drained of energy and remorseful, however anger is like a fire if it is meant to cook food however if out of control it can cook you. Feelings and emotions are powerful and they are meant to guide and help us.
Feelings, quite simply, are the way that your heart speaks to you. As you begin to be aware of your feelings or emotional state, you will be able to decipher if it is your heart or your mind that is speaking. This gives you the opportunity to successfully choose the right tool for the right situation. Your feelings are there to tell you how close or how far away you are from our true voice (which as we described earlier is a term for “everything that has ever existed, that ever will exist, that you and everyone else is connected to and that connects all of us to everything”).
When you are closer to the force that connects all of us, you feel good; when you are further away, you feel not so good also known as "feeling bad". Feelings, such as sadness, may not feel good at the time, but if when allowed to be expressed wake you up to your “wanting” and “hunger” to be connected. In other words even if the feeling is uncomfortable, when used by you with your own free will it can be the beginning of new levels of love, this act alone is the start, of "letting in love", healing your past hurts and being fully vibrantly alive.
