Soaring Heart Counseling

What a complicated and loaded word “feelings” or “emotions” can be! Our last post talked about how feelings increase the strength of memories and contain important information that goes beyond our cognitive ability. This time we’ll take a look at what feelings are and why sometimes we all need help getting in touch with them.

First off, all human feelings can be sorted according to four main categories: sad, happy, anger, fear. Within each of these categories there is a broad range of feelings. For example, sad includes grief, tearful, wistful, lonely, depressed, disappointed, hurt, miserable, etc. Happy includes content, joyful, ecstatic, interested, glee, surprised, warm, laughing, joking, silly, etc. Anger includes miffed, frustrated, rage, irritated, aggressive, etc. Fear includes anxious, terrified, horrified, unsettled, jumpy, antsy, insecure, etc.

Very rarely do we feel one pure emotion category at a time. For example, when we experience anger, sometimes there is also hurt or fear behind it. Sometimes happiness is tinged with grief that a loved one isn’t there to share it. Can you think of your own examples of times when you’ve felt “emotional” and it mostly just felt jumbled up inside?

Sometimes we’ve learned feelings are bad things, so we’re 100% unaware of emotions happening inside us. Often young children are told big girls/boys don’t cry. So where does that leave us when we feel sad? If I’m an adult and big girls don’t cry, what happens when I feel sad? In this case, sadness can often be expressed as anger. Just the opposite is also true. Sometimes we learn anger isn’t ok, “nice girls” don’t get angry. So then as an adult when we get angry, we cry. And fear is a whole other post by itself.

So don’t be afraid to seek non-judgmental, professional help to learn how to experience and recognize your feelings accurately. It’s a great way to learn about you!

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

― Maya Angelou

This quote speaks to how strong emotions create strong memories. For better or worse, life experiences with a high emotional content imprint more deeply in our minds than those with a ho-hum ordinariness. This means strong emotional experiences do stay with us long after the moment has passed.

Sometimes these memories impact our decisions without our awareness. Strong negative emotions, deeply buried and withheld, might cause us to avoid becoming friends with someone who reminds us of a neighborhood bully from our childhood. Sometimes we pick a relationship exactly because it matches how we think we want to feel, not noticing whether those feelings are helpful or hurtful. Unacknowledged or suppressed feelings can control us.

This quote also speaks to the wealth of knowledge our feelings contain. Feelings arise in us spontaneously. Think of a  time when someone said something nice but the way they said it inspired a very different feeling. In this case, your feelings are telling you to disregard the content of what was said because it isn’t true. Finding the truth of a situation requires us to ask what the person said and did, but also how it made us feel.

Feelings contain important information – if you find yourself struggling with how to sort feelings out and learn from them, don’t be afraid to ask for help!

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”  - Winston Churchill

Often failure can indeed appear fatal, especially when we experience failure in similar ways, over and over again. Like relationships with the wrong people that always blow up in the same way or opportunities lost because we rubbed someone the wrong way – again. Often when we repeatedly fail in similar ways again and again there is a deeper lesson we need to learn.

These patterns of failure suggest that there is a deeper script, an unconscious way of being and doing, that is undermining our present progress. As we grow and develop into fully (hopefully) adult human beings, we learn many lessons about the world around us and how to deal with the people in it. Sometimes these lessons are something like “the best defense is a good offense” or “avoid conflict at all costs” or “other people’s feelings are more important than mine.” At some point in our lives, these prescriptions for behavior enabled us to survive or even succeed. But when a pattern of similar failures appears in our lives, often these unconscious patterns need to change.

This is another example of a great time to reach out to a professional counselor. Professional counselors are trained to listen to someone’s story and identify these patterns and recognize the under-lying theme. Then we can help you regain conscious control over your happiness and well-being by re-evaluating these previously unconscious scripts, helping you find a new path to success.