Everyone has the right and responsibility to feel. But it's not the emotion itself that is important. It is the mindset behind it that has the real juice. Thinking that our emotions or how we feel entitle us to certain privileges it like going into a movie rental store where the cases are empty and you have to get the actual DVD at the desk, and picking out a show of your choice and walking out without paying for it. You have EVERY right to choose whatever movie strikes your fancy. But if you walk out of the store without paying the price for the real thing, all you are left with is an empty case, or an illusion of satisfaction.
Feelings and emotions are a guide, not a conclusion.
Here is a list of things I consider important to understand about feelings.
There are some emotions that are not feelings.
Sorry.
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You cannot blame someone else for your stagnate state.
Please watch this 3:36 minute clip of goodness. Wayne Dyer "When you change the way you look at things "
If you do not take responsibility for your own feelings, you will never be truly happy.
Your emotions are a direct reflection of your mindset/what you think of yourself.
I'm going to use the emotion of happiness for the following examples, because it is an easy one to talk about. It lends itself well to vague references. :)
Happiness is basically when you feel good about yourself and others. You are content and pleased with the way things are, and you feel safe enough to be yourself. Usually we have to achieve certain things in order to feel this way about ourselves, and that varies from person to person. I call these expectations.
If we see happiness as being:
wealthy, thin, acne-free, and married/single,
an innocent victim,
a person with goodness that people don't recognize,
someone who does everything for everyone,
someone who always says the right thing
the best at whatever
then our "happiness meter" will be triggered in proportion to how close we get to our expectations. If we don't meet those expectations, then we won't be happy. We would never accept a study done on only one subject, we would say that there was not enough data to make a intelligent conclusion, so why on earth would we rely only on what we have experienced without considering other possibilities?
We have to believe in a happiness that is bigger than ourselves. If we try to keep it applicable only to us, we damage its ability to be healthy inside of us. We stunt its growth, and consign ourselves to mediocre happiness.
Thinking that way makes people feel like they are in love because their relationship fulfills what they had decided was the ideal. But it turns out it wasn't love, and it almost ruins them. It makes people victims, or hard to love, or literally ugly, because they think that is the only way they can be happy, because it is the only way they can be right.
If we are feeling doubt, fear, pain, sorrow, it's essentially our subconscious trying to get our attention.
Choosing what to feel does not cheapen the depth of your feelings.
I used to think that emotions or love were like a good joke. If you have to explain the punch-line, then the joke is basically dead. But the more emotionally intelligent I become, the more obvious it is that this theory is false.
I want to be happy. But unless I am willing to look at a bad performance, a bad date, a bad day, a bad week, a rude comment or an insensitive encounter as a stepping stone to that happiness, then really I am not reaching for happiness, but rather I'm expecting it to reach for me.
Do you really want to give circumstance that much credit?
Do we even really know what deep happiness is? How will we know what it is until we feel it? How do we know if what we are feeling is even close to what is possible? The only way to really know is to understand the mindset behind the feeling.
Are my feelings based on truth?
Are they based on what is really happening, or only what I perceive is happening?
Am I really going to be so selfish as to assume that I am an island, and what I am feeling is the only thing that should dictate what I choose to do? Follow your heart, the saying goes, it doesn't say follow your hangry heart, or your chemical imbalance or your misconceptions and bad expectations. Or your one bad experience, or your several bad experiences, or whatever it is. It says follow your heart. That means you have to get past the crap and see what is really going on in there. And that requires feeling and analyzing.
What do you want? From life? For those you love? What do you want to feel? Become? Inspire?
Focus on that. Be willing to look for the signs of what you want in everything that happens to you. Your feelings will follow because your expectations will change to fit what you want.
When your desires and your emotions disagree it means your choices don't line up with your expectations.
Like this: You love your child, brother, spouse, and you want to treat them with love, but then they do something that makes you so angry that you yell at them and hurt their feelings. Your anger contradicted your desire to show love. And then you feel gross and guilty and you want to run away and hide, so more often than not, you end up lashing out again, because you feel so torn up and you don't know how to turn back the clock.
If you are angry at someone, it means you are defending specific expectations. Sometimes they are good expectations, like proper boundaries, communication, etc. But more often than not, they are weird things buried deep in our psyche, like:
"If you love me, you would always show me the respect that I think I should deserve, even if I hurt your feelings, and make you feel exploited or squelched in the process. My expectations are of more value than yours."
"If you feel that way, it makes me a bad parent."
"You should know how I feel."
"I'm always right. Otherwise I am nothing. You need to tell me that I'm right."
"I hinted enough. Why aren't you observant enough?"
"If you really loved me, you would know what I want."
UM...selfish.
Good news is, we are all like that.
Emotions are a part of everyday life, and we should allow for a steep learning curve.
Let's be real. I mean really. Who are we kidding? We can't be perfect, and we shouldn't expect ourselves to be perfect. Someone I really respect said that it doesn't matter what a person's weaknesses are, it matters how willing they are to change. We can live with imperfection. It's when they start expecting things at other our expense that it becomes an issue. And that means we have to share feelings, and it's going to be confusing, messy, weird, uncomfortable, etc. But that doesn't make it any less important.
Here is a formula for communicating feelings in an open, sincere way:
I feel____________
{joy, sadness anger, worry, guilt, shame, embarrassed, grief (wailing), fear, overwhelmed (overjoy)}
about____________
noun--use only three words to describe it
because__________
words to do with self
This is not a bashing session. It is a formula that allows you to safely acknowledge out loud and to the other people involved what part of an experience is your responsibility.We can only change our end of what is happening.
Great quote by Dr. John Lund:
"No one will change a person who is unwilling to change. Not even fear of death by cancer will stop the smoker who is unwilling to change. People don’t change people. People change themselves or are changed by the Holy Ghost."
It's important to check in with our feelings. But we also need to understand this. If being in pain becomes more important than the people around us, then we have stepped over the line.
The more you hide from what you're feelings, the more dangerous and insistent they become.
Wanting it to be something different is not going to make them go away. Feelings don't die. They are essentially energy, and that has to go somewhere.
It can make one feel so weak to recognize what we are actually feeling, because so much of it is complicated and selfish, along with being good.
We cannot act perfectly Christ-like because we live in a
fallen world and we are working with other fallen peeps like ourselves, so we
have to understand that, we have to begin to understand how much the Lord
allows for our benefit. Do we really understand what He does for us on a daily
basis? If we really understood, I mean REALLY understood what we were
responsible for, for how much of the pain we feel is caused by our own
incompetence, if we really could see how rarely we are ever victims to anything
but our own stupidity we would literally break. Like our bodies could not
handle it and we would just die. Every thought, every word, every action has a
reaction. Think about that. Every single breath is creating, destroying, or
recreating what we want, and we're not even willing to notice the carnage we
leave in our wake.
But it's a good thing. There is so much hope, so much happiness in store for each of us. We just have to be willing to believe it's there. Let's let go of our attachment to negative expectation and embrace the reality of hope.
Hope is a mindset, a choice, a mixture of feelings that reflect our desire to act. Hope means we understand that things could go wrong, that we could mess up, but it doesn't cripple us. It doesn't cripple us because we believe that all things have potential. Good potential.
