How do I understand my feelings?

by Malec and Associates

“It’s just how I feel!” “I know it isn’t true, but I can’t stop this feeling” “I feel something is true” We put so much stock in what we feel. Sometimes we are so afraid of feeling that we block them off and dismiss them as being bad or wrong. How did our feelings become so powerful? When did feeling become either the only thing that matters or something to ignore? And let’s not get started on other people’s feelings, right?

What if I told you feelings are the “by-product” of the way we think? Let’s start in an unusual place….making pasta. If you (or I) were going to make pasta, you would get a pot, put water in it and put in on the stove and turn up the heat. You would want the water to get hot enough that it could cook the pasta. The water would boil and steam would rise from the pot as a by-product. The steam would tell you that the water was hot enough to cook the pasta properly. You didn’t decide to “make steam”. You wanted to make pasta, but steam is a part of the process. In your everyday life you are out and about getting things done. You are sitting in traffic, paying bills, watch a movie, taking a bath, talk to friends, breaking up with a boyfriend, etc.  Part of this experience will be thinking and processing the events, interactions, consequences, etc. It is highly unlikely that you were engaged with these things to “cause” yourself to “feel feelings”. The feelings were just a by-product of how you were processing (aka: thinking) your experiences.

Psychologists often say feelings are neither good or bad, but are a reflection of our perception. Perception is the way we think which involves lots of complex associations and experiences both real and imagined.  In our pasta example, the “steam” told us the water was hot enough to cook the pasta based on our past experiences among other things. Now you can see that feelings are valuable but only because they give us information about our perception. If our perception helps us effectively cope and manage our lives, then we have integrated our feelings successfully. If we push away, stuff, ignore or become overwhelmed with our feelings, then our feelings are given too much importance, and we need to look at our perception in order to understand what is happening. To follow our boiling pot with steam example, if the pot is boiling over and steam is filling the room, then it becomes an ineffective reaction to our goals (making pasta). Managing our perception will allow our feelings to work for us instead of against us. Our perception is the knob on the stove, turning up or down the heat which allows us to adjust our reaction to bring out the best way to handle life’s ups an downs.