What are feelings? Feelings are something that emerges out of emotions and desires. A feeling can be happy, joyful, sad, angry, anxious anything.
I don’t understand why feelings always have been seen as a part of someone being weak. Why do we consider if some shows feelings he is not strong? We say he is emotional, and that’s his weakness. But I don’t understand what is wrong in being emotional. It makes you human. Isn’t that something that differentiates you from objects?
Right from your childhood, you are always told to hide your emotions. Why? When it’s happiness, you have no problem showing it. When it’s the other way round, you should not show your feelings and keep them inside you? Why, because people think you are emotional and weak and people laugh!
I would want to ask someone who thinks this way and laughs, have you never felt this side of emotion? Ok, you might have been very strong that you didn’t show it in front of everyone and cried alone and been strong. But not everyone is the same, which is what you have to understand.
Some people find it difficult to control their emotions and it just comes out. It’s natural. Please stop making people feel terribly bad for that. If you can’t be the one to make them feel good and solve their problems, at least don’t be a one causing them more.
One more thing I never understood was controlling and getting rid of feelings. Oh wow! I never knew we have a button in us to do that. Today we want feelings button on. Tomorrow we don’t, button off. But you are taught that because that shows you are strong.
People who think they are successfully hidden are feelings by not showing, have actually started becoming good actors and not emotionless. But trust me when that person breaks, he breaks like hell. He might have gone into depression and mental stress also. So don’t consider yourself strong and people showing emotions weak.
I think what happens is that people try to get rid of their feelings. They don’t realize that feelings are positive, that our feelings are our compass, that they tell us – they give us information.
If you’re sad, why are you sad? What needs to change? If you’re anxious, what is that telling you about what’s not working in your life? Even envy.
People are so afraid of envy, and I always say to people, follow your envy. It tells you what you want. So instead of sitting there and looking at what everybody else had, say, “What do I want? How can this help me to take the small step that I need to take to do something different so I can have what I want?”
Also Read: Self worth – the feeling of being understood
So what happens is people will minimize their feelings. “You know, well I have a roof over my head and food on the table? So I shouldn’t be sad. I shouldn’t be anxious. I shouldn’t feel the way that I feel.” People will try to numb out their feelings.
So many people feel like, you know, numbness is a way of, you know, like kind of managing their feelings. But I feel like numbness isn’t nothing-ness. Numbness is – it’s not, not having feelings, it’s like being overwhelmed by too many feelings, and your feelings don’t go away just because you push them down, and that’s the problem because our feelings will come out in behaviours, in a short temperedness and anxiety, in too much food or wine or time on the internet.
A colleague of mine calls the internet, she said, “It’s the most effective short term non-prescription painkiller out there.” True, and like every non-prescription painkiller it also has a lot of side effects. The problem is that if you don’t know what you feel, you don’t know what your story is, right?
And I think that our stories are this way of making sense of our lives, and so what happens is I see people come in and they tell me their story, and the thing is their story – There are so many problems with the story. We are unreliable narrators, right? We are telling a story in a particular way, but I think if we don’t know what we feel, we only see a very narrow part of the story and it limits us.
Author: Ankita Mundhra