Emotion & Feeling

Every person has emotions

We are simply sentient beings

From an early age, children are confronted with the fact that they have to relativize, trivialize, ignore or rationalize feelings. Babies and young children are full of feelings and are looking for their way to learn to deal with all those different feelings and emotions. A baby still screams with abandon when something doesn't make sense and it is of course inconvenient to open a throat in later life if you don't get your way. A child therefore wants to learn to deal with feelings and emotions.

Parents have a major influence on the development of strategies that you will use as a child to deal with your feelings.

If you are often told that you shouldn't put up with it, that it's not that bad, that it will be okay or that you should just think about the fun things, then these will be strategies that you will apply later as an adult.

If you have acquired the idea as a child that it is better not to feel a painful, annoying or unpleasant feeling, then the result is that you want to control your emotional world with your mind (your world of thought). Later in life, the result is that you struggle with emotions, such as hurt, sadness, anger, fear, shame or jealousy.

By hiding or ignoring feelings, you achieve that you become very rational and that the contact with your own feelings slowly becomes more and more superficial. Rational people don't realize that themselves, because they think they are talking about feelings when they are actually talking about thoughts. A feeling is there for a reason and reflects something personal about your inner world.

No one can question your feelings

A thought is an opinion and you can differ in that

A feeling is a personal experience that no one can dispute. Another person may say that your sadness or anger is nonsense, but it is an expression of the hurt or injustice you experience. However, thoughts can lead to discussions. The other person can try to refute your thoughts with arguments, so that you come up with other thoughts.

Many problems come from the confusion between feelings and thoughts. This leads to discussions that repeat themselves and cause the hurt or frustration to deepen. By becoming clearer about what you feel exactly, you will have to argue less. You can learn to express your feelings in this way so that others are much more understanding and do not enter into an argument with you.

It is the discussions that have a disruptive effect on contact with a partner, family, friends or colleagues. When you get more tools to express the feelings you have in a good way, you become more in balance with yourself and also with your environment.

Feelings have a lot of influence on how we experience certain situations and the world around us. Impactful events that we experience are naturally accompanied by intense feelings and emotions. When you don't get good guidance on how to deal with those feelings and emotions, you eventually get lost in your thought world and thoughts determine how to respond to emotions that come up.

Dare to change

Take the plunge and take a retreat in France

Current blockage due to old experience

For many children, they do not learn how to deal with feelings and emotions and how to process them. Because we do not process the feeling properly, emotions take on a life of their own. This means that the feeling remains present in our body and can be triggered again and again. The strategies that are taught to be able to handle feelings and emotions are becoming more common and easier to use. The assumption is that these strategies belong to us and are part of our character. However, this is a persistent misconception.

You can also unlearn something you learn.

By constantly dealing with emotions incorrectly, you get a pile effect, making it increasingly difficult to stay relaxed. Physically, the need for discharge grows, while your mind is increasingly busy hiding those feelings.

Hiding frustrations and sadness can increase to such an extent that it eventually results in anxiety symptoms. Fear of expressing yourself, fear of saying something, fear of making contact or just fear of being yourself.

If you close yourself off even further from your feelings, the mind can even fool you so much that you think you don't feel anything. You have closed yourself off from feelings to such an extent that you seem to have become emotionless. In fact, you have become so rational that you can even explain away your feelings.

Therapy to learn to feel again

Listen more to the physical message and listen less to your mind

When we use our thinking ability to control emotions and feelings, this is only possible to a very limited extent. The reason for this is that feelings take place in the body and that the body has the need to discharge itself by expressing emotions. When an emotion is acknowledged in the right way, the need for the feeling disappears and the tension is no longer necessary.

The only way to really get rid of certain feelings is to really feel them instead of wanting to think them away!

It is often easier said than done to learn to allow your feelings again and to listen less to the mind. People are looking for help to learn to deal with their feelings better and to lose themselves less in emotions. Many therapies focus on the mind and try to make you think about feelings in different ways. In fact, they try to make you smarter, so that you can control your feelings and emotions even better. This will help you from the shore into the ditch, because that control of your feelings and emotions is precisely the cause of the problem.

A clear approach

Assertiveness, Self-confidence, Grip on feelings, Breathwork and more

Understanding your own feelings

Then comes the real processing process

Fear, sadness and anger are emotions that most people find very difficult to deal with, with the result that they try to avoid those feelings. Yet these are precisely the feelings that are an essential part of our existence. Understanding your own fears, sadness and anger increases confidence in yourself, so that you can deal with yourself more mildly. When you are able to deal with your emotions in a good way, you don't have to avoid them.

You see that people get stuck in their feelings in different ways.
Below are some examples:

putting things into perspective
evade
deny
dramatize
downplay
analyze

The first step is that you become milder to your own feelings again, but unfortunately you are not there yet. The real change only takes place when you start processing the feeling. Processing feelings means that you will understand the function of such emotions. Only when you understand the function can you also start acting on it and ensure that the tension that the feeling evokes will disappear. Then it becomes possible to live as a loving person, who makes himself happy and with whom the environment can be happy.

Did you know that...

... your body is the instrument of feeling:

Without a body you don't feel anything and you have become a dead thing. The body is full of sensors that provide you with information. You hear, see, feel, taste and smell your surroundings. All the impressions from those sensors allow you to form a feeling that belongs to the experience you are having at that moment. Something feels good or not good.

When you are more aware of the sensations of the body, you are better able to express what you feel.

The language is full of references to feelings and you can use that information to become more aware of your feelings and emotions. Maybe you use expressions yourself that, without realizing it, tell you exactly what you feel. It is not for nothing that we say that, for example:

something is heavy on the stomach
through thick and thin
not being able to digest something
break your heart
being pissed over it
walk on your last legs

There are many expressions and when you start paying attention to them, you hear people telling you exactly what you actually feel. Often they are feelings that have been present under the skin for a long time and are therefore no longer noticed as feelings. It has become a normal part of yourself and is no longer considered a feeling that should actually be discharged.