Feelings Fact Sheet

[elisa]

Just thought to share a feelings fact sheet that was collecting dust within my huge file on "help" topics. What are your thoughts????
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1. Feelings are internal physiological reactions to your experiences.

2. Feelings are a spontaneous reaction to your interpretation. e.g. someone says "good morning" - you interpret - nice or sarcastic.

3. No-one can make you feel anything!!!!!

4. Feelings can cause physical reactions - you tremble, sweat, increase your heart rate.

5. Feelings have as well OUTWARD SIGNS or BEHAVIORS. e.g. SADNESS is inside you - but you can cry or frown. ANGER is inside you - but you may shout at someone.

6. We ALL have feelings all of the time, but we don't register all of them - IT WOULD OVERLOAD US.

7. Feelings in themselves are neutral - they are NOT positive or negative - they are NOT good or bad - they are NOT right or wrong.

FEELINGS JUST ARE


8. Remember repressed feelings control you, feelings (expressed approriately) you control them!

9. Expressing feelings appropriately often means thinking before you communicate them

10. Sometimes, just acknowledging our feelings to ourselves is enough!!

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I like 7 and 8. Although that's on an intellectual level..... The reality is that I feel and think that I'm a slave to my thoughts and feelings.....

Eppe.

I don't know about #3, sometimes if I get yelled at or even looked at wrong I feel bad. I guess for some people that are strong just wouldn't give a ****!!

[wills11]

I soo appreciated your posting of the sheet. Much of what is on it is what I have been working through with my psychologist. It is so easy to be frightened by feelings.
Thanks again.

[elisa]

Yeah - I went through so much sh*t throughout my life and swallowed so much of it through intellectual reasoning that I never dealt with the feeling side of it.

Feelings were not allowed to be expressed in my childhood and during my married life. I always made up intellectual excuses for another person's behaviour or feelings, but didn't consider mine. Sometimes I even wondered if I even had them.

The consequences of this behaviour was that over the years, I didn't even know anymore what was going on, just felt ONE BIG HURT INSIDE.

I was ready to climb the highest tower in the city and scream to the world, that I was just a human being and what had happened in my life. Ofcourse, that was the time when depression set in big time.

What unresolved (or fear of) feelings car do............

[Tiamat]

"4. Feelings can cause physical reactions - you tremble, sweat, increase your heart rate."

A triggering of past experiences can cause the same. Shock and trauma can be the cause and "feelings" are not a part of it.

If feelings are neutral, then, they cannot increase your heart rate! Perhaps it is the thought process that accompanies the feeling and not the feeling itself. Perhaps, if a person were to read about the limbic system (see Peter Levine and others) they would begin to understand more about how we have stopped allowing ourselves to truly deal with the shocks of life?????

[elisa]

Originally Posted by Tiamat

"
If feelings are neutral, then, they cannot increase your heart rate! Perhaps it is the thought process that accompanies the feeling and not the feeling itself. Perhaps, if a person were to read about the limbic system (see Peter Levine and others) they would begin to understand more about how we have stopped allowing ourselves to truly deal with the shocks of life?????

Tiamat - it's the automatic thought that accompanies the feeling. The reason for feelings being neutral means that they neither good or bad in themselves. They just are, meaning it's okay to have feelings.

e.g. it's okay to have the feeling of feeling angry at someone or something.

What it means is that it is okay to have feelings, positive or negative.

The feeling sheet is not dealing with physical reactions to the feelings.

Is that what you mean?

[Tiamat]

Elisa

In part.

There is also the trauma/shock/threat/protective response which does not require a "feeling" aspect. We humans have developed past other mammals and we have labelled many experiences along with 'deciding' to shut many down. Other mammals simply respond, no labels and (note the 'and') no judgement.

And, being a human mammal, I will decide that I am too tired to say anything more. LOL

Originally Posted by Tiamat

Perhaps, if a person were to read about the limbic system (see Peter Levine and others) they would begin to understand more about how we have stopped allowing ourselves to truly deal with the shocks of life?????

I searched the net for Peter Levine a bit and found what I read very interesting.

My karate teacher, who is also gives shiatsu massages, tells me how your body can 'know' things that you yourself (the intellectual part) does not know. How fear can be released and thus diminished by working on the body. I'm still very new to this but very intrigued by it. I've always been a very intellectual, annalysing, over-thinking person. Until recently I felt 'I' hardly existed from the neck down.....

Peter Levine seems to be saying very similar things. I'd like to read his book, Waking the tiger.

Tiamat, do you have personal experience with this???

Eppe.