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Monday, 07 July 2008
Beliefs about feelings
One. Some people believe that feelings have to be logical. Often they are not. To feel angry on a Monday morning, to feel grief when you sell your car, to feel scared in crowds, to feel despairing when you have a good job, family and life all may seem somewhat illogical.
More often than not feelings are illogical. We would all like them to be appropriate and reasonable in reaction to our environment. Unfortunately there is a powerful illogical part of ourselves. Freud called it the id and in Transactional Analysis it is called the Child ego state.
There are even some therapeutic approaches that rest on this false belief. They try and take control of these ‘irrational’ parts of the personality and make it rational or at least dominate it with rationality. Rational Emotive Therapy(RET) and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy(CBT) are two prime examples. I suggest that such a task of dominating the Child with rationality is doomed to failure if not in the short term then in the long term.
The approach I would suggest is that you accept that we are irrational beings to some extent at least. Do not try and fight it but work to live with it.
Two. Some people believe that feelings must have a goal or be a means to an end. We hear statements such as:
“What is the use of being angry, it doesn’t change anything”
“If someone dies why cry about it, it wont bring them back”
80% of the time feelings do not change reality. So in this way feelings are not a successful means to an end, yet I would suggest that they are an end in them self. They do not have to lead to something, indeed they are that something.
Consider this metaphor. When one drinks water the bladder expands and then there is a tension. The tension is expressed by releasing the bladder and taking a leak. Feelings are the same. Something happens and the body goes into a state of tension (feeling is felt). One can then act and expresses the feeling and the tension reduces. This is a biological fact I am afraid so you might as well get used to it.
Three. Feelings and issues often get mixed up and then the feeling becomes the issue. Hubby wants to go out at night and the missus wants to spend the night at home. They begin to negotiate the issue of going out or staying in. During the negotiating they start to feel angry at each other. Now there are two problems:
1. Going out vs staying in - the issue
2. The anger - the feeling
Some do not make this distinction between the issue and the feeling and they will then start to use the issue as a means to express the feeling. At this point the issue becomes irrelevant but often people believe they are addressing the issue and cannot understand why the other person is not understanding them. Both stop listening to each other because it is no longer about the issue and it is about expressing the feeling instead. This can make the issue drag on for long periods of time. If they do make the distinction then first set about expressing the feeling and forget about the issue. Once that is done then get back to the issue and usually it is resolved in record time.
Graffiti
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