Would you like to understand your feelings better? Perhaps you have questions like;
- Why do I always end up feeling this way?
- Why won’t this feeling just ‘go away’?
- Why should I feel like this now? I’ve been it some tough situations, and they were no problem to me.
- What’s the point of feeling bad? Don’t I just need to ‘snap out of it’ or ‘pull myself together’?
- Am I going mad? I didn’t used to respond like this.
- Will I ever feel better? I feel so hopeless.
- Will I ever feel better? No one can bring back such a special person.
It may be that, back in our early family situations, ‘doing’ lots of feeling wasn’t especially welcome. And in many contemporary Western settings, bringing our feelings to situations with work colleagues, neighbours and community, friends or family may not be the most ‘acceptable’ way forward.
Yet our feelings are a natural internal response to our experiences and the circumstances we find ourselves in. Ignoring them or ‘pushing them away’ potentially misses the information they are offering about our current reality.
As we begin to understand, contact, explore and express our feelings we find that;
- They’re a useful source of information
- We’re less ‘on autopilot’ and respond more to here-and-now reality
- We’re more aware of what we need
- We take more care of ourselves
- We’re more ‘in contact’ with other people
- We’re able to be more spontaneous
This ‘Feelings 101’ or Introduction to Feelings is a number of pages that look at ideas like;
- What our feelings are
- Why we have feelings
- What feelings mean
- How our feelings work
- How to get started, and do more with feelings
- Why we have bad feelings
- Why we have some bad feelings over and over
- How we can have fewer of these recurring bad feelings
The articles link together. But clicking on the ‘Feelings 101’ logo will always bring you back to this start page.
A useful way to ‘take the Feelings 101’ is to read each article in order from this list below. However, each article is written to ‘stand alone’ and you might want to dip into the ones that seem most interesting.
Take the ‘Feelings 101’ and make a start with your feelings!
- Getting Started – Somatic Feelings and Authentic Feelings – great sources of information
- The River of Feelings – Looking Away, Diving In or Just Watching
- Saving ‘Feelings’ Stamps
- Feelings in our Early Family – Some feelings were allowed, other feelings were not
- Beginning to Talk About Feelings
- Looking More Closely at ‘Can’t’
- Can someone really ‘make me feel bad’ by what they say to me?
Getting support with feelings
Remember that everyone is different and any self-help process can only offer ideas in general terms. It may be that ‘dealing with feelings’, especially uncomfortable ones, means working with someone who is qualified to support you.
Why not book an initial assessment session with a counsellor/therapist who is registered with a nationally recognised professional body (such as BACP or UKCP in the UK)?