What are feeling: Feelings are our emotions. They are what happens deep down in our hearts, as a reaction to what we experience, or what we think, or how we respond. As a matter of fact, everything about us registers not only in our minds, but also in our hearts, so that there is a corresponding feeling to everything that takes place in our lives. Someone who says he does not feel anything actually feels numb.
There are four primary feeling, namely;
Sadness – Grief, loneliness, guilt, regret, pain, depression are all auxiliary to sadness.
Happiness – Joy, ecstasy, fulfillment, excitement, peacefulness are kind of happiness.
Fear - Anticipation, doubt, hesitancy, fright, worry, anxiety can fall under fear.
Anger – Hatred, rage, exasperation, hostility, indignation, frustration, animosity, and so on.
Feelings are neither good nor bad. Feeling frustrated, or being annoyed, or experiencing fears and anger do not make one a good or a bad person, Feelings area not moral but simply factual. It is our response to our feelings that can be judged good or bad. But the feelings per se are not wrong. For example, if a woman falls in love with a priest, that is not a sin. But if she flirts with that priest or nurtures her emotions – now, that is sinful.
It is important that we are convinced that feelings are not immoral so that we can be free to face and accept our feelings. In other words, I must be able to say, without any sense of moral reprehension, that I am afraid, or angry, or sexually aroused.
The next step to emotional openness and honesty should be an integration of my emotional reaction to my mind and will. I can decide if and now I will act, or not act, on my feelings.
Repression – it is unconsciously denying or ignoring painful feelings. Louis van Dans puts it very aptly: “Repression is a psychological swallowing, a pushing down, an exclusion from our unconscious mind that we find painful.”
If that was all there was to it, it would be a somewhat happy solution to handle anything that is painful. But in this case, the “cure” is worse than the sickness.
Anything that is buried alive remains alive, festering in the subconscious. By festering, I mean it acts like a n echo chamber aggravating and intensifying all the hurts in the present that are similar to the ones which we repressed. And the emotional turmoil resulting continues until that which was repressed can come again, and be seen and accepted in a new light.
Many of us do not realize that something has been repressed can be alive and festering 5,10,15 years later, even though we have seldom thought of it during this time.
Practically, most of us do not accept in our day-to-day living that emotions are neither good nor bad. We exercise a strict censorship of our emotions. If our censoring consciousness do not approve certain emotions, we repress these emotions into our subconscious mind. Experts in psychosomatic medicine say that the most common cause of fatigue and actual sickness is the repression of emotions. The fact is, there are emotions which we do not want to admit. We are ashamed of our fears, or we feel guilty because of our anger or emotional-physical desires.
0 comments
Post a Comment