Psychology Of Emotions: What Is Hidden Behind Our Feelings?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Hello, friends!

Let's talk about emotions and feelings. Look at the picture: what feeling do you see on it?

In my work, I often come across the fact that people call different strong feelings with words like "enrages", "tired", "tired", "laziness" and other similar phrases.

How it works?

Let's say there is a man who is successful in all social relations, let his name be Oleg. He seems to be doing well. There is a wonderful caring wife, two wonderful children, a good job, and on Fridays Oleg and his friends go to the bar to watch a match and drink delicious beer.

From the bad - Oleg has a grandmother, grandmother is steadily aging. She forgets names, sprinkles sugar and is often annoyed. It is impossible to predict her behavior, she is constantly unhappy.

Oleg comes to the session with feelings incomprehensible to him - his grandmother almost raised him, he remembers her active, smiling and these memories do not help him now to accept her old age. When I ask Oleg what is happening to him in connection with his grandmother, Oleg replies:

“I am enraged by her helplessness and irritability. I start screaming when she can't remember what she said two days ago."

Oleg speaks and I see him swallow several times. And his hands are shaking. I listen to myself and my feelings when I look at Oleg and listen to him. When I think about the fact that a person who has always been active, strong and joyful begins to fade, become weak and sad - I am not angry, but it hurts. If I allowed myself to go a little further into my feelings during the session, I would probably cry. In addition, I would have felt the fear of losing a loved one. But not anger. More precisely, I would probably be angry with impotence to change anything in this. But it still felt more like pain. These are my feelings, and the client's feelings can be very different, so I decided to double-check. I asked Oleg carefully:

“Oleg, When you say that your grandmother’s impotence infuriates you - what is happening inside you, how do you feel it“infuriates”?

Oleg looks at me for a while with incomprehension, then uncertainly begins to speak:

“Well … it's hard for me to be around her. I try to control myself, but she forgets my children's names. How can you not remember your grandchildren? It's horrible! She was never like this. It's hard for me to see her like this."

Oleg's words are in many ways similar to my own thoughts, and I dare to clarify:

“It seems to me, Oleg, it's very difficult to see such a strong and dear grandmother grow old. It would be very painful for me to be around and understand that I cannot change anything."

Oleg does not look up at his hands. I understand that it is hard for him to look at me now. And I do not insist. We are silent for a long time. Probably five or seven minutes. I wait. Oleg still breaks the silence and quietly, just like a child, says:

"She was always so strong."

There is no point in giving the rest of the session, I just wanted to show you how we build our inner security, hiding behind false feelings. By hiding behind those feelings that we can handle and pushing away those that are harder to deal with.

In this example, we see how the fear of losing a grandmother, the pain of observing her powerlessness and despair of her own powerlessness are so hard to live with that the person decided to choose to be angry. But no matter how he tries to persuade himself that he is enraged by the new forgetfulness and weakness of his grandmother, completely different feelings torment him from within and this does not allow him to calm down and accept what is happening.

Unwillingness or inability to correctly recognize the feelings that have arisen, as well as protection from real feelings, is the reason for the development of so many problems. For example, panic attacks, anxiety disorder of personality, psychosomatic diseases, disorders in relationships, phobias, depression. In fact, don't take it, legs grow out of an inner prohibition on feeling your feelings.

What to do?

It is difficult to get out of the boiler in which you are cooking. It hurts and so you can't focus on the escape routes, right?

Therefore, with such difficult feelings, people usually come to a psychologist. But as you go, try to answer the next five questions as honestly as possible. This will give you some relief and understanding. Which is essentially the same thing.

1. How can I call in one or several words what is happening to me now and gives me inner discomfort?
2. How does this affect me and my life? What am I doing and how do I manifest this state?
3. When I think about it, what happens inside me? sensations, thoughts, feelings emotions?
4. What do my actions, thoughts, feelings actually look like in connection with the situation that has arisen?
5. If I could change the situation, what would it look like? What feelings would I have then?

Everything seems simple, but if you write down the answers to these questions, give yourself an hour to walk around, then return to them again and try to look as if from the outside - you will understand that many of the sensations that are uncomfortable for you are in fact other suppressed feelings. When you understand what this feeling is, it is not at all necessary to immediately decide to feel it in its purest form. But based on this, you can make more adequate and logical decisions. After all, knowledge is always better than ignorance. Especially when it comes to myself.