Most of what we currently believe about emotions is false. Here are some of the beliefs we have about feelings. These beliefs are not all inclusive, because each individual, each family and each culture has unique beliefs regarding emotions, most of which are not true. But knowing about these lies may help you to unravel the mystery of our past and how we got captured.
 | LIE #1: There are "good" feelings and "bad" feelings. |
TRUTH: ALL FEELINGS ARE GOOD!
All feelings are good because they reflect back to us how an experience is affecting us. If we pretend that certain feelings are bad, rather than the experience is making us feel bad, it is like we are beating the wagon to make the horse move. Now, some feelings we do enjoy more than others; and we would like to continue to feel some feelings and stop feeling others. But the way to stop feeling an emotion we do not like is to stop experiencing whatever it is that is painful or hurtful. |
| LIE #2: We can decide how we are going to feel. |
TRUTH: FEELINGS CANNOT BE DICTATED.
You can choose to change your mind, but you cannot just choose to change your feelings, not without damaging your soul and possibly losing a large part of yourself.
You can tell a child not to be angry at someone, but that will not stop the anger. It will only teach a child to hide the anger and suppress the feelings, AND, MORE IMPORTANTLY, teach the child that feelings are wrong or bad. Feelings are important to us because they tell us what we like and don't like. I will say this over and over again. I may react to something differently than you do because my reaction (which comes from my feelings), comes from who I am. You may not like to swim and your feelings tell you so. I may love to swim and my feelings tell me so. Each person is unique. Each person's feelings come from the deepest part of the self, to tell us who we are and how we want to live our lives and what we want to do and who we want to be with. We must not let the mind or intellect tell us what to do, when it is contrary to how we feel. The intellect, when it is working at its best, is making decisions for us and for our good based on how we feel.
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| LIE #3: Expressing our feelings (through tears) does no good and is a waste of time. Expressing our feelings is even detrimental to our well-being. |
TRUTH: EXPRESSING OUR FEELINGS IS THE ONLY ROAD TO TRUE EMOTIONAL HEALTH AND TO A NEW AND BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF OURSELVES AND OTHERS.
If I told you have you could never go to the toilet because it was bad for you, what would happen? You would become backed up and sick and your body would become filled with poisons from your own waste. Eventually you would have to let go....or you would explode with all the accumulated waste.
Emotions must also be passed through the body. If they are not passed through the body, they clog all your systems and leave poisons everywhere. The body is not designed to hold onto feelings. The body is designed to process and release feelings. If we do not release and eliminate the waste that accumulates from feelings, we become diseased and crippled.
Our bodies become sick and do not function properly.
We are unable to think clearly and we become ill-functioning in the mind. When we are backed up emotionally, our thinking becomes extremely clouded and distorted, we do not know what is true and what is false, and we do not understand our own actions and thoughts. We are unable to grasp reality because we are looking at our life and our experience through the waste of accumulated emotions that have poisoned our minds and bodies.
Our old emotions are suppressed and cannot function properly. They become pressurized and eventually erupt inappropriately, usually at someone we love.
This is one of the most important truths that we can embrace, because we all carry so much pain from the past.
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| LIE #4: If we stop someone from crying, their feelings will go away. |
TRUTH: OUR FEELINGS NEVER GO AWAY BY IGNORING THEM.
Our feelings do not go away because we stop expressing them. They just go underground, into our unconscious, stored along with the memories.
This is important to understand!
If you feel pain as you experience something and you do not process and release the pain, it stays with you in your memory banks as part of your memory, although usually frozen, hidden in the attic, and often not consciously remembered.
Considering how often we are hurt and not allowed to process our feelings naturally, we have to be carrying a big load of old hurt and all the corresponding poisons and wastes.
Unfortunately, the feelings do not go underground in such a way that they no longer affect us. Our own denied emotions are affecting us every minute of every day.
They affect everything...
our thinking
our relationships
our ability to love
our ability to be creative
our peace of mind
and our physical health.
THE FEELINGS DO NOT GO AWAY, THEY JUST MOVE OUT OF OUR AWARENESS.
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| LIE #5: Feelings lie. They are an unreliable barometer of the truth. |
TRUTH: FEELINGS ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH
Our emotions are our surest way to know what is true about any situation. Our emotions always tell us the truth long before the mind can understand a situation or discern danger. This is partly because the mind is primarily a linear thing. It sees, thinks, and makes decisions in a linear fasion. Whereas the discernment that comes from our soul, our emotions, is very different. Our emotions respond to feeling nuances in a situation as a whole, even without mental understandings. You might be used to thinking of this as instinct, intuition, gut reaction, sensing. Whatever you call it, the emotions have the power to keep us safe and help us understand the world and ourselves by telling us the whole truth about a person or situation.
However, there is a problem: when emotions go unexpressed, they freeze in time. What this means is that we often respond to a present day situation with a backlog of stored frozen emotions from our past. This is inappropriate, obviously, but that doesn't mean the emotions are lying. All it means is that in order to be able to respond and feel truly in the present with all of our resources, we need to heal all the old trapped, frozen emotions we have locked up in the attic.
In order to feel the truth of NOW, backlog of old feelings must heal first.
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| LIE #6: If you express your feelings through tears, it means you are weak, undisciplined, out of control and (for men) not masculine. |
TRUTH: FEELINGS ARE NOT WEAK; IN FACT THEY ARE THE STRONGEST PART OF US.
For instance, we like to believe that our will power is a facet of our minds. But our will and our power comes from our feelings. We DO things because of our desire and passion. We may decide what we want to do with our minds, but if our feelings are not in alignment, we will most surely fail.
Our feelings give our life purpose, meaning and direction.
Our feelings give our life color, texture and dimension.
Our positive feelings tell us what we like.
Our negative feelings tell us what we don't like.
A truly mature and self-actualized person is not one who lives totally in his mind, but one who has come to understand his own feelings and acts on them appropriately. It is when we act inappropriately because of our feelings that we get into trouble and cause harm, both to others and ourselves.
But it is not the feelings themselves that cause problems.
It is the suppression of feelings that causes problems.
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| LIE #7: Once you have experienced emotional trauma and deep pain, you are stuck with the feelings forever and must learn to live with them, overcome them and ultimately suppress them.
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TRUTH: ALL FEELINGS, PAST OR PRESENT, CAN BE HEALED COMPLETELY AND WILL BE GONE FOREVER.
Once feelings have been expressed fully and naturally, wonderful natural processes begin to spontaneously activate. A re-evaluation process takes place and gives you new understanding. Awarenesses that you did not have before lead to changed beliefs and new decisions, and an outpouring of love and forgiveness takes place automatically.
There is no hurt that cannot be healed, whether it is a hurt we have given or hurt we have received. All hurt feelings can be released until they are gone. This is part of the miracle of how feelings work if they are allowed to function naturally.
Our feelings must be allowed to surface and we must process them if we are to understand what they have to teach us. Unprocessed feelings do cause many problems. But feelings that have been accepted, honored and allowed to move through tears, are the most valuable tool we have.
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| LIE #8: You are what you feel. |
TRUTH: FEELINGS ARE NOT SET IN STONE AND THEY ARE NOT AN INDICATION OF WHO YOU ARE.
As long as emotions are allowed to express organically, as long as they are not suppressed or judged, they can heal and evolve.
You can feel murderous hatred and desire to kill someone. This does not make you evil or bad. This doesn't make you a murderer (unless you ACT on the feeling). All it means is you have a feeling that needs acceptance and expression, and once given those two precious gifts, will move itself to healing and will no longer be whatever it was. It will evolve naturally and spontaneously into something else. We all suffer under the weight of this lie that says what we feel is who we are, and therefore we try our best to suppress all feelings that we judge as bad, wrong, evil, or unloving.
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