How To Start Trusting Your Feelings. 4 Simple Techniques - Self-development

You are experiencing feelings every moment. It can be annoyance with a forgotten key, peace of mind from the memory of a day on the beach, painful helplessness at the thought of a loved one suffering from addiction. Emotions come and go, one after another, continuously. How do you learn to trust your feelings?

Your emotions are localized in your body as well as your physical sensations. For example, many describe feeling sadness in the stomach, anxiety in the throat, and anger in their chest or arms. Where your sensations are located is unique, but rest assured you have feelings, and if you focus, you can detect them by the reactions of your body.

Our senses start at the base of the brain, in the limbic system.

Jonis Webb in his book Escape from the Void. How to overcome emotional neglect in childhood”writes:

“The ability to feel developed in humans millions of years before the ability to think. Human emotions arise in the limbic system, which is located deep beneath the cerebral cortex, where thought originates. Thus, our feelings are much more than our thoughts that determine who we are. They are a physiological part of our body, like nails or knees. We cannot cancel or reject emotion just as we cannot eliminate or reject hunger or thirst, elbows or earlobes.

Emotions are essential for survival. When a desire, feeling, or need arises, they tell us what to avoid and what to strive for, when to defend ourselves, what to do, and much more. In addition, our emotions are the thread that connects us with others and helps us maintain connections.

Where would we humans be without our senses? We would most likely find ourselves wandering aimlessly through a world filled with potential unpredictable dangers and opportunities that we simply don't want to exploit. Lonely, lost and vulnerable, we would not know what we want, we feel what we need.

We don't even think about the fact that our feelings are, in many ways, our best friends. And unfortunately, they can also be our worst enemies.

What could go wrong? Three options

Your emotions signal something to you every day. With their help, you become more informed and prepared for contact with others. However, in this system, failures occur when feelings become stronger or weaker than they should be, and some even manifest themselves where they do not belong.

1. You suppress, devalue or ignore your feelings

This behavior is typical for people who experienced emotional neglect in childhood. If feelings are suppressed, the ability to perceive the information conveyed by emotions is impaired. It may seem that suppression is a great way to get rid of unpleasant feelings, however, they not only do not disappear, but they develop inside. Which makes them more intense than they should be.

2. Something in your current life brings up feelings from the past

There are many things that trigger strong emotions like grief, anger, or fear. We may feel that they passed as soon as the situation was resolved, but old strong feelings still lurk beneath the surface, especially those that have been suppressed. And, as soon as something reminiscent of past experiences happens, the repressed strong emotions can rise again, mixing with the present, maybe softer.

For example, your boss's cold, heartless behavior brings back the helplessness and anger you felt when your spouse treated you in this way during your divorce ten years ago.

3. You lack an understanding of how emotions work

In order for feelings to help, not harm, you need to have sufficient emotional intelligence - to know what your feelings mean, to understand their messages and be able to handle them. If you lack this vital knowledge, you may be at the mercy of your senses and be puzzled by your own behavior, choices and actions. And then emotions will rule your life from behind the scenes. You will be a puppet and they will be your puppeteer.

It's really sad when your best friends become your worst enemies. If you are familiar with the above, try to learn as much information as possible about emotional neglect in childhood. Personal therapy can help you deal with the effects of EPD, and as a result, you can learn emotional skills that were not developed in childhood.

4 steps to determine if you can trust your feelings

1. Stay with the feeling and think it over. Try to name him / them - many intense experiences consist of several. What is happening in your current life that makes you feel this way? It can be something very significant or, on the contrary, something that you think is trivial. Explore this question in great detail.
2. Imagine a friend of yours telling you this story: "It happened and I feel this way." What would you say to your friend? Do you feel like your friend's feelings are off, excessive, or wrong?
3. Remember if you had this feeling or a mixture of feelings sometime in the past? What then caused it? Could some of these old emotions be activated by what is happening now and tied to your current situation?
4. Close your eyes and focus on your feelings. Imagine a device that measures feelings from the past. What are the readings on this device? Now do the same, but register the feelings from the current situation. What numbers do you see now?

This is a very effective method for allowing you to better navigate your emotions. The more often you use it, the better you will get it.

No matter how strong your feelings may be, no matter how mysterious they may seem at times, after working on this issue and learning the skills of recognizing and accepting your emotions, you will be able to use them the way nature intended.

• By Jonis Webb
• Translation by Yana Tsyplakova
• blogs.psychcentral.com/childhood-neglect/2019/08/use-this-4-step-technique-to-decide-if-you-can-trust-your-feelings-or-not