I do under­stand the impor­tance of “feel­ing our feel­ings” in the process of emo­tional heal­ing. I DO value the part of the process that rec­og­nizes and releases emo­tion; feel­ings are ener­getic impulses that act like mes­sen­gers whose job is to report to us the state of our cur­rent vibra­tional fre­quency, and to show us the unhappy thoughts we are believing!

I worked in addictions/co-dependency treat­ment for years where we facil­i­tated anger/shame/grief work with our clients, and I was well-schooled in the pop­u­lar idea that only by releas­ing child­hood sup­pressed emo­tional mate­r­ial can we move past our emo­tional stuck-ness.

That said, how­ever, I have come to ques­tion the widely-held assump­tion that drum­ming up an emo­tional response helps us unload accrued emo­tional pain. I have not found that doing this sort of emo­tional vent­ing actu­ally elim­i­nates, or dis­si­pates the emo­tional energy being regur­gi­tated. Instead I’ve seen that the more we drum up feel­ing, the more feel­ing we gen­er­ate for release. This was con­fus­ing to me. If the feel­ings are old, stored up emo­tion in need of release, then why, in the releas­ing process, do we seem to gen­er­ate even MORE of it?

Such inner seek­ing and ques­tion­ing allowed me to develop a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent way of under­stand­ing what the role of feel­ings is in the heal­ing process; that shift in the way I see feel­ings served to trans­form the way I work with oth­ers. What I real­ized was that feel­ings come from thoughts, or from old imprinted belief pat­terns — only every time.

What we feel is deter­mined by what we think and believe!  This under­stand­ing prompted a huge turn around in me because I real­ized that, until and unless we begin to inter­vene at the level of what we believe, the grieving(shame/anger) NEVER ends. Ini­ti­at­ing feel­ing work with­out address­ing the beliefs behind those feel­ings will not bring true clear­ing. It can­not, because we will just go on gen­er­at­ing the neg­a­tive emo­tional states we are try­ing to elim­i­nate! We must ques­tion the beliefs and thoughts that pro­duced the feel­ings in the first place if we want real relief!

It is in the amyg­dala, that tiny gland located in the tem­po­ral lobe of the brain, where thought impulses con­vert to emo­tion, which are then trans­mit­ted to the rest of the body, pro­duc­ing the phys­i­o­log­i­cal responses asso­ci­ated with the feel­ings gen­er­ated there.

Please do not mis­un­der­stand. I do not mean to under­mine the emo­tional body. It is very impor­tant. Our feel­ings DO play a crit­i­cal role, and there­fore need to be expe­ri­enced. But what hap­pens when we under­stand the true rela­tion­ship between thoughts and feel­ings is that we work dif­fer­ently with those feelings.

Once we under­stand that our thoughts, not our life cir­cum­stances, cause our pain, we stop feel­ing at the mercy of life, of other peo­ples behav­ior, and of our own feel­ings! We come to see that the only thing that can pos­si­bly vic­tim­ize us is our own thinking.

Under­stand­ing that our beliefs are what causes our feel­ings allows us to use our feel­ings as the mes­sen­gers they are meant to be. Feel­ings alert us that we are think­ing painful thoughts. By ques­tion­ing those thoughts our feel­ings can TRULY shift (we’re not talk­ing about denial or stuff­ing feel­ings here, but gen­uine emo­tional shifts). Mis­ery dis­si­pates as we reframe our per­cep­tion of a sit­u­a­tion. This is what I have seen hap­pen, over and again.

Of course, this is for you to dis­cover for your­self. I rec­om­mend that you exper­i­ment with the con­cept that feel­ings come from our unhappy thoughts, rather than the old idea that feel­ings come from what hap­pens “to us.” Try ques­tion­ing your trou­bling thoughts about your life hap­pen­ings, rather than blam­ing them as being the cause of your unhappy feelings.

To learn more about how to do that, read, Guid­ing Prin­ci­ples for Life Beyond Vic­tim Con­scious­ness, as well as, “Lov­ing What Is,” by Byron Katie (www.thework.com).

Bless­ings, Lynne