Am I actually going to write something about feelings? I guess I do.
Before I just state what I’m here to tell you, I want you to think about the following scenario. Imagine you are making pasta, and you hurt yourself cutting unions. You started to bleed just a little bit, and you feel it. The cutting of your finger, causes a signal to be send to your brain, and your brain interprets the signal, and provides you with pain; a feeling.
Somewhat later, you find yourself picking up the metal spoon that you used to stir the pasta while it’s cooking. The spoon is too hot, and you notice this again by feeling pain. Again your hand sends a signal to your brain telling something is wrong. Your brain interpreted it and made sure you cannot ignore the signal by providing pain.
Some would clame there is no need for interpretation by the brain, the signal is the feeling. I normally would clame the interpretation by the brain, is something that is fully automated, it happens subconsciously. Now and again I notice something, which made me think this. I notice some signal from my leg, and only after I look at it I see my leg is bleeding, and suddenly there is pain…
Where is this pain good for? Why does our body provide us with a mechanism to feel pain? The reason may seem obvious. The situations, in which we experience pain, require immediate attention (action or change). Pain is a feeling most of us cannot ignore, so we act on it. We don’t have to think about that do we?
Cut in finger -> Signal to brain -> Interpretation by brain -> Feeling Pain -> Change situation
What about feelings that are not originated by a physical event. Let’s think about fear. To cook the pasta I boiled some water. When the pasta was ready I poured it into a colander in the kitchen sink. I did this pretty quickly and before I knew it, the cooking water splashed up, and almost hit me. Pretty soon after thinking what would have happened if the boiling water would have hit me, I noticed a sensation, which I call fear. Fear about burning myself to boiling water. I actually didn’t burn myself, but still felt a feeling.
Where did this feeling came from, there was no physical event. I made it up. I thought of what would happen if… My brain was interpreting a scenario I was thinking of and gave me a corresponding feeling.
In the rest of my pasta adventure, I made sure not to cut or burn myself again.
Thinking of scenario -> Interpretation by brain -> Feeling Fear -> Changed my reckless ways
So how about it, what would you feel if somebody called you an asshole? What if I told you you’re an asshole. The signal is obvious. You can hear (or actually read) the word asshole. Your brain will interpret this word, and you will feel bad. Well, do you? Why don’t you? If your mother would say it, would you feel different? Your brain must be interpreting the word asshole in combination of loads of other memories and other inputs. Just to make my point even more obvious. What if your mother called you the biggest kanojo on the planet (over msn with no emoticons, and no prior relevant chat history). How do you feel then? I was of course hoping you don’t know this word. Your brain would do a lookup, and find nothing. No interpretation follows. Not enough data available, just like my bleeding leg example. So if this interpretation is actually going on inside your head, what can we do to influence this mechanism?
Is this interpretation by the brain fully automated? Do we have any control over this interpretation?
Let’s assume you cannot change the interpretation (which you actually can but I will not go into that atm). An easy thing to do, would be adding an extra step after noticing the feeling; check whether we agree with the interpretation. For example, if my girlfriend tells me my pasta taste like shit, I would feel bad. By now you should know this feeling is there to change the situation I’m in. Before I throw all the pasta away, I can check whether I agree with my girlfriend. Of course it tasted like shit and we ordered pizza. The observation here should be, I corrected the problem at hand, and used the feeling to my advantage.
If my girlfriend called me an asshole, she probably has some kind of reason. It really doesn’t help that I’m feeling bad about it. The feeling bad should result in asking my girlfriend why she thinks this way about me. If I agree with her, I should correct the problem. If I don’t agree, I would probably still have to fix the problem one way or another (which I always do that’s why I have a girlfriend). The cool part about this is, whenever I start fixing the reasons why my feelings appeared, they seem to disappear (finish what you start).
The feeling mechanism is nothing more than a simple system of notifying my conscious of a subconscious interpretation result.
This sucks, doesn’t it? This cannot be right. Feeling mad, sad, lonely, bad, or any other feeling, cannot possibly be your own fault. Surely it’s not your responsibility to solve them. Somebody else made you mad, made you sad, treated you bad, dumped your sorry ass for the neighbor. It’s their fault! They should fix it! They made you mad, and now you’re allowed to go to the bar and drive home drunk!
Some people really believe getting mad is something you cannot control and they think they can use it as an excuse to manipulate everything around them. This is just one of the ways to ruin your life.
Imagine your kid is behaving badly (according to you), and doesn’t listen to you what you tell him to do (obviously girls listen to their parents). You get mad because he doesn’t stop; it apparently is your fault you get mad. You cannot control the kid. In this case getting mad actually worked. So getting mad does do something for you! I must be wrong, because getting mad clearly helped on its own. Would you still be mad at your kid? Or did you use getting mad as a tool (power, fear etc)? You controlled your kid by getting mad. You could have saved yourself all the feeling which came with being mad, if you just acted like you where mad. In any case, if the kid stops the bad behavior you have solved the problem and have no need to feel mad anymore. One could argue that appearing mad for a while could help the kid understand the severity of ‘agony’ he caused. The key word is appearing. You really do not need the feeling to be present.
Feelings are a signal to change your situation. Use them to extend your rational thinking, and you'll have added a very succesful tool to your skillset. Or just ignore your feelings or use them as an excuse and join the dark side!
