I have feelings and emotions – because I am alive

— Vickie Rai,

Family Counselor, Sambandh

Typically in the course of our day to day life, we experience two basic kinds of feelings – joyful and painful. We also tend to loosely classify them as good or bad, positive or negative. By labelling them as good and bad or positive and negative we tend to sit in judgement over ourselves and others when we experience these so-called negative feelings which essentially are only painful feelings. Since from our childhood, we are encouraged to be ‘good’ we begin to find our ‘bad’ feelings as a problem and go to lengths to manipulate, deny or suppress them.

Feelings which interfere with our sense of well-being like anger, fear, confusion, hurt, shame etc would be experienced as painful feelings. And for most of these feelings, we may all remember being told, at times even lovingly and caringly  – don’t be angry, don’t cry, don’t be sad etc. The sense that we get is as if there’s something wrong if we feel sad or angry and somehow it’s not ok to feel them leave alone trying to express them. And has anyone of us ever experienced our anger or sadness simply vanish just because we were told not to feel that way?

What is the purpose of painful feelings or for that matter any feeling? Are feelings even important? The answer is a resounding YES. Feelings are critical to our being alive. All feelings. The tragedy is that when we begin to suppress our painful feelings we actually end up reducing or numbing our capacity to feel joyful feelings too. Feelings are indicators of how we are doing in life. Joyful feelings give us a sense of moving in the right direction and of assuring us. Painful feelings, if allowed to be acknowledged, are also telling us that something important may be happening which needs our attention. That possibly some of our needs are not being met. An apt analogy would be a pain at a physical level. Any pain experienced in any part of the body is a signal to pay attention to something that may be wrong and needs to be attended to and corrected. In that sense pain is our friend. Pain is not the problem but a symptom. If we didn’t experience pain we would live in oblivion and not be able to take care of ourselves and correct things in time. Once we acknowledge and pay attention to that pain we can take care of it by providing what is missing.

At emotional level too, our feelings are always drawing our attention to what’s important and what’s missing by always communicating with us. But are we listening??