Feelings

Inner emotions, some positive, some negative, that directly affect people's mood and indirectly
affects their behaviour and actions.

Feelings are inner experiences such as anger, boredom, happiness, worry, jealousy, excitement, satisfaction, guilt, fear and so on. They are important not only as inner experiences, some pleasant and some unpleasant, but also because they often affect the way we behave.

The relationship between feelings and behaviour is controversial. Some argue that feelings actually cause behaviour, others that behaviour causes feelings. Whatever the precise relationship, there is general agreement that both feelings and behaviours are reactions to some external event. We don’t just feel angry, for example, in a vacuum - something happens to trigger it. It may be something someone does or says, or it may be something happening, like being delayed in a traffic jam or missing a train that it was important to catch.

The crucial difference between feelings and behaviour is that feelings are internal and cannot be observed by anyone else. If you express your feelings in your outward actions then it is the expression of them (in your behaviour) that is observed, not the feelings themselves. This difference between internal and external events has important implications. For example, you can never know how someone is feeling. You can only guess or infer it from your observations of their behaviour. Similarly, no one else is able to access your feelings. They remain a private experience unless you choose to reveal them in your spoken or unspoken actions. By their very nature, therefore, feelings, unlike behaviour, are not susceptible to direct control by other people. You cannot control other people’s feelings, or other people yours. Your feelings are entirely your own. Of course, others may do their best to influence your feelings but, as we shall see, you and you alone choose whether to let this happen or not.

Feelings can be divided roughly into two categories:

• Feelings that help you to function effectively. An example would be having a level of anxiety that helps to lift your performance so that you do better than if you took things routinely in your stride.
• Feelings that hinder you from functioning as effectively as you are capable of doing. Feelings like anger, worry and guilt, for example, are worth having only if they help you to do something effective about the situation causing them. Unfortunately, feelings like these often prevent you from taking effective action, as well as being unpleasant while they last.

Clearly, feelings that enhance your performance (ie outward behaviour) are splendid to have and enjoy. By contrast, feelings that pull your performance down are both unwelcome and unpleasant. It is possible to learn how to prevent unproductive feelings, but most people find this difficult to accept, because they hold erroneous beliefs about the nature of feelings. The four most common are:

'All feelings are instinctive rather than learned'

Some internal experiences are instinctive, in the sense that they were there from the word go, eg the sensation of the heart pounding and the adrenalin flowing when we are afraid. Instinctive sensations are built into the system and are triggered automatically in certain situations.

But the majority of the feelings were experience aren’t instinctive at all. They have been acquired over a long period of ad hoc learning. You weren’t born worrying or feeling guilty or bored. You weren’t born feeling inadequate. These are feelings that develop as you are exposed to different experiences. Things happen and gradually you learn to associate external happenings with internal feelings. Eventually the learning is so thorough that it seems as though external events automatically trigger inner feelings. Take the feeling of jealously, for example. Studies show that people describe quite different emotional experiences under the general heading of jealousy. This suggests it comes in many different brands and sizes, rather than being built into our innate system of reflexes, body chemistry, gene structure and the like. Furthermore, anthropological studies in cultures quite different from our own reveal that some cultures produce people entirely free of jealous feelings.

So there is evidence to suggest that many of our feelings are learned. This opens up the possibility of unlearning unproductive ‘bad’ feelings and replacing them with more productive ‘good’ ones.

'Feelings cannot be controlled; they just happen to you'

If you believe this, it means you are a zombie with no responsibility for how you feel. You are completely at the mercy of other people and events and believe they are entirely to blame for your feelings. I challenge this depressing view by suggesting that if so many of our feelings have been acquired through a learning process then we can continue to learn, unlearn, adapt, modify, update, replace and do anything we like with them. Feelings, like behaviour, can be modified and changed.

Of course, so many of your feelings are ingrained and habitual that you may not be aware that you can exercise choice. But, if you think about it, you’ll realise that:

• your feelings don’t just happen in a vacuum - they are always preceded by an external event and by a conscious thought
• you can choose what feelings to have in relation to an external event. No one can make you feel anything emotionally. No one, or any event, can make you feel angry, for example. You can choose whether to feel angry in just the same way that you can choose whether to react angrily.

It takes practice to get the choice mechanisms working again. In most people they’ve lain idle for so long that it takes deliberate, conscious thought processes to stir them into action.

'You should suppress your feelings'

This suggests that inner feelings should be contained and not allowed to be reflected in outward actions. In our society this is a strongly held belief, since many feelings (of hostility and aggression, for example) are not considered desirable or civilised, so we suppress them. But experiencing the feeling without expressing it puts undue stresses on the system that can eventually result in unwanted side-effects. Nervous breakdowns, ulcers, coronaries, headaches and backaches often result from intolerable stresses trapped between inner feelings and outward behaviour.

Clearly a much healthier option would be to prevent unwanted feelings (ie not to have them in the first place or to nip them in the bud) so that there is nothing to suppress.

'You should openly express your feelings and to hell with the consequences'

Applied indiscriminately this could get you into a lot of unnecessary trouble! This assumes that we have feelings that must be released through outward expression. It obviously isn’t socially acceptable or expedient to let behaviour be entirely dictated by feelings, which is why the suppression strategy is so widely adopted. Expressing feelings may well avoid the penalties of suppressing them but is likely to trigger adverse reactions in other people. You could even finish up in jail!