Our feelings serve to draw our attention to messages. These messages can be good, bad or indifferent. The intensity of the feelings serves as a call to how urgent we should attend to these messages. An analogy would be the mistaken act of burning your thumb on a hot stove, while cooking. The intense pain you would feel from this incident would be the nerve endings in your thumb, calling your attention to the fact that you are cooking your thumb. This would lead to you instinctively taking your thumb away from the hot stove, examine the damage and seek immediate relief from the pain. So in this analogy the pain would represent the feeling with the message being the burnt thumb.

To further expand on this analogy, the feeling of pain was a sensation produced by the properly functioning nervous system in response to a part of the body being exposed to excessive heat that was resulting in damage to that part of the body. So in essence the feeling was internally generated as a result of the incident. Given a similar analogy with the difference being a non working nervous system, there would be no pain which would most likely lead to permanent injury.

When you experience psychological feelings, it is a result of a proper functioning neurological network in response to a specific stimulus or stimuli. Feelings whether joy, sadness, indifference or rage exist to draw our attention to a message. The more intense the feeling is, or the more emotionally aroused you are the more urgent the message is. So if you receive good news, like the birth of a new family member, you would most likely experience feelings of joy. Your feelings of joy would draw your attention to the message that something important and good just took place in your life. Same thing if you go to work on Monday and you were let go, you would surely experience negative feelings which would draw your attention to something unpleasant and serious taking place in your life.

We generate our own feelings, as a result of the interaction between our beliefs and our experiences. So it sends a self defeating message when we hold others accountable for our feelings. The only way for another person to hurt us is to visit physical pain upon our person hood, however as far as hurt feelings are concerned, we simply experience pain when we perceive things are not going our way.

When we focus on the fallacy regarding how others hurt our feelings, we fail to attend to the message our feelings are sending to us and we emotionally regress to the mindset of infants, where there is a strong expectation that our feelings are supposed to be attended to by someone else. In this mindset we risk further exposing ourselves to more hurt, pain and shame which leads to a vicious circle.

The answer is unconditional acceptance of self with positive regard. You accept yourself unconditionally simply because you exist. Doing so allows you to get past difficult feelings and examine the messages they are trying to convey.

Ugo is a psychotherapist and professional life coach.

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