9:49pm August 9, 2013

“Never apologize for how you feel. No one can control how they feel. The sun doesn’t apologize for being the sun. The rain doesn’t say sorry for falling. Feelings just are.”

—

Iain S. Thomas (via sherlockcat)

I always tell people you are allowed to feel however you feel. Emotions just are. What matters is what you do in response to how you feel.

(via karalianne)

Hmm.

To some extent that makes sense. As in it makes no sense to be ashamed of having emotions.

But emotions don’t just are.

For the most part, emotions have something to do with how you view the world, what you think about the world, your values and interests, etc.

And while it makes no sense to tell someone to change how they’re feeling without them knowing how to do so… it’s is possible to change many feelings. It’s not easy or quick, but it’s completely possible.

It requires changing will the things that give rise to feelings: thoughts, habits, assumptions about how the world works.

And I don’t think telling people it’s impossible to change their feelings helps anyone who is trapped in a pattern of really unpleasant feelings (such as despair, rage, self-pity, terror) and wants out.

There are ways out. They are really hard and difficult to even find. But they do exist.

Example of something:

A mother said she was feeling sad because her autistic son would never be a real adult like his brother
People who don’t assume that DD people aren’t real adults, don’t get sad that their children will never be adults.

The sadness may be inevitable if you think about the world in a certain way, but it’s not inevitable if you change how you look at the world.

It takes a lot of work to change how you think and feel. It requires stepping outside of the stories you’re always telling yourself. And then staring at what you’re doing, what you’re saying to yourself, what thoughts connect to other thoughts and create feelings, what feelings have become habit. It’s not easy and it’s not always pretty. It can be traumatic in its own right.

But it can be done.

Most feelings don’t emerge from nowhere. Except ones that have a purely neurological basis, like during seizures. They don’t just happen, they are connected to thoughts and habits and worldviews and other emotions.

That doesn’t mean people should be ashamed of them.

(Except when they really should. I can’t get into the disgust some people feel when looking at homeless people or black people or disabled people or fat people or poor people or gay people or trans people. And I can’t get into the idea that this disgust just happens naturally and comes out of nowhere and has no broader meaning. They should damn well apologize for how they feel.)

But I do point this stuff out, because “feelings just happen” can lead people to believe they’re trapped and there’s nothing they could do to get out. In fact, “feelings just happen” was instilled in me during the psych system and prevented me learning how to change them. So I was stuck in some awful emotional states much longer than I had to be.

Notes: