Learn To Be Responsible For Your Feelings
By learning to be responsible for your feelings, you can learn to be happy each day and each moment of the day. Someone who takes responsibility for one’s emotions, can refuse to choose unhappiness and has the tools to manage one’s emotions. For such people, there is no nervous breakdown because they have learned the art of taking responsibility for their feelings.
They know very well, how to choose happiness over depression because they are seasoned in dealing with problems of life. It’s not about the ability to solve the problems, It’s about the ability to deal with the problems while being happy.
We all face money issues, old age, diseases, death, natural disasters, disagreements, conflicts, and accidents. Even amidst all these problems,
Emotionally strong people can take total charge of themselves and can control their emotions. They develop the ability to feel emotional whatever they choose to feel at any time in their life.
Many of us have grown up believing that you are not responsible for your feelings and you can’t control your own emotions, hate, anger and fear. As well as love, ecstasy and joy are things, that happen to you. An individual doesn’t have control over these emotions, He has to just accept them.
Whenever a sorrowful event occurs, We just naturally feel sorrow,
And hope that some happy events will come soon so that we can feel good again. But If we learn to be in charge of our emotions, we don’t have to choose self-defeating reactions. Feelings are not just emotions that happen to us. Feelings are reactions, we choose to have.
Once we learn that we can feel what we choose to feel, we will see the emotion as a choice rather than a condition of life. And then we can start relishing real personal freedom at the emotional level.
First of all, we need to understand, that we control our thoughts and our thoughts are our own. Only we control our thinking other than under extreme kinds of brainwashing. Our thoughts are our own, no one else can get inside our heads and we do indeed control our thoughts. We can not have a feeling or emotion without first having experienced a thought. A feeling is a physical reaction to a thought.
If we cry or blush or increase our heartbeat or any one of the emotional reactions, that happens only after getting a signal from our thinking centre.
Once our thinking centre is damaged or short-circuited, we can not experience emotional reactions. With certain kinds of lesions in the brain, we can not even experience physical pain and our hand could fry on a stove burner with no sensation of pain. We know that we can not bypass our think-centre and experience any feelings in our bodies.
Because each of our feeling comes from a thought, if we control our thoughts, we will be capable to control our feelings too.
We believe that things or people make us unhappy, but this is not accurate. we make ourselves unhappy because of the thoughts that
we have about the people or things in our life. Becoming a free and healthy person involves learning to think differently. Once we change our thoughts, our new feelings will begin to emerge.
Just imagine a person who is very unhappy because his boss has a low opinion of him. But if this person didn’t know that his boss thought
he was stupid, would he still be unhappy. Of course not, How could he be unhappy about something he didn’t know. Therefore what his boss thinks or doesn’t think, doesn’t make him unhappy. What this person thinks about himself, makes him unhappy. Moreover, this person makes himself unhappy by convincing himself that what someone else thinks is more important than what he thinks.
We have grown up in a culture which has taught us that we are not responsible for our feelings. Carefully listen to these sentences and
Examine the messages they send.
You hurt my feelings
You make me feel bad
I can’t help the way I feel
I just feel angry, don’t ask me to explain it.
He makes me sick
Heights scare me.
You are embarrassing me.
You made a fool of me in public.
Each line has a built-in message that I am not responsible for how I feel.
Now if we rewrite the list in such a way that it reflects the fact that we are in charge of How we feel and that our feelings come from the thoughts, we have about anything.
I hurt my feelings because of the things I told myself about your reaction to me.
I made myself feel bad
I can help the way I feel, but I have chosen to be upset.
I make myself sick.
I scare myself at high places.
I am embarrassing myself.
I made myself feel foolish by taking your opinions of me more seriously than my own.
The message is very clear, You are the person responsible for how you feel. You feel what you think, and you can learn to think differently about anything if you decide to do so.