Your feelings are not your fault

Have you ever thought that what you feel is wrong and that you shouldn’t feel this way? Have you thought that it is all your fault because you lack some critical quality, which allows other people to feel “right” feelings? I would like you to know that it isn’t so.

What you feel isn’t your fault, it is a part of you. By rejecting them you are trying to cut off a piece of yourself. There is no such thing as right and wrong feelings. Sure, some feelings might be not well accepted by society, and some can scare you shitless. But they are still a part of you.

Where feelings are coming from

You probably know that our brains were evolving over millions of years, and there was one thing they are learned to do extremely well a long time ago: remember what brings harm and pass it over to their descendants. And it has also learned to do it from the first experience if it was painful enough.

With every millisecond being of utmost importance for survival, the structure of such a memory had to be very simple and fast to process. It also needs to be extremely generalized in order to match all the cases of possible danger. So it has turned into a pattern, and since our brain is the best pattern recognition computer in the world, we are capable of processing hundreds of these patterns every second.

As you have noticed, I’m not talking about beliefs here. What I’m talking about is much more primitive, simple and unconscious. Rats, birds, and even crayfish can experience emotions. Unless you think that crayfish can hold beliefs, you will agree that emotions aren’t caused by beliefs.

The thing is — you can not control the patterns you learn throughout your life. All of us go through a myriad of events where our brain picks up various patterns. When it remembers them, it also links them to a particular emotion you will feel next time when it’ll recognize this pattern again.

The modern world is filled with patterns

Every day you interact with people many hundred times more than your ancestors. You encounter new unknown objects thousand times a day. No wonder that your emotions go haywire and you are stressed out and tired by the end of the day.

Have you ever seen a wild animal in the middle of a city? Frantically running from an unknown danger approaching from everywhere. To avoid turning into this kind of animal your brain adapts to the environment by dulling down your sensitivity, covering up complexity of your emotions and hiding them from your consciousness. Thanks to that, most of the time we tend to believe that we behave rationally. And when you from time to time meet with the reality of your emotional world, you might even start to doubt your sanity.

What can you do?

Does this mean that everything is bad and you can’t do anything? No. There are three main ways to adjust this situation:

1. Mindfulness, self-awareness and emotional intelligence. By learning to be more aware of your own feelings, you will be able to execute more rational responses to them. You will lose the need to reject or deny your emotions because they will not control how you act. This is the best, but the longest approach.
2. Learn to change the patterns you are paying attention to. Thankfully, we can control which patterns make the most impact on us. These are the patterns we focus our attention on. By focusing your attention on positive side of things, or learning to replace negative patterns with positive you can shift your feelings in the direction you want them to go.
3. Changing the emotion tied to the pattern. This is a long and difficult process, where we try to expose our brain to the painful pattern and show that it isn’t painful, but pleasant or neutral.
4. Have you thought right now: “Wait, you said there are three ways, what the number 4 is for?”. This is a new possibility — quick unlearning of trigger patterns. It was discovered about 15 years ago and called a “memory reconsolidation”. It allows replacing of one pattern with another. The problem with it right now — it is extremely imprecise.
   A very simple and precise application of this principle was discovered independently about four years ago in Ukraine. Using it you can replace reaction to any given pattern with calmness and awareness. It works through self-acceptance.

Instead of conclusion

Please remember, your feelings are not your fault. They are part of you — scars you have acquired in the battle of survival. And they are the proof that you are alive.