When Feelings Lie: Don’t Believe Everything You Feel

Hello and welcome to this audio.

Thank you so much for listening.

So today I want to explore a common misunderstanding that I've been seeing a lot lately with my in my one-to-one client sessions and it's also something that's becoming clearer in my own experience and the misunderstanding is this that the strength of a feeling must mean that the thought or the story about it is more true.

So in other words the more intense the feeling the more weight we think it deserves and the more it seems to confirm the thought creating it must be real that the story the mind is presenting must be true or more likely to happen because the feeling is so strong.

But what if that's not actually the case?

So let's look through some real client examples so that I can help to bring this to life and also illustrate what I'm pointing to.

So before I move on to the client examples I think it's also just worth highlighting why I see this as as being problematic for us as human beings.

So what I see is when I've talked to many clients about this and seen it in my own experience is that when we believe that the strength of the feeling means that the story or the thought is more true then inevitably we act in ways that either don't serve us or keep us stuck or keep us not moving forward with our lives because we're caught in this misunderstanding of believing well the feeling's so strong it must be true and therefore I mustn't x y or z you know you can fill in the blank move forward with the relationship or raise this question or stand up for myself or whatever the whatever the scenario is.

So really when we're in this misunderstanding of believing that the strength of the feeling means this must be more true we inevitably just get trapped in a smaller life than is really necessary.

So let's have a look at the first example which is the what if I'm sick in a shop example.

So one client had a reoccurring fear that she might vomit while she was out shopping.

So when she was in a shop her mind would serve up thoughts like you're starting to feel a bit nauseous you're going to be sick what if you throw up in here and as these thoughts played out and the feelings that accompanied them so some anxiety some panic some dread would just start to grow stronger and because the feelings were so strong it seemed to her that the thought must be true and that something awful was likely to happen or more likely to happen and she was going to be sick.

So what we explored together was well what if that strong feeling isn't confirming the thought what if instead excuse me it's an alarm or a wake-up call a signal that you're caught up in your imagination caught up in a reality that isn't here but it's being presented by the mind as going to happen any second now because in reality she was standing in a shop not being sick that was the actual truth she wasn't even close to being sick so rather than being evidence of danger the feeling could be seen as a nudge back into into being in reality being in the here and now rather than lost in the imagination and the anxious story that the mind is presenting so what if the strong feeling was really a sign that she was lost in this story that the mind was spilling and not in the reality of the moment where she was totally safe and okay and that's actually what it's trying to wake us up to.

So let's look at a second example which I've titled I must have made a mistake so another client felt very intense emotion whenever she thought that she might have done something wrong she even if she wasn't sure that she had actually made a mistake the strong feelings that followed the shame the worry the dread made it feel true but again we looked at this together and we said well what if the strong feeling wasn't confirming a wrongdoing or a mistake but it was a sign that she was believing an old story so what if it was pointing her not to the truth of you've messed up you've made a mistake again which is a very familiar pattern for her but to the fact that she was caught in the fearful thinking and the belief that actually there was something wrong with her that she that she makes mistakes and that it's not okay for her to make mistakes that she was up in her head up in her imagination not in the kind of neutral and compassionate space of reality where making mistakes is human and okay so because she had this underlying belief that it wasn't okay for her to make mistakes that it meant something about her as a person if she got something wrong when these really strong feelings of i think i might have made a mistake or i think i might have messed up there because these really strong feelings came along with that it then kind of went around in a circular way of confirming the belief that it's not okay for her to make mistakes because she feels so awful about it but what i was trying to pull her back into is actually the underlying belief of it's not okay for me to make a mistake is actually erroneous and has never been true and that the strength of the feeling is actually trying to point her to that to that lie to that illusion to that belief that she's innocently believing that isn't the truth rather than the truth that if i make a mistake that's bad i'm a bad person that means there's something wrong with me so it's almost like it's the polar opposite so let's look at a final example and this is one that i see an awful lot and that's the there's something wrong with me example so i had a session with a client who'd struggled with a really long-standing belief that she wasn't good enough and it had some roots in her childhood experiences especially from how her parents had treated her and therefore made her feel quite an adult and inadequate but as an adult if something triggered these old stories the emotional wave could feel really overwhelming for her you know the sadness the anger the shame the resentment and the strength of those feelings made her think well this must be true there is something wrong with me my parents were right about me all along you know that kind of flavor but again we looked at it from a different vantage point so almost like a completely opposite vantage point and explored well what if those intense feelings are actually not confirming the belief what if they're pointing to the fact that she was believing old programming old conditioning thinking from the past rather than being present with the reality now that there's nothing about her that needs fixing so what if those strong feelings that she'd been believing for years were never confirmation that she wasn't good enough what if the feeling is actually trying to point to the absolute opposite that they were proof that she wasn't broken but it was a reminder that she was caught up in a painful story that simply never true so in these three examples there's this theme that we assume that because the feeling is strong it must mean that the thought behind it is true but what if that's the very thing that we need to question what if the strength of the feeling simply reflects how deeply we're believing the mind's story or how far up in our heads we are how far up in our imagination we are and what if those feelings are actually here to wake us up to help us notice that we've drifted out of reality and into imagination so there's just one more layer that i want to highlight so in these examples that i've shared these strong feelings didn't just show up once they were familiar and habitual patterns and that is important so the more often that a thought feeling loop repeats itself the more convincing it can seem and we can start to assume that because a feel is intense and repetitious and familiar that it must be telling us something true but what if the repetition is the thing that keeps the illusion alive and what if the strong uncomfortable emotions aren't here to confirm the story but they're repeatedly trying to wake us up from it to help us to get present to be out of our imagination out of the storytelling capacity of the mind and back into reality into the here and now and to ask what do i actually know to be true right now what's actually happening in this moment these are really important questions to help us to bring us out of the imagination of the mind and the thought feeling system and back into what is actually here in the moment so we're probably never going to fully understand what feelings are trying to tell us or why certain feelings show up we don't need to we can make up all kinds of ideas and maybe some are going to resonate but the point is we don't have to treat our strong emotions as any evidence of truth or any evidence of something being more true it is all simply experience energy thought feeling passing through us nothing to do with us so there might simply just be familiar alarms like offering us the chance to get back into the present moment again and again because our point of power is always in the present moment with what is here and now and because these strong feelings are often quite habitual they can also be the thing that we are often intensely resisting so for example if we are anxious anytime an anxious feeling comes up we'll be like oh no here's the anxiety again i don't want it or anytime that feeling of not good enough comes up oh no here it is again i don't want it and we push it away because we think oh no the feeling is telling me something true and i don't want to feel that i'm an anxious person or i don't want to feel that there's something wrong with me that i'm broken in some way but this is where if we can see that what if the feeling is actually pointing us to the opposite thing that these these feelings can actually become as i say our alarm our wake-up call but also that means they're our friend in some way you know they are here to help us to support us they're not something to be pushed away there's something to wake us up and bring us back into the present moment so we don't have to keep pushing them away and resisting them so as a last point i think it's also worth saying that these feelings will often come with really strong sensations in the body i mean i probably don't need to point that out to you but those physical sensations don't actually carry any meaning on their own so without the label that we attach to it like panic or shame or guilt so a tight chest or a racing heart or that dread in the pit of your stomach is just a nervous system response the only meaning that comes to that is the mind's interpretation and the label that we have innocently put on top of it so when that intense feeling shows up next time you don't have to push it away you don't have to believe the thought that came with it either and instead you might just ask yourself is this pointing me towards truth something i know to be absolutely true or is it reminding me that i've drifted into the mind story and that i'm out of reality and out of the present moment and i can just embrace this emotion for the nudge that it's giving me so i hope this has been helpful thanks so much for listening i'm lindsey and i will see you again soon bye for now