It's Normal to Have Feelings
Posted on August 28, 2010 by Guy Farmer, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
Have a lot of feelings but don't know what to do with them? Learn how your feelings can help you live a great life.
Many of my clients tell me their stories about not being allowed to have feelings in their families or how there were only certain feelings that were allowed. In some families people aren’t allowed to show fear, in others they can’t be joyful, still others don’t permit sadness.
Well, unfortunately, our parents and their parents before them going back generations didn’t realize that feelings aren’t something to suppress and avoid. Feelings are a natural part of being human. We were designed to feel joy, sadness, anger, love, loss and many variations on those themes.
So what happened? People just didn’t realize that it’s OK to experience feelings. They kept hanging on to assumptions like sadness is weak or joy should be tempered. Oftentimes it was due to having to survive and not appear weak. There just weren’t that many alternatives available to our ancestors.
We now have studied humans enough to know that experiencing our feelings normally and freely is actually beneficial to us and is a natural part of being human. It’s when we try to deny that feelings exist that we start making ourselves miserable and creating problems in our lives.
The paradox is that it’s normal to be sad, happy, angry, scared or any feeling you have. If you think about it, they’re your feelings and you’re allowed to experience them.
When you get in touch with your feelings you become more genuine and you get to experience life on a deeper level. Feelings are here to help us, to signal when we are doing great and when we’re not. They are not scary or undesirable, they’re just feelings. Think of all the people in the world who live in pain because they deny their feelings. Now think how different their lives could be if they would just let themselves experience them.
Take care,
Guy
