The 10 Rules Emotions Follow That Everyone Should Know

a post by Jonice Webb for the World of Psychology "best of" blog


Do you sometimes feel mystified by your own feelings? Of course, you do!

Believe me when I say that everybody does.

It’s not always obvious why you’ve felt sad all day, for example. In fact, you may go through an entire day feeling sad without even realizing it until the evening. Then once you recognize how you’ve been feeling, you may still be confused about the reasons.

An experience like this is not at all unusual. You would be hard-pressed to find a single human being who hasn’t been there. And if you find someone who says he has never had that experience, it’s probably because he is not sufficiently aware of his feelings to realize that he is having them.

It is true that feelings are unbelievably complicated. Yet they are an integral part of our everyday lives. In fact, it’s truly incredible how much we are actually influenced by what we feel, whether we realize it or not. Our feelings drive our decisions and our actions. They cause us to get into conflicts and to work out problems. They help us choose our mates, our careers, and everything else in our lives.

So think of your emotions as a strong current that carries you through your life. The better you understand that current and work with it, the better you can harness its energy and use it, and the easier your life will be.

Although emotions are complex, they do follow certain rules. Once you know the rules you have a huge leg up on managing and using your feelings in a healthy way.

The 10 Rules Your Emotions Follow

1. Your feelings do not originate from the part of your brain that is under your control. You cannot choose your feelings.
2. Feelings are not subject to any moral code. They’re neither good nor bad, right or wrong. They just are what they are.
3. Even though you can’t choose your feelings, you are responsible for them.
4. Emotions can be “walled off” but they cannot be extinguished. If you wall off an emotion, it does not disappear. It just goes and lives on the other side of the wall.
5. Feelings can lead you down the right path or they can lead you astray. It all depends on what you do with them.
6. When you disregard an emotion, you are actually empowering it. Ignoring, pushing away, or walling off a feeling may seem to make it go away but it’s the feelings you’re the least aware of that can affect you without your knowledge.
7. There is only one way to make an uncomfortable feeling go away, and that is to let yourself feel it.
8. Your feelings drive your thoughts, but you can also use your thoughts to manage your feelings.
9. Sitting with a powerful emotion and letting yourself feel it while thinking about it to understand why you’re having it, what it means, and what it’s telling you, is called “processing it.”
10. Your feelings are valuable messages from your deepest self. When you follow Rule 9, you are listening to the messages, honoring yourself, and making use of this valuable resource from within.
    

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I am learning, a bit late in life but I am learning. For a long time I have worked with “feelings just are” but now I have the other nine rules to go with it. Not that I understand it all but …

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