Feelings…

Emotions are what make us human.

They give us the great experiences of life. There is nothing like the pride you feel with a job well done. Or the sadness at the suffering of a loved one. The joy of seeing your child overcome an obstacle. The anger you feel at witnessing injustice. The great emotions are wonderful to feel and the negative ones suck.

One Sided Experience

As a caregiver of someone with cancer, you may feel like your emotions are one-sided – and mostly on the negative side.

sadness   anger   doubt   frustration   self-pity   hopelessness

Any of these feel familiar?

What We Do With Our Emotions

The positive emotions in life are what we live for. We want to be happy, to laugh, love, feel excitement and joy. The negative emotions however, we will do anything to avoid. We are so afraid to feel we will use alcohol, food or TV just to numb ourselves.

A Vibration From A Thought

Have you ever wonder what an emotion is exactly? It is just a vibration that we feel in our body. That is it. And it is driven from our thoughts.

Over the last several posts I’ve discussed the relationship between what happens in the world and our thoughts, feelings, actions, and emotions. We call this The Model:

circumstance – leads to thought > causes a feeling > drives an action = creates a result

All emotions come first from our thoughts. We may think it is the circumstances in our life that makes us feel happy or sad. However it is actually how we think about what occurs in our life that causes our emotions.

When my husband was between treatments for his metastatic cancer, he was so weak and in pain, I felt terrible just seeing him. I was miserable seeing him miserable. It was not actually his pain that caused my feeling, but that I kept thinking I hate seeing him suffer. That thought was actually causing my suffering, not the situation.

A lot of times we don’t necessarily want to feel any different. But when we understand that our emotions are coming from our own thoughts, this allows us a huge level of insight into what we are focusing on. A lot of our negative feelings come from thoughts that do not serve us.

What Are You Feeling Most Often

I want you to take notice what emotions you are feeling most often. Is it anger? It is sadness? Perhaps overwhelm? Just notice yourself with curiosity. Then ask, what am I thinking that is causing this emotion? This will help you to begin to understand what is going on in your brain. That is the first step to learning how process and feel your emotions so that you are not a victim of them.

Read my previous posts on the model, circumstances and thoughts.