"Thoughts aren't feelings
and feelings aren't thoughts"
In our day to day lives as adults, we mostly rely
on and trust the logical, reasoning and conscious parts of our
minds. At a stage in our childhood we develop the ability to think
things through, solve problems rationally and learn how to understand
what is going on in the world around us. From then on we learn
to mainly rely and depend on this ability.
But when it comes to our emotions and feelings, as both children
and adults alike, we find that our emotional reactions seem to
be driven by something deeper or beneath our logical, rational
self. Although we are instantly aware of the feelings or emotions
we have in response to situations and events, we experience these
automatically without thinking them through, or even being able
to think them through.
The familiar statements "I don't know why I got so angry",
"I'm not sure why I feel so sad" or "I can't help
how I am feeling" and many others, all confirm that our emotional
reactions are driven by something other than our reasoning minds
and conscious will. If this were not the case, we would all be
able to just consciously control or change any uncomfortable feelings
or emotional reactions. We'd just "think ourselves better!"
In our infant years we can only interpret things around
us through our feelings and emotions, we have no other choice.
So by the time any of us are able to talk, think or develop conscious
memories, we have already
learned how to respond to the world at the emotional or affect
(feeling and emotional) level. This is a
protective mechanism and it's unavoidable. These early experiences
and learnings form the basis for our own unique emotional matrix
which unconsciously influences all our
future emotional responses and reactions.
This goes a long way towards explaining why we have so much difficulty
in identifying and describing the real causes of our emotional
discomforts and why we can't just consciously change how we feel
and respond. "I've talked all about it, tried to analyse and
understand it but it hasn't changed how I feel."
Over the past decade or two, science has been catching up with
the reality about human emotions and the existence of our own
very individual and unknowable emotional matrix. Various independent
researchers have been
instrumental in alerting the world to the fact that our talking
selves, our conscious perceptions and our reasoning minds play
very little part in our actual ability to resolve our emotional
problems.
This knowledge has steered the development of the very different
therapeutic approach used in affectology and af-x® Therapy.
The revolutionary af-x approach is based on a thorough
understanding of how we learn, develop and maintain our subconscious
emotional matrix, and how this understanding can be used to help
us privately and permanently resolve our emotional problems, without
the difficulty and pain of trying to talk about them.
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