Feelings ruining your life

Feelings ruining your life

Are you somebody who often has very strong feelings and you let the feelings dictate what you do? Do you find that you are often overwhelmed by sad feelings or bad feelings and you get stuck? Are your feelings about people, relationships, your job preventing you from getting the work done that you want to do? Do you often have a hard time distinguishing between a feeling and a fact?

Emotional reasoning or over-relying exclusively on your feelings to make decisions or determine reality is the number 1 cause of mental health problems. Some people grow up in families where they never learn the skills that feelings, while important, are not facts. Some people use their feelings to determine reality and because they feel something, they may even feel it very strongly, they believe it is true and then they go out looking in the world to confirm their feeling.

Their feelings are driving their reality and their behaviour.

Examples might be:

• I feel very strongly that my boss is unhappy with me. The fact is he keeps telling me I’m doing a good job but I still feel he is not happy and I get stuck.
• I feel my partner doesn’t like me or love me and therefore it must be true and I will find these reasons.
• I feel like I’m going to get fired so instead of focusing on my work on focus on what I’ll do if I get fired.
• I feel like I am alone and have no friends. So I ignore all my long standing friends because of my feelings. I spend time with them but I don’t feel better because I feel like I’m alone.

This type of thinking or emotional reasoning is very detrimental to people’s lives and relationships. Human beings are feeling creatures by nature. Everything we do is to produce a feeling or to avoid a feeling and feelings are helpful and helping us understand who we are and what is going on in our world. However, they are not facts. We need to develop the skills to learn how to process our feelings, cross check them and question them with facts. Facts are things that are observable and measurable and that we can touch, see and feel.

People who do emotional reasoning are often quite volatile in their day-to-day life. They will have difficulty in relationships because they will feel things and they will pick up things and they are not aware that their feelings and not facts. Oftentimes, they are not even aware that what they are feeling is a feeling, even if they use word ‘I feel…’ they will often think it’s a fact. They represent it as a fact and this will create very difficult conversations and arguments because they are so positioned that their feeling is absolutely right even in the face of hard evidence.

If this sounds like you or your loved one, therapy helps people learn how to relate to their feelings and integrate them with facts. Emotional reasoning is not helpful to one’s mental health. We need to learn how to integrate our feelings with facts. This is one of the number one things that we accomplish through therapy.

If you would like to learn more about how therapy can help you contact All In The Family Counselling Center Pt. Ltd. at +65 9030 7239 or email us at tammy@allinthefamilycounselling.com.

All In The Family Counselling Center Pt. Ltd. is one of the oldest therapy practices in Southeast Asia and Singapore. Tammy Fontana, our English speaking expat therapist, has been providing therapy to individuals and couples who are facing difficult times, stress, anxiety, infidelity and other relationship and individual problems. If you want to start living the life that you want feeling calm, stable and in control of yourself, contact us now.