Читать книгу Sometimes feelings are monsters - Lilli Höch-Corona - Страница 12

What you will find in this book

What you’ll find here are exercises to help you understand and read the connection between your feelings and your body, and to get to know your feelings so well that you know what triggered a feeling and what that means for you. I’ll introduce techniques to help you make friends with the more difficult feelings, learn to accept them, and take them as signs that something that’s happening isn’t good for you. And then knowing how you would like to act. You will also find techniques that help you to perceive your positive feelings, to let them sink deep into your body and thereby find strength in your own perception. On this basis even the difficult feelings can be looked at – cautiously at first, then more courageously – and fully experienced without them having a negative effect on you or anyone else.

This is all part of emotional intelligence, one of the important basic skills for getting along with other people, whether at work, within a friendship or in a romantic relationship. Knowing and being able to regulate your emotions makes you more resilient to stress, more empathetic, and more successful in dealing with other people.

Have you ever experienced saying or doing things that you didn’t really mean to say or do? How could this happen? What led to it? If you remember such a situation now, you already have your own Gefühlsmonster situation, namely a situation in which a feeling invaded you, took possession of you, before you could think and decide how you actually wanted to act.

Feelings are there to help us recognize what is good for us and learn to avoid what is not good for us. What sounds so simple is in fact providing pitfalls in practical life. Avoiding unpleasant situations, for example, can lead us to not accept challenges and keep us from developing further in important areas.

Emotions unfortunately also feel very threatening even through imagination. It is enough to imagine or remember a scary situation to clearly experience a quite frightening feeling. Fear, which is actually there to protect us from danger, can become excessive if we nurture it.

This is exactly what this book is about. It’s about what can happen to us through feelings and how, if we want to and invest some time in exercises, we can have more influence over our feelings and actions.

There are also exercises that support you in developing a realistic view of both positive and negative events in your everyday life. In an effort to avoid negative situations our brains sometimes play tricks on us by shifting the emphasis too much to the negative situations. And you can learn to better distinguish old feelings from new ones. Please keep in mind that implementing these exercises requires you to participate yourself and get to know yourself better in the process. No one can do this for you.

The emergency toolbox is for emergency situations in which we want to quickly get out of tangled emotions and become able to act. The exercises are effective, easy to implement and with quick results. Here, too, practice brings an advantage, namely that the techniques work even faster and more intensely in an emergency.

To feel connected to your body is a necessity for all exercises. This will be talked about in many exercises. We notice feelings through small body signals like vascular constriction/coldness or vascular dilation/warmth. If we know our very individual signals it helps us to identify feelings within seconds.