Читать книгу Sometimes feelings are monsters - Lilli Höch-Corona - Страница 14

Introduction

Why should we deal with our feelings when they sometimes cause us so much trouble? Maybe we can’t escape sadness, hurt others with words or actions by a sudden outburst of anger, avoid situations that scare us … This book is a plea to deal with your feelings, so that you recognize them, know how they feel, and learn to deal with them better and better during the course of your life.

Suppressing difficult feelings costs more energy than accepting them, and above all it has the disadvantage that we do not learn to deal with them. In the children’s book “Ronja Räubertochter” (Ronja the Robber’s Daughter), Ronja tells her father that she can’t learn to deal with the harpies if she doesn’t go into the forest. I read this book to my children and this sentence always helped me when I wanted to protect them too much instead of letting them take their own steps. It’s kind of like that with the feelings we like to avoid: There’s the fear of speaking in front of others that prevents us from learning and growing from new experiences; or the anger we hide from ourselves and then fear its force for the rest of our life. So we remain trapped in the effort to repress these feelings and have less energy to focus on the beautiful things in life.

Without feelings our experiences would have no meaning. Feelings help us to arrange our experience and to understand what is good for us and what is not good for us. They help us to feel connectedness and to feel pain when we feel excluded. According to Gerald Hüther our basic needs are autonomy and connectedness.

Dealing with these, and finding our own measure with them, is crucial for growing up healthy. Subsequently children who do not experience that their needs are considered, that their ideas are accepted, that their desires make a difference, do not learn the principle of self efficiency and are in danger of being too subordinate to others and they don’t do – or even know – what is good for them.

Just like we have now learned to exercise our bodies regularly from childhood on into old age, the brain can also be trained. Feelings that you have already worked with, and which effects you recognize, will no longer appear as monsters, but as signs of something that you want to devote your attention to. The following theses have evolved from my work and research, and I would like to put them at the beginning of the book: