Feeling is the unity of understanding the situation and from within the lived spontaneous kinesthetic of the body.

There are three important points - comprehension of the situation, spontaneous kinesthetics and focusing attention inward.

Feelings, although they may well flow without the participation of the head, are quite complex structures, products of one or another understanding and comprehension. For example: "When I think about you, my breathing is blocked in my chest, there is a heaviness between my shoulder blades, I clench my fists, and the thought appears to avoid meeting you. And I also want to feel sorry for you. I interpret this as".

If a man and a girl are in a dangerous situation and one of them has a heartbeat, they more often interpret this not as fear, but as ...

Until there is an understanding of the situation, you can only feel the sensations. Heart beats, but what is it: fear or falling in love? Feelings do not automatically follow from the situation: if you missed something, it can cause grief, disappointment, resentment, and the feeling of "cool". A person with standard social patterns will have a familiar set of feelings, a person from a different culture or a different level of development will have different feelings or no feelings at all.

At a minimum, in order to experience any feeling, you need to evaluate what happened as an event, you need to pay attention to this event and highlight this something as an event. If a person was busy with something of his own, more important or interesting for him, then asking him "what are your feelings about what happened now" is meaningless: for him nothing happened.

If there is no spontaneous kinesthetic, the feeling is not yet alive. The feeling is dreaming, the feeling is transparent, the feeling is cold ... If the body turned on, eyes flashed, hands stretch and breathing stopped for a second - yes, this is a living feeling.

In the spring, when a warm breeze pegs a dress and hormones play in the body, the girls develop a state. In young people, similar conditions occur after the army against the background of sexual hunger and sperm toxicosis.

The turning of attention inward is what marks what is happening in the body not as a complex of physiological disorders or settings, but as a feeling.

If you look at your body from the outside, like a doctor, you are observing physiological changes. If you let your attention from the inside (for this it is enough to put your hand on your chest, as you do when speaking from the heart) - and you felt from within what you feel.

Feeling structure more

Comprehension of the situation can (and it is useful) to decompose into several elements - into the image of the situation, accompanying its internal text and into a verbal formulation in which a specific feeling is caught.

As for spontaneous kinesthetics, there are even more elements: these are movements, postures and gestures, facial expressions, intonation and breathing, internal clamps and tensions around them, the overall functional state of the body ...

If we combine this into a general formulation, we can already say this:

Feeling is the unity of the inner image, the inner text, and from within the lived spontaneous kinesthetic of the organism, caught in the word.

In NLP it would be said a little differently: "Feeling is the unity of the internal image, the internal text and the totality of the calibrated kinesthetic characteristics of the organism from within." For example: "When I think about you, my breathing is blocked in my chest, there is a heaviness between the shoulder blades, I clench my fists, and the thought arises to avoid meeting you. And I also want to feel sorry for you. I interpret this as a feeling of guilt."

In short, inner feelings are messages that we receive from the senses of the soul. Feelings are born in the body, but they are understood by the head, which is also inclined to animate.

“I admire you” - it can be both a feeling and an assessment from the head. And the feeling of admiration as “the feeling of light emanating from your beautiful face” is about feelings. It goes through the body and there is a metaphor here.

So how do you define feelings in short? Feelings are a figurative-bodily interpretation of kinesthetic. This is kinesthetics, shaped into living metaphors. This is a living thing that came to us from our body. This is the language our soul speaks.

It is difficult for me to understand my feelings - a phrase that each of us has encountered: in books, in movies, in life (someone's or my own). But it is very important to be able to understand your feelings.

The Wheel of Emotions by Robert Plutchik

Some people think - and perhaps they are right - that the meaning of life is in feelings. Indeed, at the end of life, only our feelings, real or in memories, remain with us. Yes, and the measure of what is happening can also be our experiences: the richer, more diverse, brighter they are, the more fully we feel life.

What are feelings? The simplest definition: feelings are what we feel. This is our attitude to certain things (objects). There is also a more scientific definition: feelings (higher emotions) are special mental states manifested by socially conditioned experiences, which express a long-term and stable emotional relationship of a person to things.

How feelings differ from emotions

Feelings are our experiences that we experience through the senses, and we have five of them. Sensations are visual, auditory, tactile, taste and smell (our sense of smell). Everything is simple with sensations: stimulus - receptor - sensation.

Our consciousness interferes with emotions and feelings - our thoughts, attitudes, our thinking. Emotions are influenced by our thoughts. Conversely, emotions affect our thoughts. We will definitely talk about these relationships in more detail a little later. But now let's remember once again one of the criteria of psychological health, namely point 10: we are responsible for our feelings, it depends on us what they will be. It is important.

Fundamental emotions

All human emotions can be distinguished by the quality of the experience. This aspect of a person's emotional life is most clearly presented in the theory of differential emotions by the American psychologist K. Izard. He identified ten qualitatively different "fundamental" emotions: interest-excitement, joy, surprise, sorrow-suffering, anger-rage, disgust-disgust, contempt-disdain, fear-horror, shame-shyness, guilt-remorse. K. Izard refers the first three emotions to positive, the remaining seven - to negative. Each of the fundamental emotions underlies a whole spectrum of states that differ in their severity. For example, within the framework of such a single-modal emotion as joy, one can distinguish joy-satisfaction, joy-delight, joy-glee, joy-ecstasy and others. All other, more complex, complex emotional states arise from the combination of fundamental emotions. For example, anxiety can combine fear, anger, guilt, and interest.

1. Interest is a positive emotional state that promotes the development of skills and abilities, the acquisition of knowledge. Interest-excitement is a feeling of being captured, curious.

2. Joy is a positive emotion associated with the ability to sufficiently fully satisfy an urgent need, the likelihood of which was previously low or uncertain. Joy is accompanied by self-satisfaction and satisfaction with the surrounding world. The obstacles to self-realization are also obstacles to the emergence of joy.

3. Surprise is an emotional reaction that does not have a clearly expressed positive or negative sign to sudden circumstances. Surprise inhibits all previous emotions, directing attention to a new object and can turn into interest.

4. Suffering (grief) is the most common negative emotional state associated with obtaining reliable (or seemingly such) information about the impossibility of satisfying the most important needs, the achievement of which seemed more or less likely before. Suffering has the character of asthenic emotion and often takes the form of emotional stress. The most severe form of suffering is grief associated with irreparable loss.

5. Anger is a strong negative emotional state, which occurs more often in the form of affect; arises in response to an obstacle in the achievement of passionately desired goals. Anger has the character of a sthenic emotion.

6. Disgust - a negative emotional state caused by objects (objects, people, circumstances), contact with which (physical or communicative) comes into sharp conflict with the aesthetic, moral or ideological principles and attitudes of the subject. Disgust, when combined with anger, can motivate aggressive behavior in interpersonal relationships. Disgust, like anger, can be self-directed, reducing self-esteem and causing self-judgment.

7. Contempt is a negative emotional state that arises in interpersonal relationships and is generated by the mismatch of life positions, views and behavior of the subject with those of the object of feeling. The latter are presented to the subject as low, do not correspond to the accepted moral norms and ethical criteria. A person is hostile to someone he despises.

8. Fear is a negative emotional state that appears when the subject receives information about possible damage to his life well-being, about real or imagined danger. Unlike suffering caused by direct blocking of essential needs, a person experiencing the emotion of fear has only a probabilistic forecast of possible trouble and acts on the basis of this forecast (often insufficiently reliable or exaggerated). The emotion of fear can be both sthenic and asthenic in nature and proceed either in the form of stressful conditions, or in the form of a stable mood of depression and anxiety, or in the form of affect (horror).

9. Shame is a negative emotional state, expressed in the realization that one's own thoughts, actions and appearance do not correspond not only to the expectations of others, but also to one's own ideas about appropriate behavior and appearance.

10. Guilt - a negative emotional state, expressed in the awareness of the improperness of one's own deed, thoughts or feelings and expressed in regret and remorse.

Human feelings and emotions table

And I also want to show you a collection of feelings, emotions, states that a person experiences during his life - a generalized table that does not pretend to be scientific, but will help you better understand yourself. The table is taken from the site "Community of Dependents and Codependents", author - Mikhail.

All feelings and emotions of a person can be divided into four types. These are fear, anger, sadness and joy. You can find out what type this or that feeling belongs to from the table.

And for those who have read the article to the end. The purpose of this article is to help you understand your feelings, in what they are. Our feelings depend a lot on our thoughts. Irrational thinking is often at the root of negative emotions. By correcting these mistakes (by working on thinking), we can be happier and achieve more in life. Interesting, but persistent and painstaking work on oneself is ahead. You are ready?

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P.S. And remember, just by changing your consumption - together we are changing the world! © econet