Overview
You’re wounded and angry. Someone close to you, who should love you, hurt you instead. This person might be a parent, a sibling, a child, a friend, a partner, or a spouse. Whoever it is; where you once had trust, you now have fear. You were attracted; now, you are apprehensive. You had love, but now you have loathing. You don’t know what to do. Should you stay, or should you go? Put up with it, or give it right back to him? Retaliate or bury your feelings? If neither choice seems good, it’s because neither choice is good. You…
A Field Guide to Feelings
Feelings are like the idiot lights on your car. They’re crude messages about your state of being. When the oil light goes on in your car, you know to check the oil. When you feel angry, you know there is a perceived injustice somewhere. You don’t ignore the idiot light on your car, do you? Then don’t ignore your feelings. Check them out to see what’s causing them, and thank your feelings for alerting you to potential danger.
I once knew a guy who had a check engine light that would not go off. He brought the car to the…
The Road to Reconciliation
Getting hurt sucks. You’ll want to move on. Before you can, you’ll need to know where to go. What is it that you want, exactly?
If your wife has been sleeping with another man, you might not know how to heal. It’s not like she can undo what she did or that you can unknow it. What’s done is done. You find it hard to trust and a persistent image keeps popping into your mind whenever you go to kiss her. You try to imagine feeling the same about her as you once did, but you can’t get there from…
As if it wasn’t hard enough to deal with the people who hurt you who were supposed to love you, you also have to deal with their representatives you carry around in your head. Actual people you can divorce, send to jail, move across the country and never see again; the people of the mind follow you, they share your bed despite divorce. Regardless of orders of protection, they dog your footsteps, day and night. It’s imperative you find a way to cope with these imaginary people or they will do you more harm than the real ones ever could.
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A Field Guide to Feelings
People go crazy because they’re bored. Workers hate their jobs because they’re bored. Partners cheat on their spouses because they are bored. Recovering addicts relapse becausethey’re bored. Also, writers write, painters paint, players play, and inventors invent because, if they did not, they would be bored. Boredom can lead to everything from wasted, whiny days to searing insights and helpful inventions, from depression to mania, from a dull, laggard apathy to a determination to escape.
Boredom is such a powerful and common feeling, you would think we would understand it better, but it’s hard to study feeling, or any subjective…
The last time Larry had seen his son, Joyce had called to say their boy was planning on going into the Army instead of college. Larry was of the generation that took it for granted that everyone who was capable should go to college and pay whatever the institution wanted to charge because the benefits of a college education seemed to so outweigh the costs. This was the case for him; sadly, it has not been the case for his children.
He was also of the generation, having narrowly missed the Vietnam War, that did not think it was worthwhile…
A Field Guide to Feelings
And the way out.
A bad mood is when your feelings get stuck in a terrible place and you can’t change them, no matter what. You’ve been in the doldrums for weeks, sad and depressed, even though you have nothing to be sad and depressed about, except for being sad and depressed. How do you shake that feeling and experience the joy you have every right to claim?
Imagine a radio dial with many frequencies along a continuous range. When you tune into one station, you get one genre of music, Country-Western, say. …
If you’re in a close relationship, you have a resource others don’t have. You have a lookout.
When the wheels start to come off, everyone is prone to develop their own kind of problem and make their own kind of mistakes. Some get depressed or anxious or angry or just withdraw into themselves. Others use substances, or gamble, or have sex with everyone, or can’t stop shopping; others get controlling. Some have a combination of several kinds of problems and mistakes. Everyone’s got their thing. Your own type of problem and mistake is yours because it’s the very thing that…
A Field Guide to Feelings
Science often tells us that things are not what they seem. Why should feelings be any different?
In the popular view, when a man tells me his dog died, the break in his voice indicates he’s sad. This means, according to the common conception, a circuit in his brain called sadness has been activated. This circuit was wired into him at birth, designed to be stimulated whenever he suffers a loss. …
A Field Guide to Feelings
Your feelings tell you about the state of your body. If you’re putting on a roof, carrying shingles up a ladder, swinging a hammer until your hand falls off, sweating it out at a hundred and ten degrees, your body will have a lot to say. You may not want to listen to it. You’ve got to cover the roof before the rainstorm comes; but, your body is trying to tell you something. It would be in your interest to listen sometimes.
The feeling of pain is the way the body speaks to you when it wants to say, cut…
