Feelings are raw body sensations like hunger, the need to empty the bowel or bladder, sleepiness, butterflies in the stomach, nausea, warmth from within, coldness, tingling down the spine, the urge to run or fight, the urge to have sex, the urge to spend time with friends and family, and so on. Words can’t fully describe what feelings feel like, but instead feelings can only truly be known by feeling them in the body as they emerge. Feelings have biochemical substance within the body. Feelings are conscious awareness of real bodily sensations.
Thoughts are mental processes as opposed to body sensations. They are electro-chemically based in the brain compared to the body-wide biochemical substance of feelings. Thoughts can be in picture form, but are more often in auditory form as the sound of words inside one’s mind. Thoughts generally have complex conceptual meanings, often focused on things far away from the location of the physical body, perhaps about the past or the future. Thoughts often label things as good or bad. Thoughts tend to describe cause and effect even between non-related phenomenon. Thoughts are conscious awareness of imaginary concepts created inside the mind with or without real inputs from the body or environment.
Emotions are big balls of feelings and thoughts all mixed up and entangled into a jumbled mess, becoming a unique phenomenon unto itself. Usually based on a bodily feeling but tweaked by an imaginary misunderstanding.
Emotions can start with either a feeling or a thought.
When a feeling from the body comes first, if the mind labels the feeling using thoughts, then the feeling becomes an emotion.
For example, if while walking down a wooded path you hear leaves rustling on a nearby bush, and you feel a tingle down your spine and your heart beating faster, then if you think, “that noise could be a hungry bear that wants to eat me,” this feeling in your body can turn into fear. If you are at a party and the person you have a crush on starts to walk over toward you, and you feel a tingle down your spine and your heart beating faster, then if you think, “This is finally happening, we are going to get to talk and maybe exchange phone numbers,” then this same feeling in your body can turn into happiness.
On the other hand, when the thought comes first, then the body will react to it causing bodily feelings. These feelings are used by the mind to justify the truth of these thoughts, causing even deeper belief in the thoughts which causes more body reactions and feelings, and so on, until the feelings and thought merge into a big ball of emotions.
For example, if someone you don’t like looks at you from across a crowded room at a party and your mind thinks, “I can’t believe they are looking at me, how dare they, who do they think they are,” your body will react by firing up the emergency system to prepare to run away or fight. As you feel your heart racing and the blood rushing into your muscles, your mind will use these feelings as proof that the person looking at you is giving you a mean look which will set off more thoughts. “They are giving me the evil eye, they are plotting against me, I won’t stand for this, I have to confront them before they can get the jump on me!” Your body now realizes that you are planning on confronting someone dangerous and now really amps up the heart rate and blood pressure, maybe starts sweating. All this combined with thoughts of injustice become the emotions of anger.
So in this way, any traumatic event has two main parts: 1) the feelings of your body reacting to the event, and 2) the thoughts (or the story) that the mind creates about the event. But once these feelings and thoughts mix together, they become a new entity called emotion.
As you can see, the type of emotions you have surrounding any circumstance depends on the story that your mind makes up about the event. And if the story it makes up is not accurate, then the emotions you have will be exaggerated, unnecessary, or even counter-productive.
From this perspective, emotions (big tangled balls of body sensations reacting to unfounded thoughts) are often unhealthy because they cause the body’s fight or flight stress hormone system to over-react to things which when chronic, tears down the body and makes it age faster, gain weight, and get sick.
Feelings are always good and useful messages from the body, being mindful of them and letting them run their course uninhibited is healthy. But labeling them as good or bad, or using them to justify illogical or unrealistic or magical thoughts and beliefs is unhealthy and creates balls of stagnant emotions.
In order to heal from emotional trauma, one needs to begin to slowly disentangle the thoughts and the feelings from the emotional entanglement that has been created.
Allowing yourself to fully feel the feelings underlying the emotion, without labeling them, without re-running the story mixed up with them is a good first step.
Then observing the thoughts that make up the story surrounding the emotion, noticing that the thoughts are just thoughts, is a good second step.
It’s best to start with small things in your daily life before tackling big events from the past. Emotions surrounding big events are best disentangled with the help of a talk therapist.
Yours in health,
John B. Campise Wellness Consulting
Holistic, Chiropractic, Light therapy, Hyperbaric therapy
(559) 930-1034
1709 W. Barstow Avenue
Fresno, CA 93711
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