All feelings are valid, but not all behaviours?

To quote Sven from Frozen, "you feel what you feel, and those feelings are real". Feeling just are. Labelling feelings bad are just going to inspire feelings about the feelings and a spiral.

All feeling are valid, but not all feelings need to be acted on, and sometimes we need constructive feedback, and compassion but with logical compromise.

Where kids are concerned, I suspect you might feel differently if you'd grown up having every feeling your parents didn't understand/approve of systematically invalidated and sometimes ridiculed. Not exactly helpful for building a child's confidence.

If I wee you, I'd look into some of the effective work that us being done in schools around this. Your posts are only demonstrating your lack of knowledge and understanding around the subject, tbh.

People feel what they feel; they can't help it. Maturity means learning to react to feelings appropriately and not to make other people responsible for your emotions when they're not. If you're upset because I'm punching you in the face, you're entitled to say that my behaviour is causing the emotions and the problem and I'm the one who needs to change my behaviour. If you're upset because I'm wearing a green jumper and you were once attacked by someone in a green jumper, my behaviour does not need to change and you need to manage your emotions yourself, without bringing me into it. That doesn't mean your feelings aren't "valid". But you can't make them anyone else's problem.

But this is surely what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We don’t always act on instinct, we stop and think first about how it might pan out should we, say, suddenly start shouting and swearing in public. We all have moments like that- where we’re completely boiling over with rage but we know if we let loose, it would be utterly mortifying!

Small children don’t register shame in the same way and don’t exhibit the same self-control hence the tantrums. We have to teach and help guide them so they stop doing it. Eventually they develop embarrassment anyway so don’t want to do that.

So basically it’s ok to have feelings but as a human, you can’t just act however the hell you want. This is also why we have laws and morals.

@drspouse it simply comes from talking, i guess my mother helped my identify my emotions.
i don't think emotions can be "turned off" at least not the initial reaction, after all otherwise we would go about the day in a state of numbness and not even be alert to danger. what we can work on though is the cascading subsequent feeling that come from the first response.
and as mentioned in another post "anxiety" like "anger" is a bit of a catch all that is not really helpful. you need to explore other words to better describe the feeling; chest pain, heart ache, shock, hurt, insult, degraded, humiliated, embarrassed, frightened, unease, spidy sence, hair raising, off balanced.
then from there ask yourself why. if it's the creepy fellow walking towards you, you need to cross the street.
but the identifying and action phase needs to happen quickly and spontaneously for safety sake. fight or flight is a basic instinct and not something to mull over yes you can then review if your actions were reasonable (shit i didn't look both ways before crossing the street and nearly got hit by a car) but that's just simply every day life and ongoing lifelong learning.
the school bag situation, is that a problem because of fear of reprimand, embarrassment, a wasted day or class, loss of marks for handing in a late assignment? but school wise this atmosphere is damaging; the correct response should be "i can go home and get it, teacher xyz will lend me a pen when i ask, teacher xyz will understand when i tell her about the situation".

Then you are in the lucky proportion of the population who doesn't do that.
Loads of people do and you are clearly able to CBT yourself out of those thoughts where other people aren't and need a therapist to help.

@GoldenCupsatHarvestTime if feelings can't be manipulated or turned off, CBT wouldn't work. But it does. For the vast majority of the people who need it.

@GreyCarpet one of the reasons we have a mental health crisis among school children is the idea that all feelings should be identified and mulled over. Rumination leads to feelings being held onto and described as pathological - a child now thinks they have "anxiety" and describes themselves as such and talks about it a lot, instead of being just a bit worried they've forgotten their bag or insulted their best friend and then realising they haven't, or actually they have but it's easily fixed.

@GreyCarpet i also think reading helps, seeing words like anguish and limerence that you might need to look up also helps.
i'm just sensing that in a busy society lots is being dumbed down for simplicity or to fit in a short video clips, and in that simplicity words are being lost.
so without knowing the word your choice of how you describe the situation becomes limited to anger.

Some people do recognise more emotions than others. That is true.

A lot of this is down to emotional literacy and having the ability to understand the external stimulus and the language to adequately describe how they feel.

Unfortunately, this is just one more consequence of a patriarchal society where women are dismissed as emotional and where men are raised to ignore/shut down all emotions except for anger so sadness, disappointment, grief, frustration, insecurity, fear etc are all understood as 'anger' and lead to violent reactions. The wil still have the full range of human emotions but aren't necessarily able to recognise or identify them.

More is being done in schools now to recognise and teach emotional literacy and to give children the tools to do this so hopefully this will begin to improve.

In a therapeutic context, all feelings are valid.
Your therapist says this as a step in building the a therapeutic partnership, later on when you learn to analyse feelings rather than baldly accept or ruminate on them, there will be a level of nuance filled in.

It was a real (valid) feeling. You were just able to self regulate and so rationalise and see the bigger picture and understand what was going on rather than, for example, thinking, "Well,.I'm just shit!" And handing in your notice.

Or punching them.

No, I don't catastrophise.

I have thought someone has done something on purpose on a couple of occasions when it's transpired that, yes, that person has done something intentionally to cause harm. Did I feel worried that that person's actions would impact negatively on me? Yes. But I took appropriate action to mitigate that.

Have I occasionally wondered if people liked me. Yes, but, again, that is a thought and not a feeling. And I might feel a bit sorry for myself when it has happened. But then I've reflected and realised that a) their might be an alternative explanation and b) that it doesn't matter. Not everyone is going to like me.

If you really meant to ask if I have emotional responses, then again, the answer is yes. But I don't have extreme emotional responses that cause me to behave inappropriately because I have the ability to self regulate. I don't feel overcome by my emotions and I'm able to rationalise them in order to respond appropriately.

Catastrophising is not an 'normal' response to an external stimulus and, if a person finds that their emotional responses to a stimulus are extreme and difficult or their behavioural responses are disproportionate to their emotions/the situation, harmful others, or just aren't helpful to themselves, then it still falls to that person to take responsibility to learn to self regulate and manage them.

ETA: I don't really understand the point you were trying to make. No one has questioned people having emotions. I have said that emotions are a normal part of the human experience. But that how we choose to respond to them is important.

Yes? And how do you plan to forbid the feeling? People have tried that since the beginning of time, and, spoiler, it doesn't work. Allowing the feeling and focusing on your actions is not the best way, it's the realistic way.

@GreyCarpet i think some people recognized more emotions and feelings than others; surprised, annoyed, frustrated, impatient, irritated, and a few other steps before “anger”.

@drspouse catastrophic thinking arises from the emotion of fear. People try to control the emotion of fear using catastrophic thinking. Humans are wired to problem solve and use forward planning skills. That is what makes us so successful as a species, but in some people they end up with going too far down that route and their fear of some unforseen emergency is ever present and they can end up with too many catastrophic thoughts. If catastrophic thinking is happening frequently, that is most likely not a good thing.

@drspouse no I’ve certainly not catastrophes often in my life.
it would be rather debilitating.
the initial feeling in your example “everyone hates me” needs to be followed by “that’s silly and stems from that time when I was in grade 3” and “isn’t that strange how that happens” not cutting the arm arm off.

By valid the therapist is saying that feelings can’t just be manipulated or turned on or off. No amount of learning that it’s ‘wrong’ to feel jealous can stop you from feeling it. No amount of knowing I shouldn’t be angry/ sad at something will make me suddenly happy at it instead.

Feelings are nebulous and rebellious, they don’t obey logic, reason or manipulation of the self. Your feelings are valid because they exist and we can’t change that. But we can change our behaviour.

Thats what she’s saying. To act upon the things we can change (behaviour, expression, action) and not the things we can’t (feelings, emotion, thoughts).

I agree, last week I felt hurt by something stupid someone else had said to me. It wasn’t a valid feeling because the person was being a twat and the correct feeling was just annoyance they’d bothered talking to me at all about something that wasn’t there concern. I was hurt because of my own insecurities about my work (which everyone else says is fantastic).

@GreyCarpet have you never thought "everyone hates me" or "they've done that on purpose" or "I should buy lots of loo roll now because it's going to be in short supply" or "my whole family will die because I haven't washed my groceries"? Have you never catastrophised?
I would bet quite a lot that everyone in the world has, sometimes, catastrophised or tried to see into the future. These all lead to unhelpful feelings e.g. anxiety, sadness aka mild depression. It's hard not to catastrophise.

@Booyd but my point is that she isn't angry at the cashier. She is angry because of the shit day. She then feels annoyed, irritated, short or whatever towards the slow cashier. Her emotion of anger is about the shit day. The feelings she projects towards the casher because she hasn't dealt with or acknowledged that she is angry about her shit day are misplaced feelings towards something or someone other than what her actual original emotion was about.

Has that ever actually happened though?

I mean, my partner sometimes picks me up chocolate on the way home from work.

If I think about it 10 mins before he gets home, I might feel hopeful that today will be a surprise chocolate day. I might feel disappointed when he gets in and it wasn't. But I can't imagine anyone feeling actually angry about it.

And, yes, if they did, it would still be their responsibility to work through those feelings and understand what the problem actually is in order to self regulate because anger in that situation is likely to have deep rooted origins such as not having your basic needs met as a child.

Which is pretty much what everyone has said since the start.

She said angry AT the slow cashier. She didn’t say she behaved badly towards them in any way. But she felt anger towards them.

But you have just said that you don't feel annoyed, irritated etc at the shop assistant, you are angry because you have had a shit day. It is wrong to behave badly towards someone because you are angry because of something else entirely, so the behaviour is what is wrong. It is perfectly ok to be angry because of your shit day.

Yes I agree with you, maybe didn’t articulate it well, as I was trying to join with what I think the op is exploring. Good and bad are not especially helpful terms in this context, but some feelings are more likely to lead to harm to ourselves and others.