All feelings are valid, but not all behaviours?

[Polyestered]

Hopefully others will have heard this phrase before, often with parenting advice or in therapy. My therapist often says this, and I disagree with her.

Essentially, I have interpreted it as it’s ok to feel whatever you feel, but you have to control your reaction to it.

eg child is allowed to be sad she can’t have an ice cream, not allowed to throw a tantrum about it.

however, I don’t agree with this in principle AT ALL. Some feelings are absolutely not valid! And we shouldn’t be teaching children that it’s appropriate to have any kind of feelings they want - we should be teaching them that NOT all feelings are valid and how to recognise which ones are and aren’t. Otherwise how do you recognise that your feeings or opinions may be wrong?

for example, a partner might feel jealous of their spouse and say they can’t speak to other women. No the behaviour is obviously not ok, but (in a normal healthy relationship with no context) feeling that jealous is also not ok!

or someone might have the feeling to hurt someone for no reason. Men might have the feeling or desire of wanting to rape someone. We wouldn’t say “that’s ok to feel like that because you haven’t done it”

If opinions are somewhat based on feelings, and some opinions are blatantly wrong (eg misogyny, racism) how can we say every feeing is valid?

I agree to an extent. It's not reasonable of me to be angry with my boyfriend for not buying me a large bar or chocolate out of the blue, however much I might suddenly decide I fancy one ten minutes before he gets home. Some feelings are actively not valid and the best thing to get over them is to recognise they are unreasonable.

Validating a feeling doesn't mean you have to agree or approve of it. It just means recognising it exists.

If someone says they dislike someone because they're black, then that is a real feeling that needs dealing with. For that person's own emotional and psychological wellbeing, it would be helpful to understand why and where that feeling came from and try to challenge it, rather than just shame it away.

I think that you seeing a therapist to unpick all this is a good idea.

I completely agree with the therapist that all feelings are valid. As in they are feelings arising in people, and they exist, and are a natural response in the mind. Some feelings lead us toward happiness and some lead us toward suffering or harm.

So you have a point - feelings like anger (I don’t like you because xyz) and jealousy (I feel unhappy when someone else gets something good) - not good feelings, don’t make the feeler of them happy, or people around them, can lead to harmful behaviours. Even if not acted upon they are emotions that harm us. But they are valid as in they come from a valid place - we have reasons to feel what we feel and we can’t really get rid of them unless we acknowledge them. You sound like you may be advocating repressing feelings that one ‘shouldn’t’ feel - I don’t think it works for long to do that.

But you are angry, no matter how irrationally. That anger is real and needs looking at.

I imagine it probably comes from a deeper place connected to not being paid attention to or having your needs properly met.

Or I'm just hungry and want chocolate.
We've all had moments when we get mad at someone/something that is not the right target. If I've had a rubbish day and I get angry with a slow cashier, I'm still unreasonable to be angry with them. Sure I can cut myself some slack for that bad day, but it doesn't change the unreasonableness.

@swifttara hmmm, I'm not sure you can describe emotions as good or bad. An emotion (which I think is what you mean) is an instinctive reaction to the environment. It is neither good nor bad. When the emotion of fear arises inside of us that isn't good or bad, it just is our instinctive reaction. The feelings & thoughts that come about afterwards may be useful or may not be and they in turn can lead to actions which could be seen as good or bad.

but @StrawberrySquash this is where it helps to understand the process that happens.

You've had a shit day, so the emotions you experience are anger and maybe sadness. You feel annoyed, irritated, resentful, indignant and that leads you to behave in a rude or thoughtless way towards someone entirely innocent. The behaviour is unreasonable, not necessarily the emotion or the feelings.

This is the essence of CBT. Your feelings can be harmful, and they often stem from your thoughts. "They all hate me" is unlikely to be true, but leads to "I feel worthless". "I feel like my arm belongs to someone else" is a very harmful feeling, especially if accompanied by "I feel like my arm should be chopped off".

But feeling angry at them is still unreasonable

Having feelings and emotions is human and simply part of our existence. However how we react our behavior can become maladaptive.
stubbing your toe, feeling pain, yelling out, hopping on one foot and checking to see if it’s broken is normal. Turning around punching a hole in the wall throwing furniture around isn’t. Somewhere in your life trauma has led to maladaptive and your behavior is not healthy to relationships.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

@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.

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).

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).

@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.

@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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.