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?

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.

@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.

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.

@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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.