How do I change the way I feel?
Take a child brought up in an abusive family. His self-worth is so low that he spends hours cowering in the corner of the room, fearful of the next blow. Then one day he is rescued from that awful situation and put into foster care with loving parents. Eventually he is adopted into that safe and secure family. But, he still cowers, he is still fearful.
Hopefully that was not your experience - but we all have our own version of that. Upon arrival in this world each of us has exactly the same value - let's think of it as a score of ten. Nothing can change that - no one can take even one point away from us - nor add to our value. It will remain constant. What key people can do, however, is to convey the impression that we are worth less than ten. So much will depend
on how they feel about themselves. If they only feel worth five then that is what they will convey to us. That is one of the ways in which emotional patterns get passed on through the generations.
As we grow up and venture out into the world we meet people who will value us and say positive things to us. What happens to the compliments? In truth, they don't touch us - they don't sink in and make a difference. We might not be so rude as to disagree with someone's positive assessment of us but we quietly think to ourselves - 'you don't really know me.' And then there's the struggle to let people get close, even those we love dearly, because we cannot afford for them to know who we feel ourselves to be.
How can we change what we feel? To do that we need to understand how our thoughts and emotions feed into each other. Our lack of sense of value was formed by our perception of what people thought of us. As we have seen, it might well be that the other person loved us dearly but was unable to convey that to our innermost being because of their own lack of self-worth. Nonetheless, it is our perception that matters. In other words, the power is in what we think other people think about us. That perception then shaped our emotions into patterns - like the pouring of concrete into a mould. As we came through those early years the concrete set and how we felt about ourselves became established. Now we are faced with positive views about ourselves but we cannot seem to get our minds to change with the dawning truth. The reason is that our feelings are firstly shaped by our thoughts but then our feelings themselves shape and even control our thinking. We are caught in a vicious circle. So now we are taking what we feel as our reality, rather than the ever-increasing objective truth that surrounds us. What can we do about it?
We need to recognise where our feelings have come from; that they are not a true comment on who we are, and that they tell us, in fact, more about what the key people in our lives felt about themselves rather than being anything to do with us. Once that dawns on us we can begin to put distance between those horrible, destructive feelings and who we really are - and as we do that we begin to feel something solid beneath our feet. We are beginning to find ourselves.
When the old emotions attempt to reassert themselves, go through the process again of stepping back, reminding yourself that present situations are merely tapping into the reservoir of emotions from the past, separate out the emotions of the past and present and deal with the present. Consciously choose to trust the person saying the good things, resisting the downward pull. Remember, just because an emotion is especially strong it does not mean it has to be telling you the truth. It may simply mean that what you felt and experienced was particularly painful.
In the end we change how we feel by changing how we think. That is why Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, 'be transformed by the renewing of your mind' (Romans 12:2). If you want to pursue the understanding of this process further you will find our 'Understanding Yourself' courses to be really helpful.