I know you may be sad, depressed, angry, upset, or have any rage or strong emotion. You’re entitled to your feelings. But there’s a problem. Just because you feel something, doesn’t necessarily mean it is accurate. Now you’re probably scratching your head. You might even be offended and think that I am contradicting myself. How can I with one sentence, say that people are entitled to their emotions and take it all away by saying that they’re not exactly feeling what they’re feeling? What’s going on?
Well, here’s the problem. You can’t just go with your emotional states. You have to measure them by some standard. Unfortunately, if all your standards are subjective, with no regard for how others perceive your emotions, you’re making things harder on yourself.
You set yourself up for a really sad disconnect between how you feel and how other people perceive what you’re feeling. You put yourself in a position where you have these strong emotions but you really cannot communicate them in clear enough terms to resolve them.
Do you see how this works? Your feelings, while being completely owned by you, actually have two dimensions. There is the subjective dimension, which is what you are perceiving deep down inside. But there’s also an objective dimension to it.
You’re going to have to express your feelings. Do these expressions line up with what you’re feeling inside? If there is a disconnect, then don’t be surprised if people respond to you less optimally.
Here’s the kicker, it’s not their fault. Whatever negative experiences you have maybe since you’re just expressing yourself the wrong way. The good news is emotional expression is a skill. You may not be doing a good job of it now but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to stay emotionally incompetent forever.
You can work with people who care about you to fine-tune your emotional expressions, so you can get rid of that disconnect between the strong feelings you have deep down inside and how other people perceive you. This is very important because a lot of people base their decisions on their feelings.
The problem with this is if you’re basing it on something that may not line up with objective reality, you’re going to have a problem on your hands. It’s not unusual for people with this issue to think that they always bring out the worst in people. It’s also not unusual for people who struggle with this problem to automatically assume that people are out to get them so they develop some low-level forms of paranoia. You don’t have to put yourself through that self-abuse. Focus instead on honesty.
Do you think your feelings can line up with objective parameters? Can you get somebody who cares about you to work with you so you can see whether you are expressing your emotions correctly?
