You, sir, are human. I know it’s a surprise to hear. Yet sometimes we need to be reminded that we are. We will often find reasons for us not to think we are human. One of the main times we try not to be human is when experiencing emotions we don’t care to feel. We men will find anything else to do than to allow the feeling of fear, sadness, anxiety, intimidation, jealousy,
Why avoid these emotions? Because they’re unpleasant. Who wants to feel sad? Who would like to feel hopeless? Who wants to feel self-pity? They answered all these no one but at the same time, these are important emotions for us men to experience. This is because our emotions allow us humans to be human. And I get how many of these emotions are unwanted. They do exude elements of weakness and of helplessness, but that doesn’t mean that’s who you are.
When you feel jealous because somebody has something that you don’t, yeah, we’re going to have our feelings hurt because we start to think we’re not good enough. Now you can choose to sit around and wish ill upon the person who has what you would like to have, or you could find a way to earn that item. Will you succeed? I don’t know, nor do you, until you try.
The key to all of this is that you have to allow yourself to feel any and all emotions that show up to the party. They’re not going to do any harm to you. And they don’t last that long.
Emotions come about in this order. There is a circumstance where your neighbor just got a new bass boat. You’ve been wanting a new bass boat for the past four years, and you still don’t have one. So you probably have a thought in the vicinity of it. It’s not fair. I want one of those. That thought creates the feeling of jealousy because you do not think you’re adequate enough to have that new bass boat.
From here, you may decide to stew about it, by stomping around being angry that you don’t have that bass boat. Then again, you may act in some way completely different. But you’re gonna have an action based upon the emotion that you have.
If you were holding off and just sitting around plotting the demise of your neighbor, you’re wasting energy on not getting that boat.
So you’re angry and jealous because you would rather fume about what you don’t have instead of deciding that your neighbor has shown you it’s possible to get the boat and finding a way to get one of your own.
Yeah some feelings suck
I agree, many perceived negative emotions are not pleasant. We often run from them. But it doesn’t mean that we will be able to stay away from them. You see that jealousy that you feel, the anger and resentment that you have, the self-defeat that you experience are all part of your existence as a human.
Remember that life is 50% pain and 50% pleasure so you’re going to have the crappy experiences with the great experiences. But just because they don’t feel light and bubbly, some feel cold and hard and unpleasant, doesn’t mean you don’t experience them. Because they’re not desired doesn’t mean you run from them. Because if you don’t let the negative emotions live their short life, they will continue to crop up time and time again, and that will cause problems.
Some feelings are great.
Yeah, there are some emotions that we absolutely love to share. We love to experience many, many emotions in our lives. From love for our wives and kids, to pride and what we have built. I don’t know many guys who shy away from any time that they are sexually excited to see their wife. We celebrate with our band of Brothers when our football team wins, and we show our sorrow when we lose a loved one.
There are plenty of emotions, we men love to show. We are always displaying our emotions to those around us. Even men who believe that we do not feel many emotions show positive emotions when they are around.
We need all emotions to have a complete life experience.
As I’ve said, our emotions are needed. They are watercolors in our lives. When we have memories, those memories are lit up by the emotions that we actually feel at that time. This is one reason why it’s so hard for us to remember ordinary days in high school, but most of us will remember the first time we kissed a girl. It’s not because of what we thought, but of how we felt.
The same goes with the times that we’ve got upset, angry, pissed off. We remember those times a lot more many times our emotions can be entertainment to our friends. And they will lovingly repeat the stories each and every time they get a chance. Is it because that emotion is bad? No, it is because we had an emotion. Emotions are not good nor are they bad. They are just our vibrations we feel throughout our body.
To run and hide from those emotions compounds the negative effects that we will have because we haven’t experienced those emotions completely.
Resisting emotions can cause problems.
Many times, we will have unprocessed thoughts and emotions in our lives. Whether it is something as minuscule as our wife rebuffing our advances. Or that someone we look up to told us that we will not reach our goals if we do not allow the actual emotion at hand to exist. It will manifest itself in many different ways.
Drug use
Many men have had experiences that have not been resolved, and as a means to cope with the pain of that emotion that keeps trying to come up, we will drown it out with some type of substance. Whether it is alcohol or some type of drug, it is easier to drown the thoughts out than to spend the minute and a half to two minutes experiencing an emotion that we don’t want to feel.
We would rather spend the time avoiding that uncomfortable emotion, fearing that that emotion will cause us irreparable harm, than just experience it for the short amount of time that it will be there.
Indulgent actions
Unprocessed emotions also crop up in other types of indulgent actions. These indulgent actions are often seen as procrastination. We also turned to video games, because the constant dopamine hit that comes from immersing ourselves in a video game world allows us to not have to face the problem of a thought, needing to be looked at.
Same thing goes with porn pornography. It is far easier to look up a webpage and watch some adult movies than to face the uncertainty of being rejected by our wife. We get the release that we’re after, and we somehow fool ourselves into thinking that we have done our wives a favor by not having a connection with them.
Over eating
Another way we avoid unpleasant emotions is by making ourselves miserable. How many times have you just eaten yourself to the level of being painfully full? I know I have. More times than I want to count. This is one reason why I distance myself from my favorite Chinese food buffet.
Overeating is just as bad as any other type of
Playing small at life
Another problem when you are not processing your emotions is that you play small parts in life. When you are not tackling the true problem, that’s in front of you. You’re trying to do everything else to feel competent instead of doing what is actually needed. This is a problem I face all the time. Instead of getting my business in front of other people, it’s easier to tinker with this part of the site or that part of the site.
Yet, when you stop running from the uncomfortable emotions, you realize that those emotions have no power over you. And with that lack of power, you aren’t nearly as afraid to try the big, uncertain, lofty goals that you want in your life. So soon, you are able to make bigger leaps in the direction of the life that you want, all because you started addressing the unwanted emotions in your life.
Understand where your emotions come from
Emotions are thanks to our thoughts. Our thoughts are the source of our suffering, and they are the source of our pleasure. If you wanna have better outcomes than what you’re having right now, the solution is to change the thoughts that you’re having about your circumstance.
Your results are based on what your model is.
The model is as follows.
- Circumstance
- Thought
- Feeling
- Action
- Result
Your circumstance is neutral. Every circumstance is neutral until you apply a thought to it. This is why you and your friend watch the same movie and come out with two different experiences. You have two different sets of thoughts. When you have a thought, it is based solely upon the experiences that you have had in your life. So your thoughts are not going to be the same as your wife’s thoughts. Your wife’s thoughts are not gonna be the same as your kids’ thoughts. Nobody has the same thought about the same circumstance.
Those thoughts create a feeling. Now this feeling could be pleasurable or could be painful. That is the 50-50 principle at work. If it is not a pleasant emotion, this is where doing thought work comes into play. Why did you have the thought that created this emotion? With the model, you can actually examine the thought and even do a thought interrupt and have a different emotion for the circumstance.
Now, with the feeling you’re going to take a certain action and this is why many people with unintentional thoughts wind up having unintentional actions. When you’re just sleepwalking through life, you’re not present about why you did what you did. Yet when you have the model in your life, you start paying attention to the base thoughts that created the emotion that led you to take the action that you have taken.
Finally, when you take that action, you will get a result, and the interesting thing about this result is that it always points back to your thought. So if you’re not getting the results that you’re after, the key to look at improving your stance is what’s the base thought?
Allow yourself to feel the emotions.
This is why it is good to allow yourself to feel that emotion. Crazy thing about emotions is that they only last about a minute and a half. The reason that so many people seem to feel an emotion all day long is that they are ruminating over the same thought over and over and over again. When you are not conscious of what your thoughts are, it’s easy to ruminate, because your brain tries to come up with a solution to the problem. The big issue is that often there is no solution. Our brain would love for there to be a solution, but sadly, many times there is no closure to that problem. So what you have to do is you have to clean up the thought. Understand why you have the thoughts that you’re having. And except what you do not have the power to change
This is a challenging piece of work, but as you continue to understand the thoughts that you’re having, changing the results that you have, you’ll soon find that the emotions are just the vibrations that you feel and they cause you no problems. Are you sometimes still afraid? Yes, you are. Are you sometimes feeling a little shameful? Yes, you are. Are you feeling a bit embarrassed about something that you did very much? All the emotions that you had before you will still experience; the difference is that when you start accepting your emotions and feeling your emotions. You’re no longer going to run away from them because you are now fully embracing what it means to be a human.
