Have you ever been told you have no feelings?

You’ve gotten into an argument with someone and not responded how they wanted you to respond, so they tell you you have no feelings. Or maybe you’ve not cried at a weepy film that most of your friends have cried at and they’ve told you “you don’t have feelings, you’re heartless”. Something exciting happens and you’re like “yeah that’s cool”. You’ve maybe done one of these online personality tests and it shows you lack empathy/sympathy (delete as appropriate).

I once had a chat with someone and they said that they’d been told that they were emotionally detached. When I asked her how she felt about that, she shrugged and said she was “p****d off” with what she’d been told. And that is the irony. So it wasn’t a positive emotion, but it WAS an emotion… so she CAN feel.

It’s not that you don’t have feelings, it’s maybe that they’re not the feelings others expect based on how they would feel. When you’re depressed it’s the same, you lack the feeling of happiness but you’re still feeling something, whether that’s numbness or even a feeling of emotionless, it’s a feeling.

I recently had to query my own feelings. I was a bit low, (yes, I can still get low points), and thought I’d lost my sense of emotion, I couldn’t feel happy, I felt miserable and alone. I still felt they were just not the ones I had gotten used to.

You may not think it’s easy to feel different, but it is possible to change those feelings. It’s the thoughts we engage with that create those feelings. The process is:-

Thought – Feelings – Action – Outcome.

Because we can’t change the thought, we change how we feel about the thought by choosing how we engage with it. If we feel differently about it we will act differently, and if we act differently then we are guaranteed a different outcome.

So don’t “switch your feelings off”, just “switch your feelings”