Sometimes our emotions don’t match our circumstances, and this can feel unsettling.

Feelings can be confusing.

When I was in my twenties, I spent some time teaching English as a foreign language in Indonesia. During my travels I arrived in Bali and found myself standing on one of the most objectively beautiful beaches I had ever seen. Long white sand stretched ahead of me, palm trees lined the edges, and with a tropical drink in my hand I lay back and felt… horribly depressed.

It was the kind of place people travel across the world to find happiness. And yet there I was, staring out at the ocean, feeling the opposite. In that moment, the mismatch between where I was and how I felt seemed almost absurd.

I was, in fact, horribly depressed. And worse than that, I felt critical of myself for being depressed.

Wasn’t I supposed to be happy? Wasn’t this what people wanted? Wasn’t this what I wanted? I experienced a stream of critical self talk, calling me annoying, ungrateful, and useless. Overall, it boiled down to one main thought: I should be feeling differently!

From a young age we are often taught that if we work hard, follow the rules, and pursue our dreams, happiness will eventually arrive as the reward. The truth is more elusive.

This is a huge topic, so today I’m only going to touch on one idea: that our feelings often shape how we experience reality, sometimes even before our thoughts have caught up. They are rarely useless, and may be a route to better self-understanding.

Often, feelings point towards something deeper than the surface of our lives. They tell us something about how we are truly experiencing the world. They can reveal our values, our needs, and the parts of our lives that may be out of alignment. In that sense, feelings can act as a kind of compass.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes about this idea in his book The Righteous Mind. He argues that our judgements are often primarily intuitive rather than rational.

The process tends to look like this:

Intuition (feelings) → judgement → reasoning

Rather than:

reasoning → judgement

In other words, we often feel something first and then generate explanations afterwards. Haidt calls this moral intuitionism.

This means that sometimes we feel something, and then we justify it.

When we explore our feelings rather than suppressing them, we can begin to see that they have their own story to tell. We can acknowledge that we feel something without immediately attaching a narrative or judgement to it.

Feelings are a little like the weather. They rise and fall, pass through, and colour our days. When we feel stormy, the world can seem stormy too. If you are feeling anxious, you are far more likely to think anxious thoughts and create narratives. Many emotional responses are also pre-cognitive, meaning they arise from older parts of the brain such as the amygdala and the limbic system before conscious thought has caught up. Sometimes the body reacts first, and the mind scrambles to explain why.

For example, if your heart suddenly starts racing, your mind may begin constructing theories about what might be wrong. The mind is an excellent theory-maker.

In my case, on the beach in Bali, I found myself thinking ‘I’ve failed’, ‘I don’t work hard enough’ and a variety of critical thoughts about my body.

In reality, and thankfully, the mind and body often work like two gears in a car. As the writer and mental-health advocate Ruby Wax describes, we can sometimes shift between them. When we move our attention from our thoughts to our physical feelings, we can find relief from our inner critic. We may then notice that they subside, much like the clouds parting.

When I sat with my feelings later, I realised: I was actually lonely. I was going through a horrible breakup, thousands of miles from home, and felt alienated. My depression was heavy, and justified. My feelings, when sat with, gave me a much greater picture of my story than my quick, accusatory thoughts.

Clients ask me what practices I would recommend, outside of the therapeutic space. I would recommend some sort of meditation linked to body awareness, like body scans, as being an excellent way of connecting with our authentic experience. They allow us to observe feelings and bodily sensations without immediately trying to explain them away.

A practice I sometimes recommend for my clients is RAIN, led by psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach. I’ll link it here:

RAIN.

It’s an extremely useful practice for when you’re feeling overwhelmed and your mind is racing.

This is just one option, and there are numerous others. If RAIN doesn’t work for you, I can recommend having a little search and being curious about the various practices out there. Another method is the ‘seek 5’ method. If one doesn’t sit well with you, another may well. I try not to be prescriptive; everyone is unique.

Feelings can be inconvenient. They can arrive at the “wrong” moment, contradict the life we thought we wanted, or refuse to match the picture we had of how things were supposed to feel. When that happens, many people assume something is wrong with them.

But feelings are rarely meaningless.

Often they are signals. Small messages from within that something needs attention, care, or understanding.

Going through the process of learning to recognize our feelings can be daunting and frustrating to do alone.

In therapy, we create the space to slow down and listen to those signals. Rather than rushing to judge or explain them away, we can gently explore what they might be trying to tell us.

Sometimes what initially feels confusing begins to make sense. And when our feelings begin to make sense, we often start to feel a little more at home in ourselves.

If you’re struggling to make sense of your feelings, counselling can offer a supportive space to explore them at your own pace. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me for a chat.