Importance of Feelings

Importance of Feelings Feelings are our lifeblood. Without them, we would perish. Think about it. What if you couldn’t tell the difference between hot and cold, the feeling of pain, body temperature, strength or weakness? You would be numb at best, severely injured, or dead, at worst. Unable to discern possible danger or harm potential in the environment would doom you to a short life. That’s one set of feelings; the physical feelings, necessary for our survival. But what about emotional feelings? Are they any less important? The obvious answer is “no” they are no less important. That is why we have the full array of feelings; physical and emotional.
What’s interesting about feelings is that we develop the ability to refine and perfect our feelings by learning from our mistakes. It only takes one time for a child to touch a hot stove. By the time we reach adulthood we are pretty good at discerning what is good or bad for us physically, although some may debate this statement. Suffice to say, more of us survive than perish.
We also become more adept at identifying and expressing our emotional feelings and we become more socially adept as we establish and build relationships. The more adept we are at identifying and expressing emotional feelings, the better we feel and the better our relationships.
In the process of growing from childhood to adulthood, however, some of us unintentially lose touch with our emotional feelings. Somehow, our parents teach us to stop responding to our feelings as we were created to. “That didn’t hurt. Come on, get up! a parent might say, as we fall and scrape our knee. Or, “Stop that crying! I’ll give you something to cry about!” We might be subject to our dysfunctional parents’ emotional, psychological, and/or physical abuse, either due to their own childhood abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, or mental illness. We might grow up having to deal with an unfeeling, cold-hearted, angry, depressed, bi-polar, schizophrenic, or