the black and white of our feelings

“fear is bad and love is good!” – why taking our feeling out of the boxes could improve our understanding of life.

Go to a forest. Pick up a random piece of wood and look at it carefully. You will observe a unique texture, shaped by nature which is the result of a complex process in growing and adapting to a specific environment. This individual piece of wood does not exist a second time. Once you zoom out your micro perspective, you will be able to see an entire forest, composed by millions of individual pieces of woods and plants. This observation always taught me to understand how complex the world we live in actually is and how much energy it requires us to understand and listen to our environment.

In order to organize all the information in our brains, humans developed a strategy to simplify everything around us. We put our perception in categories. Therefore: a tree remains a tree, but seldom a tree which grows towards the sun, hiding smaller trees in his shadow or hosting a bird.

Putting things into categories helps us to simplify our lives, but it also makes us loose our focus and our awareness to allow individualism. A tree is a tree, but many of us would not take their time to carefully identify the uniqueness of a certain tree. Nowadays this is what we call ‘mindfulness’.

Beside nature there is something else most people would describe as “fuzzy” or sometimes hard to understand: feelings and emotions. All of us sometimes struggle with the outcomes of our inner processes and therefore book shops are packed with books teaching us on certain emotions and people go therapists in order to approach the unknown inside of their souls. The complexity of our emotions brings us to the point also to sort our feelings into categories. We usually use two different ones: good feelings and bad feelings.   

I learned about good and bad feelings in my early childhood. Education consisted concept of “you should not be angry” or “always be happy, otherwise no one will like you”. This kind of education is also gender based – men are supposed to hide sadness while girls should not deal with aggression. Our way of conceptualizing emotion provides the foundation for generations of humans who are taught to ignore one of their key instincts: basic emotion, such as sadness, anger or aggression. 

I observed the dissolving of the “bad feelings” becoming a trending movement in the past years. 

People attend classes in order to leave anger or sadness behind and there is a huge industry growing in order to promote infinite happiness and the distance from anger and grief. Many times I am confronted with people who try to tell me: “Look, I joined this course and then I lost all my aggression and my hate. And yes, I do love everybody.” Listening to these kinds of thoughts, I have the impression of talking to a robotic version of a human prototype, but not to a real person.

But imagine a world, in which no one would have any impact on someone else. You might be telling your best friend how someone fooled you and she would respond with a friendly smile. Are these the moments which create boundaries? Instead, I remember evenings after break-ups and failures, in which we sat together, drinking wine and gossiped endlessly about every boyfriend we ever had and will have. I remember situations in which I allowed my emotions of jealousy, aggression or sadness to take part of my actions – and my surrounding responded with compassion and openness towards my weaknesses. It is an amazing experience to be loved for your ‘bad parts’. If I would live in a world in which I could never have an impact on anyone with my feelings – I would feel useless. Feelings and emotion is a tool to communicate the insights of our heart, which is more honest than expressing our ratio.

We also have the tendency to work against feelings we judge as “bad”. These could be aggression or anger. I met people who take this challenge very serious which leads them to a point to ignore all the bad feelings someone ever experienced. I have one friend who truly says that he never practiced failure. According to him, his life was filled with happiness, loving parents, friends, health and a good education. All of this sounds lovely and should be everyone’s dream. Nevertheless – if I ask this person if he is happy about his life, he always mentions that there is something missing. This helped me to understand, that the ‘bad’ is a caring pathway towards reflection and learning.

I love to compare the feeling of my friend to the illusion of a life-long holiday. Imagine your life would only consist of free days, in which you always decide what to do. Sounds like a dream? Yes, but most of us would conclude, that we typically enjoy our free time, if we have worked before. That shows us – we need the bad in order to understand about the good and vice versa. Sometimes love needs to be taken away to show us how important it is. Sometimes we need to fail in order to change our perspective. Everything we judge as “bad feelings” can actually have a very positive impact on us. Our saddest moment allows us to learn about vulnerability. Moments of anger can guide us towards our wishes.

However we need to distinguish between actually having the feeling and about how much we allow them to take over our decisions. Dealing with controversial emotions in a compassionate way doesn’t mean that we are open and allowed to express them. Our fear of communicating ‘bad’ emotions also results from our bad experiences we have observing others expressing them in an inappropriate way. 

Most of us witnessed someone getting very aggressive and expressing himself by shouting or using any kind of violence. And these examples are always mentioned to teach us to delete aggression from our list of emotions. Still, most of the people who express aggression belong to those with the biggest troubles of accepting it. Aggression is a tool for many people to hide the current feeling of sadness or loneliness and therefore is not used correctly. Compared to that, someone who really feels angry and still is able to communicate his perception straight but not hurting, allows his environment to understand and correlate to him. 

In the end we all belong to the same species, able to express anger and love, grief and harmony. All of these are part of us and tools to orientate ourselves in this world. What would help us is to open up towards our so called bad sides and treat them with compassion and kindness. Maybe this is the pathway towards real happiness.