Are Feelings a Compass to our Needs?

[Woolspinner2000]

From time to time, I thought it would be good for the llama to spin some yarn (aka think out loud), like the Board Parrot shares his thoughts. This topic has been on my mind for quite some time and it isn't an easy one for me to grab ahold of. In my journey of healing from an uBPDm, one of my initial struggles was to learn what feelings are, and then allow myself to begin to experience them. This is still fairly new for me, and in a previous post I mention that one of my greatest and most helpful tools I received from T was a feeling wheel. Here is a link for any one who might be interested:

www.freedomeveryday.org/downloads/feelingswheel.pdf

As I consider what we feel, I wonder if our feelings are an indicator of what our needs are? Can we say our needs are directly related to our feelings? In other words, when I feel a certain way, can it lead me to what my need is at that moment, if I figure out what I'm feeling first?

Here is an example of a negative feeling I often have: scared.
I think of a situation from my childhood when I felt scared, and it was when I was around my mom. My need was to feel safe.

Now let's consider a positive feeling: joy.
I think of a time when I was around my coworkers, and we were laughing, like a family. I had a need to be a part of the family and to belong.

I must admit that my mind finds it super hard to process positive feelings. I never even considered that positive feelings meet needs too, but I talked about it in my T session and learned that they do. I think that it's really hard for me to process the positive because I've never known it. I hear the negative voices and see the unkind faces in my mind, and those drown out the chance for anything positive. I have to work at learning that life isn't always about the struggle, but it is also about learning to thrive as well.

According to Pete Walker, flashbacks and feelings go hand in hand.

Flashbacks are opportunities to release old, unexpressed feelings of fear, hurt, and abandonment, and to validate - and then soothe - the child's past experience of helplessness and hopelessness. Healthy grieving can turn our tears into self-compassion and our anger into self-protection.

There are some needs being met here as a result of the feelings he mentions, those needs of 'self-compassion and self-protection.'

Could you share a negative feeling and the need which corresponds?
Can you also share a positive feeling and the corresponding need?

 
Wools

[Kwamina]

Hi Wools

Thanks for sharing your thoughts

Here is an example of a negative feeling I often have: scared.
I think of a situation from my childhood when I felt scared, and it was when I was around my mom. My need was to feel safe.

Now let's consider a positive feeling: joy.
I think of a time when I was around my coworkers, and we were laughing, like a family. I had a need to be a part of the family and to belong.

I like the examples you've chosen here. That sense of belonging while amongst coworkers is something I can relate to. I have worked with a particular group of coworkers that were very kind, respectful and non-judgemental people. Not only did that give me a sense of belonging, but it also made me feel safe because I did not have to be on guard for any hostile communications from them. I've also had other less positive experiences at work though, but this particular group of coworkers really stood out in a very positive way.

I have to work at learning that life isn't always about the struggle, but it is also about learning to thrive as well.

Yet another thing I can really relate to, the feeling that you are constantly fighting to hold on, constantly finding yourself in that struggle for survival. It would definitely be nice if we could just be, let down our guard, relax and feel secure.

Could you share a negative feeling and the need which corresponds?
Can you also share a positive feeling and the corresponding need?

There are those moments that I forget, or it seems like just for a moment all memories of past struggles have left my mind and I find myself at peace. Those moments are amazing and might speak to my need for a more pleasant and more stable childhood. When the memories return, the sense of peacefulness leaves me and is replaced with sadness as reality sets in again. So my example shows both the negative and the positive feeling.

[Sunfl0wer]

I do see feelings as indicators of what I am longing for, and clues to what I feel that I may need.

So if I am feeling lonely at night, I tend to take that as a cue that I can provide myself self soothing to nurture that part of myself. 

I try to take my desires of receiving from the outside world, and move them to providing it to myself within my inner world(/in my head space.)  Otherwise, if I expect others to manage or fulfill my emotions, then I can be left disappointed.

However, I generally rather intentionally speak/think in terms of a feeling being "uncomfortable" instead of "negative."  I think using feelings as internal indicators is an excellent point and well, sometimes in my own past, using "judgmental" language has caused me to want to "remove" or "rid" myself from that feeling or remove the feeling from me.  This has caused varying forms of dissociation for me. 

For myself, using instead, language such as "uncomfortable" then implies an ultimate goal of being able to sit comfortably with sadness, or anger, or such.  (Whereas the use of "negative" makes me hear an implied goal of extricating that feeling or such.)

Learning to sit and be ok with uncomfortable feelings and comfy ones, listen to what they are saying, finding and exploring the value of what they offer seems to be the goal you are communicating.  (Or rather what I am hearing, please correct if i am misunderstanding).

What I find personally most interesting is that you express issue with processing joy, because I have really never thought of joy being a feeling that could speak much to me except, "not feeling sad" or such.  I think I could do well to listen to joy better and think about it.  Part of me is not comfy feeling joy.  I relate joy to being naive or letting ones guard down or being childlike, yea, all judgemental.  So I do feel a tendency to suppress my own joy, instead convincing myself that to let go, be joyful = not on guard looking for danger. I also feel guilt to experience joy and was conditioned to rid the appearance of joy off of me for safety reasons as otherwise it would be beaten off me or such. Humm, will ponder today thought of making peace with Joy somehow, wondering how I can allow it to surface and be ok with it. 

Thanks for spinning up some interesting thoughts Woolspinner!

[HappyChappy]

I think you are onto something here, you know how to spin a yarn Wooly. It sounds like you are describing intuition. When  I did CBT I was introduced to the concept that feelings were our underlying thoughts, practised to the point of them becoming intuitive. Just as riding a bysicle become intuitive in time.

I would agree feelings are a compass, especially at times when we need to act quickly (like riding a bysicle). But as CBT points out, sometimes our BPD give us unhelpful intuition that needs correcting. So for example, the battered wife. Her father may have been NPD, so intuition tells her another NPD man feels familiar, maybe the only belonging they had experienced. But she ends up running from one bully into the hands of the next and history keeps repeating itself.

I must admit that my mind finds it super hard to process positive feelings. I never even considered that positive feelings meet needs too, but I talked about it in my T session and learned that they do.

I think we can be a victims of the company we keep. From age 12 I fell in with a very positive group of friends who cracked jokes all the time. I learn’t not to take life seriously, I also learn’t that trying to find humour in everything was a great way of doing that. So that's my example of a positive feeling. This is also where my nick name Happy Chappy came from, partly because my friends observed how miserable my FOO were. The fact my BPD was the opposite to all this, everything was an issue, never care free. That’s an example of a negative feeling.

But on a positive Wools, if we practice anything, it gets easier, so hang out with positive people and practising positive feelings, the theory is it will become more intuitive to seek out fun. I note folk on here tend to be very postive. Around my way there are meetup.com groups called "Laughing yoga classes." or "Positive People." which I'm guessing are trying to do this. Maybe there's a "Laughing Larmarama Lovies" group near you ?

[heartandwhole]

Hi Wools,

I hope you don't mind me jumping in on your thread    I was just thinking about this the other day, after listening to a podcast where the subject was mentioned. And I think you are right: feelings and needs are very much linked (thoughts, too). Having a slippery relationship to my own needs, I think this is a very interesting topic.

For example, sometimes when I feel angry I think below that is a need to be heard and/or to be acknowledged. I can think of times when I feel sad and link it back to the need to know that I/my feelings matter. Sometimes when I feel anxious about the future, there is a need to feel secure, safe, maybe even in control?

I also relate very much to your feeling of joy and the need to belong. I wonder if we could trace every feeling and each need back to one or two fundamental ones, like the need for connection, to feel loved, to be enough? Sometimes I follow my feelings down the rabbit hole and ask myself questions until I get to the core issue. For example, if I want/need to feel heard, then I'll ask myself "If you felt heard, what would that give you?" and so on, until I end up at my need to know that I am okay/lovable. In fact, that kind of questioning can take me to a place where I experience wholeness and joy in just being, where all my needs seem to dissolve for a time... .

Thanks for the interesting topic!

heartandwhole

[Woolspinner2000]

Kwamina, you have shared a good example of how you've taken note of your feelings.

There are those moments that I forget, or it seems like just for a moment all memories of past struggles have left my mind and I find myself at peace. Those moments are amazing... .When the memories return, the sense of peacefulness leaves me and is replaced with sadness as reality sets in again.

To me this is a good illustration of those day to day processes we go through. I like the peaceful times the best, and finally having some rest from the negative. But you are learning from both it seems.

Sunfl0wer, you have made a great observation about 'uncomfortable' feelings. Thank you for sharing this!

For myself, using instead, language such as "uncomfortable" then implies an ultimate goal of being able to sit comfortably with sadness, or anger, or such.  (Whereas the use of "negative" makes me hear an implied goal of extricating that feeling or such.)

I think I can understand what you are trying to say, and it is a point well made. Each of us needs to be able to do what we can to healthily identify feelings for this is a part of understanding who we are. From Surviving a Borderline Parent comes the following quote:

Emotions serve several purposes, actually. They help you communicate with yourself and with others, they serve your need to influence and control your environment and the behavior of others, they alert you to danger, they help organize and motivate your for action, and they validate your perceptions of the world around you.

HC, this is something that I learned in T this week and your example supports it well:

But as CBT points out, sometimes our BPD gave us unhelpful intuition that needs correcting.

Last week I had to do something that was difficult for me. I let a part time job go, mostly because I chose to no longer struggle with a controlling boss. As I drove away, my self talk was that I wasn't strong enough to deal with strong controlling women (I just fully discovered 2 weeks ago that my uBPDm was very much NPD too, but that's a topic for another thread). My T pointed out that perhaps it wasn't disappointment I was feeling, but sadness that I was not going to be teaching and interacting with my students anymore. When we learn particular emotions/feelings from our pwBPD, those may need to be challenged to see if they are actually true. The truth pointed to my strength because I was able to face my boss and not back down. That initial 'unhelpful intuition' really did need correction. The projections from my uBPDm have distorted the true feeling. 
I think a Laughing Llama Lovies group sounds delightful, by the way! 

  andwhole, you are always welcome to pop into my threads! Glad you joined in. 

Sometimes I follow my feelings down the rabbit hole and ask myself questions until I get to the core issue. For example, if I want/need to feel heard, then I'll ask myself "If you felt heard, what would that give you?" and so on, until I end up at my need to know that I am okay/lovable. In fact, that kind of questioning can take me to a place where I experience wholeness and joy in just being, where all my needs seem to dissolve for a time... .

This is such a great way to figure out what we are feeling, whether positive or negative or uncomfortable. I'll end with a story that relates. One evening while sitting in a musical concert, listening to my son play in his college orchestra, I saw a dad sitting with his daughter held tightly in his arms, her head laying on his shoulder as she slept. There was a stirring within my soul, a moment of recognition that I knew what that felt like, long, long ago. I struggled to identify this new feeling. I could feel it, but what was it really? It caused gentle warmth to flood over me, and a deep satisfaction of something I had experienced when I was about that age. Finally as I watched them, it began to dawn on me this feeling of being carried by my dad when I was a little girl. I recall hovering between wakefulness and sleep as he picked me up and carried me. He held me tenderly and put me in my bed. This feeling, I finally found it on my feeling wheel the next day. It was contentment and peacefulness. I could feel it and began to identify a new, long dormant feeling, with a need to be loved and secure.

 
Wools

[Kwamina]

Hi Wools

One evening while sitting in a musical concert, listening to my son play in his college orchestra, I saw a dad sitting with his daughter held tightly in his arms, her head laying on his shoulder as she slept. There was a stirring within my soul, a moment of recognition that I knew what that felt like, long, long ago. I struggled to identify this new feeling. I could feel it, but what was it really? It caused gentle warmth to flood over me, and a deep satisfaction of something I had experienced when I was about that age. Finally as I watched them, it began to dawn on me this feeling of being carried by my dad when I was a little girl. I recall hovering between wakefulness and sleep as he picked me up and carried me. He held me tenderly and put me in my bed. This feeling, I finally found it on my feeling wheel the next day. It was contentment and peacefulness. I could feel it and began to identify a new, long dormant feeling, with a need to be loved and secure.

Thanks for sharing this. It is interesting that as I read your story the concept of emotional flashbacks come to mind. I have always thought of emotional flashbacks within the context of something negative, but it could of course also be possible to have positive emotional flashbacks. What you describe here definitely sounds like a positive emotional flashback. Your  experience in the present triggered something very positive within you from your past

[polly87]

Hello Wools and thanks for the topic.

A negative feeling I often have is emptiness. I think it signifies the need for a fulfilling life and the need to belong. The trick is, I believe, to take care of those needs ourselves. The times I looked outside myself for fulfilment, it has always been temporary.

A positive feeling I had today was gratefulness. I find it hard to link this to a need. Maybe it's the need to love. That has always been present in my life. It's among many other things the reason why I have pets 

[catclaw]

Hey

I really like this post. I don't know why but it made me all teary-eyed...

I don't really trust my feelings. I just don't. My feelings often blend over witz my mom's feelings and generally i do trust the signs of my body more than i trust my feelings.
My T describes my body-conciousness as a seismograph (these things that detect earthquakes long before they happen) and i 100% rely on that.

But one positive thing i often feel is useful. I serve a purpose. That, in exchange, makes me unconfortable again, because it states my need for validation so obviously, that i rather go back to listen to my body. Does that make any sense?