Your feelings don't matter (again). I'll keep trying to get this message across until I die ...
Mary Schiller argues that Western culture lies to us about feelings, telling us they're problems to fix. She spent decades chasing therapies and self-help for anxiety and PTSD, only to realize emotions aren't something we control. Instead, she says, we should accept all feelings as normal and natural.
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Hello, hello, this is Mary Schiller, author and coach of MarySchiller.com, coming to you today as always from Paris, France. It was actually a relatively good day here weather-wise, no rain, no real wind, although it was chilly, it was probably around 40 or so when I was out a little bit ago. And I decided to jump on here right now because I noticed a similarity in an experience I had while I was out and to one that I've been having lately with you guys. So when I was out, I was at a furniture store and the nice gentleman there spoke a little English but not very much. And so I was having trouble explaining something in French that was a little more complicated than my vocabulary would allow. And so I was having to find a bunch of different words and try to put something together in a sentence that made sense to him. And eventually we came to a meeting of the minds and he understood what I was trying to convey and he showed me something that might work and etc., gave me the prices and things like that. So eventually there was a little bit of a breakthrough there. Well, I have found myself in a similar struggle With a message that I'm trying to get across, and then I have talked about in a few of these videos now, that your feelings don't matter, and that essentially all of us have been told a lie about the importance of our feelings. And not just the importance of our feelings, but we've also been lied to not because anyone's intended to do that, but because they've been mistaken about something. We've also been lied to whenever someone has said to us that we have a choice about how we feel or we have a choice about how we think. And all of that messaging that we've received most of our lives, at least in Western culture, has led us down a path that has been hugely unhelpful. And sometimes I feel like I am standing in the middle of a very crowded space trying to make my voice heard in a way that's different to try to break through this, what I consider to be unhelpful noise. For example, there's a book that's just come out recently, I won't name the author or the title, that's all about one particular feeling. And I thought to myself, oh my goodness, you know, why is this necessary to spend an entire book talking about one feeling? I just don't understand. We don't have to do anything. I'm going to say this in as clear a way as I can right now. We don't have to do anything about our feelings. They are all normal. They are all perfect the way they are. Even the ones that are uncomfortable are also perfect. There is nothing wrong with them. We have been given this incredible gift of being human and having this full range of emotional experiences, and yet we have been conditioned to believe that certain of those experiences are destructive, bad, negative, something that we're supposed to do something about, that we have to worry about, and it's just not true. It's just not true. And I'm speaking to you from my heart, and as you can tell, with some level of passion, because I spent, and I'm gonna get emotional here, I spent my whole life trying to stop a certain set of feelings from happening because I was told they were a problem. I was told that I had an incurable mental illness that was basically making itself known through all of the stress that I experienced over and over and over again. All of the kind of reactive way that I was interacting with the world, you know, through fear and through anxiety and things like that. And, you know, I was essentially told that my entire experience of life was sick and that I needed to try to do something about that. So that's what I did. I went to professional after professional after professional. I bought every self-help book there was. I read them all. I tried everything. And guess what? I still had stressful feelings and anxious feelings, and I had such pressure to try to fix myself. That I really was not very functional. On the surface, I looked okay. You know, I seem to have certain things together. I had a reasonable job and, you know, I had gotten remarried and all these kind of surface things. But inside, I was just roiling all the time. Never rested. Never felt a moment's peace, literally. Never felt a moment's peace. I've told this story before, but I'll repeat it, that I remember very, very clearly in late 2013, I went on my lunch break to Central Park, which was near the office where I was working, and I just cried. I wanted more than anything to have a feeling of peace just once before I died. I remember saying to myself, if I could just feel 1 minute of peace before I died, then my life would be okay. That's how much emphasis was being placed on my feeling state. And I see this over and over and over again in other people, that they have a sense of sadness or they have a sense of— self-criticism, or they hear a lot of thinking in their minds that's fearful and all these different things. And the, as we call it in the Three Principles world, the outside-in approach keeps saying you have to do something about that. You have to stop judging yourself. You have to think more positively. You have to bolster your confidence. You have to, it goes on and on and on. You know, I suppose if I went to look at the self-help section of a bookstore or Amazon, I could probably find a book about every emotion that we deem as negative, maybe multiple versions of books like that. And the message that I am trying to convey, maybe very ineloquently today, I don't know, I just feel so passionate about this, is that your feelings are not a problem. In fact, they are a gift. They have been given to you as a human being to experience everything that there is in this life to experience. And if you can see the connection between thought and feeling, that your feelings come from whatever thoughts are going through your mind, nothing from out there, you can still find yourself in situations sort of a circle of going, well, I want a better feeling, so I need to create better thinking, right? No. The only thing you need, I'm gonna say this slowly, the only thing that you need at all is to see that there is something beyond your thinking. And everyone has an intuitive sense of that, whether they ever explicitly say that or not. Everyone has the experience of knowing, because this is truth we're talking about with a capital T, of knowing that there is more going on here than whatever feelings you've got and whatever thoughts you have. I have spoken to people who have been in very depressed thinking who still have sparks of love and enjoyment of life. I can look back at all of those years when I was supposedly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, disorder, and I can see plenty of times where I was experiencing my true self, when I was experiencing something beyond those troubled thoughts that I was having and putting so much focus on. This is something that we simply are. And so If I could close out this message today, it would be with this commentary, which is if you are having feelings that you're deeming as negative or problematic, I would love for you to kind of turn your inner gaze about a half a degree in a new direction and just recognize the fact that every single thing you feel Everything is normal. It's how we're designed. You know, I don't look at the plants in my flower boxes and say, oh, well, they shouldn't have a bloom there. It should be on the right side, not the left. I mean, that's just silly, right? I mean, I would never do that. So for us to say we should have one thought instead of another or we should have one feeling instead of another is the same thing. Human beings are designed to have thoughts/feelings across the entire spectrum. That means we can embrace them all. We can embrace them all and see that that is not the sum total of our experience, that we are much, much larger than these thoughts and feelings we have in this human form, but that that is a gift that we have been given, not something to try to wrestle with because we can't. Can't control the thoughts that come through. Can't control the feelings we have. Not possible. Hey, sure, Helen. Not possible to do that, so you are allowed to stop. Stop trying to control what you feel and what you think because you can't. Instead, open your arms up wide to the whole of your experience here and try as best you can to embrace the fact that you are a human with a normal, lovely human experience going on. So I hope this has been helpful to you today. I don't know what got me so fired up, but I think it was because I've had a few conversations these past couple of weeks where I've seen people struggling in this way and I want that struggle to stop. I want that struggle to stop. And the way to do that is recognizing that everything is okay. Everything you feel is okay. What if that were actually true? And bonus, it is true. So find me online at maryschiller.com. Send me an email, mary@maryschiller.com if you'd like to get in touch with me. I would love to hear from you. And post a comment, question here, wherever you're watching this video. Thanks so much for watching today. Bye.
