In this solo video recorded from her Paris apartment, Mary Schiller expands on her earlier claim that "your feelings don't matter." She argues that Western culture over‑emphasizes the quality and origin of emotions, urging viewers to stop treating feelings as indicators of personal worth or as messages that must be decoded. Schiller recounts her own three‑decade experience of being diagnosed with post‑traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and how, after realizing that feelings are merely the by‑product of fleeting thoughts, her symptoms vanished within weeks. She explains that every feeling is linked to a thought, not to past events, circumstances, or other people, and that the default human setting is one of calm, resilience, and confidence. Her practical advice is to simply sit with any feeling, observe it without judgment, and let it pass, recognizing that emotions are gifts that enable the human experience rather than data points to be fixed or improved.
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Hello, hello, this is Mary Schiller, author and coach, coming to you from inside my apartment in Paris, France today because it is raining outside, so the weather is not quite cooperating with us today. That's all right. I much prefer to do these outside, but I'm happy to be here with you anyway from inside my cozy apartment. I wanted to continue this discussion about your feelings don't matter. So in yesterday's Facebook Live, which I think was November 26th, 2017, kind of lost track of the dates here, this month has gone by so fast, I was talking about the fact, yes, it's a fact, that your feelings don't matter. And what I mean by that is that we here in Western culture spend an awful lot of time focusing on what we have determined is the quality of our feelings. Are we having more positive feelings than negative ones? Are we having more negative feelings than positive ones? And if we're having more negative feelings, we should be striving to have more positive feelings. And we go around in circles like this. Constantly, we are asked to examine where certain feelings have originated. For example, if we have a sense of shame or we have a sense of regret or we have a sense of guilt, we're told that we have to go look at the source of these feelings, delve into our past, and spend all this time in self-analysis about our feelings. And I am here to tell you and to hopefully bust this myth once and for all that none of that, A, is helpful, and B, none of it is even close to being accurate in terms of what's really happening with human beings. So let me kind of back up a second and tell you that I, my whole life, thought that feelings were important. I especially saw them important if they looked like chronic stress or chronic anxiety, chronic fear. Those were the things that I was dealing with myself. I had been diagnosed with having what, what is normally called post-traumatic stress disorder. I'll talk in another video about how I don't think that actually exists, but that's for another video. And so every time I had a feeling that seemed to reflect that so-called condition, I freaked out. I thought, "Oh my God, they are right. I am sick and I am never going to get over this thing." And so that was perpetuated for years and years and years. Hi, Therese. Of my life, looking at myself as this person who had had some stuff happen to me that wasn't very pleasant. And the result of that were these chronic bad feelings, essentially. And that's how my life looked. So I spent hours and hours and hours in therapists' offices and on my own reading books and trying all different kinds of techniques to try to get rid of these bad feelings, these chronic bad feelings. Good to see you, Therese. And I am telling you right now, that was not a pleasant experience in and of itself because I was asked to think about where these feelings supposedly originated, which the professionals told me they were all rooted in these horribly violent acts that were perpetrated on me. So I had to kind of relook at all of that. And, you know, this was not fun. This is just not fun to have to relive things like that in order to supposedly find the source of a feeling. Well, in mid-2014, thankfully, I got straightened out about all of this. And I discovered, much to my great relief, that my feelings were only ever coming from one thing. They weren't from an experience. They weren't coming from a circumstance. They weren't coming from my past. They weren't coming from another person. All those things that we're told make us feel things, it's all wrong. And what's really going on is that every feeling we have is connected to something that's going through our minds. It's connected to some thinking we're having. It's not even important to notice what the thinking is. I don't even advocate going that far. To me, that seems irrelevant as well. It's simply knowing that thought and feeling are like this. They're like two sides of the same coin. And we have a thought, we have a feeling. We have a thought, we have a feeling. And feelings certainly do not indicate the quality of our life or the quality even of the thoughts we have. They are simply things that occur. It's like, you know, we wouldn't look at the ocean and say, well, you know, that wave was a little too high and that one was a little too low. You know, they should have been more even. We never would do something like that. So why do we make these judgments about ourselves? It's because we think that these feelings matter. It's because we think that these feelings are important, that they're indicating something about ourselves, about our lives, about what we're supposed to do, what we're not supposed to do. And it's not true. It's simply not true. Not true. Where we get into trouble is when we start looking at feelings as these transmitters of important information, and that is not what they are designed to do. They are designed for one thing, and that's to give us this amazing human being experience. Feelings allow us to have this experience of being human in this body and connecting with people. And if you start to look at feelings more from this zoomed-out perspective, they start to look like the most incredible gifts that you could ever imagine. Think about the range of human emotion. It's pretty hard to even quantify what that is. And to even begin to assume that I could know what feeling was better or worse than any other along that huge broad spectrum is pretty ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And so when I say your feelings don't matter, what I'm really saying is you do not have to be focused and concerned about every single up and down and blip in your thinking and feeling because that isn't you. You are so much bigger than any thought/feeling that is going through your head at any given time. That's like saying the ocean is contained in the waves, which is obviously not true. The waves are are just the top line of the experience of the ocean, but there's so much richness underneath that that we can be exploring and experiencing once we take our inner focus off of these little up and down blips in our thoughts/feelings. So I would encourage you, if you can, when you have a feeling of anything that you deemed unacceptable, that you don't like, don't do anything about it because it's connected to a thought and thoughts designed to change all the time. That's how we're made. And luckily, the other thing I found out in 2014 was that our default setting as human beings is one of calm, composure, resilience, happiness, courage, Confidence, all those things that we've been told we have to focus on and work on, they're already here. We don't have to do anything about them at all. So sit with the feeling until it passes. Don't worry about having it. It's not important. It's not you. You could never be contained in a feeling or a set of feelings. Not possible. There's nothing wrong with any thought/feeling that you have. Isn't that a relief? What this did for me, just to sum up, was after I saw this for myself, I realized that I hadn't been sick all those years. I didn't have a mental illness. What had been happening was I was having some repetitive thinking that I was looking at and I thought was important to pay attention to. That's all that was going on. As soon as I saw that I didn't have to pay attention to it because it didn't have anything to do with me, it was simply thoughts going through my head, my quote-unquote post-traumatic stress disorder disappeared in about 6 weeks. And that was after having it for 3 decades and trying everything I could think of to try to wrestle it to the ground. But I was wrestling with air. You know, we can't control the thoughts and feelings we have. We can't. So why not simply enjoy the waves and feel this incredible human being experience instead of assuming that our feelings actually matter in some tangible way? There's a lot more going on to life than these wavy feelings we've got. Appreciate them for what they do. Appreciate them for giving you this human being experience. And beyond that, don't give them another thought. All right, I will talk to you again tomorrow, maybe from outside when it has stopped raining. So I'll talk to you again soon. Thank you so much for listening. Bye now.
