What Generates Feelings?

Besides the fact that we now carry feelings induced in us during childhood, the fact that our emotions are generated from our thoughts also influences our damaged and exaggerated feeling reality.
This process of generating feelings from the way we interpret the events around us automatically leads to trouble for codependents, because the experience of being abused damages our thinking. The process of assigning meaning to the events in our lives is skewed and the conclusions we draw are often inaccurate - but we don't know it. We believe our thinking is fine. But in fact our emotional responses to other people's actions toward us often seem bizarre to them.

In the process of generating feelings, we first bring some data into our innter world with one of our five senses... We draw conclusions, and interpretations and give meaning to what we heard, saw, tasted, smelled, or felt.

Out of this thinking comes our emotions about our thoughts. As a result of our emotions, we choose a behavior...

We cannot change our emotions. What we feel is what we feel. In fact it is dysfunctional to try not to be angry or not to be afraid when that is what we feel. To deal with an emotion we must acknowledge that we feel it and learn to express it appropriately. But we can examine the thinking we are doing that leads to the emotion.

We can often choose a different behavior after we've had our feelings. Examining the thinking is far more effective in reducing the intensity of emotions we feel than changing our behavior... We must also try to express our emptions with healthy, nonabusive behaviors no matter what is triggering them.

What I seldom realize as a codependent is that because of my childhood abuse I tend to put a negative interpretation on incoming data when a positive interpretation might be far more accurate.

I "transform" incoming data as it goes through the grid of my abused past. I take the perception into my mind and give it meaning very different from what a functional person would give it. For example, when someone gives me a genuine complement, because of my past abuse I can transform it into a subtle insult by labeling the remark as sarcasm. To make matters worse, I have no idea that I just did that; I think my brain is working perfectly well. I think it was sarcasm until the evidence is overwhelming that it was not.

Add to the fact that out of this feeling reality based on skewed thinking we then act, it's easy to see how we codependents are automatically set up for trouble and also don't understand why we're in trouble. We think we're acting quite normally. Consequently a relationship we have with a more functional person can be chaotic for that person as well as for us. On top of it all, we think they are acting strangely, being unreasonable or hypercritical.