missmaven | Succinct excerpt about the space between feelings and actions (Reply)

Feelings are never right or wrong. They just are. You get to feel what you feel.

Now, when we take actions based on our feelings, whatever they are, we need to be accountable for those. So if we cut someone out of our life, angrily explode and destroy property, tell someone off, or whatever it is we decide to do, we are on the hook for whatever outcome those actions cause.

Sometimes our feelings will push us in ways that cause us to act unproductively or in a way that actually backfires, making it harder to achieve what we actually want.

So just because feelings aren’t wrong doesn’t mean that those emotions can’t push us to do things that have really undesirable outcomes. And when that happens, we have to live with them.

But the feelings themselves aren’t wrong. They just are.

It’s incredibly difficult, verging on impossible, to make yourself feel a way you don’t feel. But actions are much easier to control. As Pearl Buck famously said, “You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”

-- 6 Things Jealousy Doesn’t Mean, PolyLand