Kinds of feelings

When successfully working through feelings of deficiency, we arrive at base qualities of our psyche.

Base capacities

The body and psyche have all kinds of base capacities, that help you function. They make it possible to act, think and feel.

There's a capacity for decision making, for plans, for skills, there's love, understanding, nurturing. For relating and prioritizing. And lots more. These qualities are instinctual, or intrinsic, or genetically determined, so you will. They are there without us needing to learn them, but we can develop them.

Deficiencies

In childhood, while our nervous systems aren't developed completely, the base capacities don't function well yet. Children run into all kinds of difficulties, because they cannot bear difficult feelings, or handle various situations. These are simply beyond their capabilities, also because of their lack of life experience. But those immature ways of dealing with situations do get in our Implicit Memories. They get to be emotional reactions and patterns of behavior. They still drive us when we are adults, while we haven't worked through them.

Quite a large part of the feelings from that are about our base capacities not being enough for a situation. We may feel a lack of skill, instead of the skillfulness of the mature base capacity. Pessimism that blocks the capacity for making plans. Dissatisfaction blocking the capacity for getting our needs met. Feeling we don't understand, instead of a capacity for understanding. Feeling we can't bear something, which a mature sense of enduring would not have a problem with.

Those childhood feelings blocking base capacities are called "deficiencies." In order to mature, it is especially important to work through those deficiencies, even though working through anything, no matter what, is beneficial.

Emotions

Emotions are instinctual, just like the base capacities. Those feelings like anger, fear, disgust, and joy are related to particular base capacities, and can be worked through. Especially the negative ones always have a deficiency underneath them.

Feeling base capacities

After successfully working through the deficiency of a base capacity, that base capacity will come up.

You can feel the base capacity as a feeling tone that permeates your entire psyche. You can recognize the capacity from that particular feeling tone. Along with the feeling tone there is the functioning of the base capacity, that is somewhat harder to notice, because you may not actually be using the capacity at the moment you work through feelings.

Base capacities can also be elicited by acupressure (or acupuncture) and various energy techniques, like chakra meditations. The use of such techniques can also be a solution to overcoming the problems of the unconscious, while you haven't yet worked through the issues.

Sensations

Next to the kinds of feelings described before, there are also sensations. Sensations are feelings of the body like pain, pressure, temperature, and such. Just like the information from other senses, like the eyes and nose, they are just that, information.

While the information from the senses is just there, how you experience that is something that can be worked through. When you feel cold, for example, that can feel more or less threatening to you. How threatening that feels, can be worked through. And also how you deal with that threat. But the coldness is just there.

Some feelings can seem like sensations, being information, when they not really are. When you feel bones in your body, for example, it may seem that there is just a sensation of there being bones. But in actuality, you may be feeling a dullness or dryness of the bones, that just appears like being a mass there. And that can be worked through.

Not feeling

The biggest obstacle to working through feelings, is not feeling feelings.

As explained in the article about defensiveness, we can lose touch with our feelings when they are threatening to us in some way, and we feel we need to protect ourselves from them.

Another reason to not feel is that we simply don't care. When we don't have a reason for feeling particular things, why bother? Only when you feel a need for feeling things, and unpleasant things especially, will you allow them in your consciousness, or be willing to go look for them.

Sometimes you may not be aware that something you notice in yourself is actually a feeling, that can be worked through. You could, for example, notice that you are holding on to something for a long time, but not realize that there is actually a feeling of "holding on for a long time," that can be worked through to arrive at a feeling of freshness, of being flexible with what you do.