How good are you at Feeling Good?

Have you ever considered how good you are at feeling good? It might sound strange at first, but it is something that we can improve at.  How do you take positive compliments or feedback? Do you let it in? Do you really let them land and hang out with the feelings that comes with them. When something feels good to you can you stay in that experience for more than say 30 seconds?  Three of four years ago I couldn’t stay in the good feelings I had when I accomplished something or someone commended me for something for more than 3-4 seconds maximum. I would deflect, change the subject, or felt I must say something equally kind or uplifting in return.

I’m not suggesting that we always try to focus on the positive, with positive thinking and ignore all the negative or hard feelings. When we find peace with those hard feelings it actually makes more psychological room for us to stay in the positive experiences too.  Staying with positive experiences and really embodying them, is something that we can practice and get better at. As we stay in those good feelings, we are actually rewiring the neural pathways in our brains for these positive experiences to become a more traveled and comfortable path for our systems to take.

Check out this 10 minute Experience to see how good you are at “Feeling Good”

Feeling Good: The goal of Modern Society

It almost feels like our current western society promises us to feel good all the time. We are surrounded by advertisements that relentlessly sell us feeling good, social media is filled with people who seem to live in continuous bliss.  We find ourselves feeling we just can’t compare, we wonder what is wrong with us, why are we falling short?  If we just worked harder, were more perfect, we would have this perfect life and feel good all the time, right?   Consider your own struggles, the reality of your life, how many people have a good and clear understanding of all that you are faced with? I don’t suggest you share all your challenges with the world, I only mean to point out we never really know what is going on for other people.  It’s actually very normal to struggle with one or more major areas of our lives at any point in time.  Until we accept that fact, things are very unlikely to change for us.

Feeling is Feeling – For Good or Bad

What is the truth about feeling good, to being happy?  Is it possible or just a myth?  To feel good all the time is a myth unless you are some enlightened being (enlightened beings go ahead and stop reading here). For the rest of us feeling good is certainly something we can have more of.  A hard truth about feeling good is that we need to be good at feeling, for it to happen. We must be willing and able to feel and experience both good and the bad feelings. When we push down and lock away the bad feelings, we lock away our ability to experience the good feelings.   When we improve at feeling, feeling the hard stuff gets easier over time, the bad feelings lose intensity, and at the same time we get better at feeling the good feelings, and get better at staying with them. For many it’s really hard to stay with the experience of feeling good. How often have you noticed; when someone says something kind and supportive, you take it in for a second or two; then something happens and you want to change the subject or shift the focus. The experience of feeling good becomes too much and our defenses kick in and we do something so we can avoid feeling too much. 

What is feeling good?

 While I imagine there are as many ways to describe feeling good as there are people in the world there seem to be certain emotions and states of being that most people relate to feeling good. Emotions like being happy, content, joyful, optimistic and proud often are at the top of the list.

For myself and in my work, I have found that “feeling good” is more a state of being than solely one or two emotions. It might include some of the positive emotions but it also includes sensations or a feeling in the body. A relaxedness in the mind and thoughts. Internal Family systems have come up with the 8 C’s of Self energy they are; confident, calm, curious, compassionate, courageous, clarity, creativity and Connectedness. It might be my bias as someone who works with IFS, but for me and my clients these 8 C’s capture much of the experience of feeling good.

 For many “feeling good” is a completely new experience that actually takes practice to be able to sustain. In our present world that is busy, overwhelming and prides itself on how much a person can produce, it can be foreign for someone to know what feeling good actually is. Feeling good is also the absence of feeling certain things too, it might be easier to relate to these.  When in our core state or accessing self-energy, we might find ourselves not experiencing constriction, fear, overwhelm, anxiety, uncertainty, anger, blame and doubt. We may notice less shyness, confusion and judgment. Feeling good is our naturally state even if we haven’t felt it for a long time.

Feeling Good can feel and be Dangerous 

We might find we sabotage ourselves each time we get to a good place in our lives. It’s like we can’t trust ourselves with this experience of feeling good. It might come from a place of not feeling worthy of feeling good, a history of negative things happening following feeling good, or a learned rejection or avoidance of feeling good from family or our own experiences. What happens is our nervous systems and minds have learned that feeling good isn’t safe, that it isn’t going to last.  There are many reasons that we experience this lack of safety with feeling good. If the loved ones who we looked to for safety and guidance treated us poorly, demeaned us, or responded to our joy with contempt our internal wiring may have gotten mixed up. Instinctively we know these people are meant to be safe for us, but what we experienced was the opposite of safety.   Our natural instinct of trusting our caregiver was in direct conflict with our actual experience. We learn to bury our feelings and create coping mechanisms (defences) to maintain those core relationships at any cost.  As a child you might have learned to tone down your joy and feeling good, to keep everyone else happy. Your nervous system never learned that feeling good could be safe.  Chances are our caregivers never learned how to feel safe and developed these negative behaviors as their own coping mechanism. 

This are how patterns continue through families and communities. This lack of trust with “feeling good” might come through our family systems through phrases or mindsets like “feeling good never lasts”, “don’t let yourself feel good because something bad will happen”, or a family rule to never except positive attention. Your family may view feeling good or accepting positive feedback as a weakness or indulgence. They may have learned it from their families and never thought to question it. Many families developed these needed defences because they lived through some type of oppression, feeling good was dangerous as it might bring unwanted attention to the family. However, we were shamed, taught to distrust, or question feeling good we can reteach ourselves.  We can rewire our brains to trust and even move towards feeling good more often.  As we rewire our brains towards safety and joy, we calm our nervous systems, lower our defenses, relax in our bodies and find ourselves less and less in the patterns of negative thinking. Just like we can build negative momentum by re-enforcing lack of safety and circular negative thinking we can create positive momentum towards happiness, contentment and embracing good feelings.  

Feeling good as an Aim

Something important I want to point on here is that I don’t want to give the idea that we should want to feel good all the time. Wanting to feel good all the time can actually be a detrimental aim if it encourages us to avoid feeling what is present for us.  As we build our ability and reteach ourselves to feel again, we find we can allow the bad to flow through us without being overwhelmed by it; at the same time we are able to stay with the positive and good feelings. I definitely encourage staying with experiences of feeling good when they happen. See if you can stay present with the sensations you experience when someone says something kind or supportive. See if you can notice what it’s like for you to be in that experience. As a counselling student I often heard something to the effect of “It’s not so much about feeling good; as it is it about getting good at feeling”. We were being taught this important core understanding that we shouldn’t try to feel good all the time. We should encourage our clients to feel what is present when its good go into that experience fully and when it’s not a good feeling don’t force it.For many of us truly allowing ourselves to be in and have the experience of feeling good is as foreign and hard as allowing the bad experiences.   Learning how to stay in the good experiences is as important to healing, growth and having a fulfilling life as learning to be with ourselves in hard times.

Feeling good after coming through feeling bad

While it’s not the only way that a person can learn to improve at feeling good; one way for many is the afterglow experience or “core state” that we can find ourselves in after transforming hard or negative emotional memories through some kind of therapeutic process. The calm expansiveness that follows the completion of these transformational experiences is what Danny Young describes as the “core state” in his article on “Self-transcendence as an Aspect of Core State”. When we can have a new or different experience through highly emotional or traumatic memories we can often come to this new (for many people) place of feeling good and knowing that we are well resourced for future challenges.  In AEDP this expansive place of feeling good is called the “core state” and in IFS this is referred to as accessing “Self” energy. While it isn’t a guarantee, often after we have worked through or processed a past experience in a new way, with safety (either through our selves or a trusted other), with a new perspective (often called context) and to completion it opens up more of our internal resources, care for ourselves and for others.  What happens when we don’t have the safety to experience the feelings to completion, is we interrupt the process of transformation which doesn’t allow it to progress to the “core state.  I certainly do not recommend you push or force yourself through feeling to completion as some of the keys to the transformational process of moving through negative sensations and emotions are safety, and new context,  which can be very difficult to cultivate for ourselves when we are highly emotional.

Practicing Feeling Good – Our inner Drive to Evolve

We all have an inner drive to evolve, to go beyond where we are now, to fulfill our purpose and flourish in the world.  AEDP has a great term for this innate drive “transformance”.  AEDP also states that “transformance reflects positive neuroplasticity in action, that is, the brains capacity to change for the better”.  The capacity to rewire or create new neural pathways of positive experience or that empowering core state.AEDP- Transformance – “innate motivational drive to heal, self-right and flourish”  As mentioned, before it’s not something to be forced in our daily lives, or in therapy sessions,   but when these flashes of positivity occur naturally, we can slow down and take our time with them. As we spend time with them, we gain new realizations about them, new experiences of them in our bodies, and rewire positive neural pathways in our brains. As a therapist when I see these positive feelings, these curious or expansive states present, I invite and encourage exploration of the experience.  I encourage clients to take notice of the experience of having these new experiences. We go into the Meta experience or the experience of having a new experience. We might spend 20 or more minutes staying present and sharing this expansive and connective experience together.  

We are broadening the experience of being in this “core state” through the client’s descriptions of what it’s like to “feel good”. One of the key differences here is that it’s not a mental description of what we imagine or think it might be like, but it’s from within the experience itself.  The exploration of it in the moment, anchors it into our brain (new neural pathways) and makes it safer and familiar to come back to again and again in the future.  I remember a therapist guiding me into experiencing a new good feeling for around 20-30 minutes once, this completely changed my life for the better.

Now we can talk about all of this for days on end, but we will never truly know and appreciate it without actually experiencing it for ourselves.  You may have experienced this before as an epiphany or “ah ha” moment when everything changed for the better. That is the power of feeling good, and the transformational opportunities it makes possible to us.

Notes and Credit:

AEDP or Advanced Experiential Dynamic Psychology has been developed and founded by Diana Fosha, Phd – Some of the material for this article is taken from “Undoing Aloneness & the Transformation of Suffering Into Flourishing: AEDP 2.0” by Diana Fosha

IFS or Internal Family Systems was developed by Dr Richard Schwartz now through his IFS Institute.