How are you feeling today?

Hi kids! In the first article we talked about the importance of knowing ourselves and we started a journey of self-discovery. Today we will move one step ahead in our journey and talk about "our feelings". What??? Did I hear someone say why feelings ? Well think about it. Think about how feelings are related to knowing ourselves.

Feelings are a spontaneous reaction to any kind of an event or thought. Suppose you get to hear that you have just passed your exams, what kind of a feeling do you have? Exactly--- that of happiness. You think of an old friend who has moved away and this very thought will make you feel sad.

Every day, every hour and every minute of our lives we experience one feeling or the other or many at the same time. Every one has these feelings regardless of whether they are rich or poor, male or female, old or young.

There are various kinds of feelings e.g. that of happiness, sadness, anger, embarrassment, love, hate, and the list goes on.

Feelings help us know ourselves. They help us understand how and why we react to certain situations or issues in a certain way. Once we are aware that a particular situation has made us happy or sad we try to deal with it. In a way they help us take care of ourselves. You might be wondering how feeling sad or scared or angry helping in taking care of ourselves.

Lets take the example of Mona. She is a sweet and shy girl of 12. She loves making friends and buying gifts for them. She makes friends with girls who ask her for all kinds of favors. Mona always helps them out but she at times makes fun of her friends. The jokes are at times very mean and humiliating and make her friends feel uncomfortable.

How does Mona feel when her friends use her all the time?

Is Mona aware of her feelings towards her friends?

Why do you think Mona makes fun of her friends in a mean way?

What can Mona do about it?

Mona probably feels used, unhappy or embarrassed that her friends always ask for favors. She does not seem to be aware of how she feels and as a result her feelings come out in the form of mean jokes, which hurt her friends. She can deal with them by figuring out how she actually feels towards her friends using her and then she can try telling them how she feels instead of being mean.

If we are not aware of our true feelings we will react in an inappropriate way, which can hurt us and those around us like in the case of Mona. If the alarm button does not go off in our heads we would not know that it is time to react.

Coming back to Mona do you think that there is a possibility that she was aware of her feeling? Yes, it is possible that she knows how she feels but finds it difficult to tell her friends and so she ends up covering her real feeling with something that she finds easy. When we start covering our real feelings with another feeling or behavior that means we are using a defense . A defense is like a mask we wear so that we can hide our pain from others and sometimes from our own selves. Sometimes when we use defenses we are aware of them but sometimes we are not aware of them or use them so often that we no longer notice that we are using them.

Defenses can at times be healthy because they protect us in a particular situation but if we start using the same or other defenses in all the situations that we face then they can become unhealthy. E.g. your parents keep fighting all the time, which hurts you a lot. You take care of yourself by listening to the music or talking to your older sister. This helps you in dealing with your pain in a healthy way. Suppose your cousins come over and they start making fun of you or teasing you, you feel hurt .but you keep complaining to your sister or listening to music. Now whenever they come they take you for granted and keep repeating the same thing. Unless you tell them that it makes you angry they might never stop.

The key to using defenses is that we are aware of where and why we use them in our life. We can also try avoiding their use in situations that we do not need to. Knowing our defenses and the reason why we use them would be the first step towards changing them.

Understanding our own feelings also helps us understand other people's feelings and thus we become more sensitive towards them.

Try making feelings your friend by not getting scared of them and knowing them. Next time we will talk about how we can express our feelings in a healthy way.

We would leave you with a small test.

• Try to recall a time when you felt sad, angry, embarrassed and happy.
• Try to identify the feeling that you find difficult to express. What do you do when you can not express it?

You have five minutes for each part. Good luck and do not forget to time it!