THE ILLEGITIMATE POWER OF FEELINGS: field notes for a fellow Avatar

Do you know what most psychologists are busy with these days? They coach people to reconnect with their hidden feelings, to catch and control emotions, to face their true internal aspirations. Step by step they train a person to live a life, in addition to just contemplating about a life. Why is it happening? At some point in life everyone got hurt mentally or emotionally, after which a person usually chose to shut down feelings. Partially or completely. In order to go on easier. As a result of this decision, one learns subconsciously to live in an auto-pilot mode without internal drive, justifying it with safety measures and caution needed. Better safe than sorry - is the common response.

Many cope and get by switching their attention to various excessive addictions, including those commonly available and trendy, such as money, food, sex, alcohol, work or whatever else is there.

Yet, deepest roots of these escapisms are always hidden in a person's childhood, when one was not taught properly to feel, observe, explore without constant restraints and warnings not to get hurt. When a child's internal world is not taken seriously or as sufficient, nobody asks a child 'what did you want to do'? What do you think about it? And how do you feel? Kids are not taught to develop self-confidence through pro-active challenge in order to face further versatility of life. At most, they are given a 'yes' or 'no' options, 'black' or 'white' image and a financial cushion if they are lucky. Again, supposedly to keep the underdeveloped personality safe. Well, it's never too late to try. Right?

Intuition is the foundation of everything. Every choice to act or stay passive begins with it.
But in order to interpret it right one needs to spot it first, and that's when the in-depth feelings and emotions come into play. Am i being too obvious? Who would argue with feelings? But in today's culture we live in, the power of feelings is illegitimate. Adult is very well conditioned to deny the obvious sensations. He learned not to want what he really wants and not to feel what he really feels. He lives in a constant denial. Most episodes that require intuitive guts are swept out as traumatic and uncomfortable. The person remains living a sterile life. So what? Many live this way.

What if I ask you: do you really feel anything now? You will answer, sure, I do. And mostly it would be a lie. Not even to me, but to yourself. How would you know it to be any different, if all of your life you were conditioned a certain way? And safest thing one could do is to mimic commonly agreed behavioral patterns or responses?

However, even with these sad points a story might have a good ending. Little by little people are attempting to find contact with their own body and with their true emotions. By themselves with a help of others or through practices. And children are being taught and treated differently at last. So that nothing or no one dies inside. The more aggressively society is pushing an individual into behavioral pattern in order to obtain a needed degree of predictability that social marketing specialists love so much, the more elusive behavior becomes on a personal level. People feel that they are being conditioned and refuse to be a passive mass, at least those who try to find the true internal clues, checking them up against overall acceptable social values, morals, and principles. Still, I wonder what might have happened with our society that people so easily lost connection to their inner world, willingly devalued everything non-materialistic, lost their sense of uniqueness and trust?