The Seven Basic Feelings AFRAID

The seven basic feelings are;

Mad

Sad

Glad

Hurt

Afraid

Shame

Hope

Whenever I state these, people always ask me, well, what about love?  I answer that love is the core of everything.  It is called many things, but feeling connected to others and ourselves is our basic humanness.  The other seven are ancillary and help us negotiate the basic problems of love. 

Love is the most basic need of all.  To feel welcomed, valued, honored and accepted (to name a few) is what every one of us hopes to achieve.

Each feeling has its accompanying need and consequence if not met.

So I am going to take each feeling and expand on it a bit in hopes that people can begin to articulate what they are feeling a little better.  That helps a lot in relationships

It always amuses me that if you ask a man what he feels, he will tell you what he thinks and obversely, if you ask a woman what she thinks, she will likely tell you what she feels.  The integrating of thinking and feelings creates the outcomes we all desire.  Putting who you are back on what you do.

The fifth feeling of the basic feelings is AFRAID.  There are many words for afraid, like terror, horror, nervous, anxious, and panic to name a few.  There are many reasons to be afraid.  The fight-flight reaction has been well documented and studied forever.  There are two kinds of fear, physical and emotional, they both feel pretty much the same, but physical is much easier to identify, emotional, not so much.  The big bug-a-boo seems to be the fear of “something”.  Fear of harm or fear of loss drive much of our behavior, our literature, our music and our conversations. 

Fear, of course needs safety, and if we feel safe we become confident, certain and develop a sense of competence. If that need is not met, we become mistrustful, suspicious or even paranoid. So how does a person find that magical sense of safety, because the world is not a safe place, even with magical  “safe spaces”.

It takes some hard personal work to clear the old expectations out and replace them with current truth.  So the best we can do in the world is to know in ones gut, that whatever happens I can handle it.  Just think of all you have survived and somehow keep going, You have developed skills and strangles and tactics to  negotiate the world.  You can count on that in yourself.  If you have trouble believing that, just keep working on yourself.