H.D. Johns, Ph.D.

Note: One of the primary reasons we need emotional support is to deal with our feelings.  How we manage feelings is central to our overall emotional health as well as our emotional healing process. And learning to manage feelings is a primary emotional intelligence (EQ) skill.

Here are some tasty nuggets for you - simmered slowly over some thirty-five years of clinical experience: observations made by clinical psychologist and Transactional Analysis therapist H.D. Johns.

Remember, these are the kinds of messages we need to be telling ourselves and each other about our very human feelings - and we all have feelings!

I suggest you read this over to get familiar with it; then revisit it often to review and remind you of some healthy messages about feeling!

Enjoy! Pam

THINGS I THINK I KNOW ABOUT FEELING

by H.D. Johns, Ph.D.

Excerpted from From Fear to Fury,

Copyright © H.D. Johns, PhD 1990

All Rights Reserved, Used by Permission

Note: Dr. Johns is currently Director of the Greater Washington Institute for Transactional Analysis. A practicing psychotherapist for 35 years, he has focused on feeling (affect) and how it affects our lives. The following are things he has come to believe about feeling:

1. Everybody feels.

2. Some people are not in touch with their own feelings.

3. The feelings in two or more individuals differ in degree and not in kind.

4. Every feeling has its somatic counterpart.

5. Feeling does not dissipate energy. The automatic repression of feeling dissipates energy.

 6. Denying a feeling does not get rid of it.

7. Identifying and accepting a feeling does not put it out of control.

8. Identifying and accepting a destructive feeling (e.g., fear) tends to dilute it.

9. Identifying and accepting a positive (e.g., sexual) feeling tends to strengthen it.

10. Identifying and accepting a feeling brings it under cognitive control.

11. Some feelings (e.g. guilt, resentment, defiance, jealousy and concern) are feeling structures, i.e., they are intellectualized vehicle and screens, for fear.

12. Feeling structures can be used to maintain unwanted familiar behavior patterns. (Rackets)

13. All feelings are mixed feelings; never pure.

 14. Trauma can cause a change of feeling.

 15. It is easier to change feeling by changing behavior than to change behavior by changing feeling.

16. Suppression of negative feelings tends to suppress positive feeling.

      17. Institutions tend to be afraid of and suppress
  feelings.

18. Feelings tend to move in repetitive, sequential patterns.

19. Repetitive, automatic behavior patterns are connected with old feelings.

20. Redeciding is a process of accepting an old feeling pattern without automatically accepting the old behavior pattern that
went with it.

21. In human relationships, the communication of feeling is more
important than the communication of logic.

22. Logic does not answer feeling.

23. It's OK to feel anything you feel. (This is the beginning step in getting well from depressive reactions, and compulsive
reactions.)

24. It's OK to think while you are feeling.

25. It's OK to do while you are thinking and feeling.

26. It's OK to enjoy while you are doing, thinking and feeling.

27. It's OK to relax while you are enjoying, doing,thinking and feeling.

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