Straight Talk about Addiction by Terence T. Gorski

Author:Terence T. Gorski [Terence T. Gorski]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: -
Published: 2016-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

9-3. Feeling Management Skills

Now we are going to look at how to develop or improve our Feeling Management Skills. Many recovering people don’t have the basic skills that they need to manage feelings and emotions. Some of us start out in recovery by letting our feeling manage us instead of us managing our feelings. I have known newly sober people who were absolutely convinced that certain feelings like anger and depression were just impossible to manage. As you’ll see as we go along – this is an absolutely wrong technique. The truth is that we have never learned how to manage our feelings. Most addicts don’t need to learn because we have an automatic feeling management tool that is quick and effective. This tool is called our drug of choice. If just taking a drinking or popping a pill makes us feel the way we ant t feel, why should we invest the time and energy in learning the psychological and social skills needed to manage our feelings in a sober and responsible way.

Effective feeling management is a critical to for living a good life. To have a good life, we must be able to communicate know what we are feeling, label those feelings accurately, and communicate them appropriately to others. We must also be able to both sense and listen to the feelings of others and respond appropriately.

Healthy people are able to express feelings of that are both pleasant and unpleasant when it is appropriate to do so. They are also able to control their impulse to express their feelings in situations where to do so would be harmful or dangerous to themselves or others.

People are most free and spontaneous in their emotional expression with people they know well, are close to and have a trusting relationship. These are the people celebrate with when things go well and mourn with when things of value are lost. At times all people feel joyful, caring or fulfilled. At other times all people feel sorrowful, angry or frustrated. No one feels good all of the time.

When you know how to handle your feelings, you can talk about your feelings and emotions with other people in a way that enhances your relationships, helps you to solve problems, and ultimately leads yo9u to higher levels of personal growth and maturity. You also know how to hear, understand, and affirm the feelings and emotions that are people are experiencing. This allows us to express all of our emotions without fear of shame, guilt, or fear of rejection. This is what it means to be in a close and trusting relationship.

When we mismanage our feelings, it affects us and the people around us. Most of us mismanage our feelings from time to time; this is normal and natural because we are all fallible human beings. The problem gets serious when we constantly mismanage our feelings. This can drive damage our relationships, drive emotionally healthy people away us, and attract other people who are not very good at recognizing and managing their feelings.

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