How can you trust your feelings?

How do we know if what we feel for someone is real and how can we know if it will be lasting? In the world of relationships, “feelings”, for want of a better word, are the currency that makes things move up and down, backwards and forwards, inside and out. When we have feelings for someone, we can be overcome with joy, inspiration and excitement as we experience the full force of our feelings of love and attraction.

Yet, before we know it, we can start feeling anxiety and insecurities if these feelings somehow don’t match with the reality we afford them. So what does this mean? Does it mean that our feelings have tricked us? Have we done something to warrant another change of feeling? If feelings can switch so quickly, how can we ever trust how we feel?

These are questions to which there are no “easy” answers. But there are ways we can experience our feelings, which will mean there is less room for huge drops and losses. At the same time, we may need to be willing to forgo the huge dizzy heights that make those rock bottom experiences even more pronounced.

Dealing with Expectations
One of the biggest issues when it comes to having deep feelings for another person is the expectation that arises within these feelings. Obviously when we love someone deeply, and they appear to share this same love and affection, the feelings tend to enhance each other. Yet within this very sensitive state, we can become acutely aware of all the subtle nuances of that person’s feelings. So the moment there is a slight deviation from the good feelings we want, we sense this and often what we sense is magnified out of proportion.

An all to familiar spiral of emotional events can then take place: They pull back - we move forward; they become more distant - we become more anxious; until eventually, all those great feelings that once moved so freely have now been replaced by their coldness and distance and your fear and anxiety.

In the mourning and licking of wounds period afterwards, we can then start to ask ourselves these very basic question: How could something that felt so right and so mutual suddenly disappear in a spiral of fear. Were my feelings all wrong and misplaced? How can someone go from being in love with me to suddenly not seeming to care any more. The answers to these questions come down to the nature of life and the nature of feelings. It’s normal and natural to want to hold on to something that makes us feel good inside. But that desire doesn’t reconcile with the fact that in life, everything changes. We didn’t know this person, we met them, we fell in love. The change from not knowing to knowing them is a change we are happy to accept and embrace. The change then of them leaving our life is still part of the moving and changing flow of life but because it doesn’t favour us, we suddenly stop embracing and starting retreating.

So the first thing to help you in understanding your feelings and how they work is to accept, as simple as it sounds, that everything in life changes. Sometimes it works for us and sometimes it doesn’t. The more we accept this and try to work with this flow of change, rather then resist it, the happier we’ll be and the less energy we will have wasted.

Life doesn't always fit into a box
This same understanding links into a deeper fact that sometimes what we think is right for us, sometimes simply isn’t. Life does work in mysterious ways, and often our minds try to control life to fit into a box that suits us. Relationships are a particular aspect where this occurs frequently.

The fact is that sometimes you have to accept that you don’t know or have the answers.

What you can know is that you gave to someone wholeheartedly, that you loved someone with warmth and sincerity. What happens after that we don’t often have much control over. As you embrace this and trust that all you can do in life and relationships is give your whole self to who ever and what ever you do, then these questions to varying degrees will become irrelevant, as you move into a universe that’s not geared to getting what you want, but a universe that supports what you give. In the end, when it comes to the currency of feelings, you will no doubt end up a rich person.