The Counselling Service is here to help you address personal or emotional problems that get in the way of having a good experience in life. To a large extent, you are what you feel. Important feelings include happiness, interest, surprise, fear, sadness, anger and disgust or contempt. Dictionary definitions of feelings tend to use words like ‘physical sensation’, ‘emotions’ and ‘awareness’. All th
ree of these words illustrate a dimension of feelings. Feelings as physical sensations or as physical reactions represent people’s underlying animal nature. People are animals first, persons second. As such they need to learn to value and live with their underlying animal nature. The word emotions implies movement. Feelings are processes. People are subject to a continuous flow of biological experiencing. Awareness
implies that people can be conscious of their feelings. However, at varying levels and in different ways, they may also be out of touch with them. Physical reactions both represent and accompany feelings and, in a sense, are indistinguishable. For example, bodily changes associated with anxiety can include galvanic skin response: detectable electrical changes taking
place in the skin, raised blood pressure, a pounding heart and a rapid pulse, shallow and rapid breathing, muscular tension, drying of the mouth, stomach problems such as ulcers, speech difficulties such as stammering, sleep difficulties and sexual problems such as complete or partial loss of desire. Other physical reactions include a slowing down of body movements when depressed and dilated eye pupils in moments of anger or sexual attraction. Sometimes people react to their physical reactions. For example, in anxiety and panic attacks, they may first feel tense and anxious and then become even more tense and anxious because of this initial feeling. Feelings and physical reactions are central to the helping process. You require the capacity to experience and understand both your own and your clients’ feelings. However, just because feelings represent people’s animal
nature, this does not mean that you and your clients cannot act on them. In helping, three somewhat overlapping areas where feelings and accompanying physical reactions are important are: experiencing feelings, expressing feelings and managing feelings. In each of these three areas you can work
with clients’ communications/actions and thoughts and mental processes to influence how they feel and physically react.
