19 October 2016 @ 10:18 pm
 
(..)a person is balanced only when what he shows of himself in public matches what he feels in the inside.
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Most people's feelings are so mixed up that they can neither accurately feel nor act from their feelings. They rightly believe that they must control these disruptive inner impulses which might break out and do harm to themselves and others. It takes months of therapy before a patient can truly feel complete feelings and discriminate between acting out disordered feelings and acting from complete feelings. Once a person makes this discrimination he is free to live from his impulses. They provide the truest guide to how he can be himself in the world because complete feelings bring together thoughts and impulses into a single integrated expression.
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Young children do not have answers - they feel. They live from their feelings. What happens to them is that they are forced to exchange feelings for answers. (..) As people grow up, their exchanges with the world become more complicated; they know more about what is happening around them and less about what is happening inside them. They abandon their feeling reality.
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Without being in an integral state [of feeling], a person is insane. There are two states of being: balanced or unbalanced. There is no in-between. There is balanced feeling ir disordered feeling. Because many people have such good answers about themselves and their world, their insanity does not seem too insane. Armed with answers, they remain "adjusted" or "centered" or "well educated" or "sophisticated" or "misunderstood" or whatever their particular answer may be. (..) Once answers begin to be given up, then personal insanity becomes visible. Behind the answer is the insanity of not being in an integral feeling state, of having no meanings which arise from inside sensations, of no expression which matches inside with outside, of having no feeling connection to life.


//Joseph Hart, Richard Corriere, Jerry Binder, 1975, Going Sane: An Introduction to Feeling Therapy