If you think or truly believe your emotions are facts, you can take yourself and those around you on some pretty crazy and bizarre rides. You will stubbornly believe that because you feel something, it is based on fact, while your friends, spouse, children, or coworkers try to help you see a fact that is different than how you feel.

Feeling a feeling is just that, a momentary event that in no way indicates a fact is within a hundred miles of your experience. As you move forward in your emotional fitness, you will be able to see that feelings are just feelings. Then you will also have less need to strongly interpret them. The more you lose your hold on a meaning or interpretation of an emotion, the healthier you will be for yourself and those around you.

Feelings are not truth. Some people go beyond the belief that their feelings are facts to a belief that their feelings are expressions of truth. For me, truth is external, never changing, while by definition, feelings are temporal and ever changing. Just today, you have probably had many different feelings. Some of you had different feelings about the same event or person as you collected more information or saw the situation through a wider lens.

When a person believes feelings are truth, he or she is set up to be regularly misunderstood, avoided, and can become demanding, controlling, and easily offended by anyone who doesn’t agree with his or her emotional reality.