What am I feeling? Emotions can be confusing. One moment we're happy, content, and hopeful, and the next we're anxious, hurt, and overwhelmed. But we don't have to live at the mercy of our emotions. In True Feelings, a mother-daughter team clears away common misconceptions and mixed messages about our feelings to offer us a biblical perspective on emotions— helping us understand how they work, why we feel what we feel, and how to develop good emotional habits. We will see that we don't have to ignore, excuse, or follow our feelings, but can instead learn to honor God with our emotions as an integral part of who he made us to be.

We live our lives through our emotions, writes Robert Solomon, and it is our emotions that give our lives meaning. What interests or fascinates us, who we love, what angers us, what moves us, what bores us--all of this defines us, gives us character, constitutes who we are. In True to Our Feelings, Solomon illuminates the rich life of the emotions--why we don't really understand them, what they really are, and how they make us human and give meaning to life. Emotions have recently become a highly fashionable area of research in the sciences, with brain imaging uncovering valuable clues as to how we experience our feelings. But while Solomon provides a guide to this cutting-edge research, as well as to what others--philosophers and psychologists--have said on the subject, he also emphasizes the personal and ethical character of our emotions. He shows that emotions are not something that happen to us, nor are they irrational in the literal sense--rather, they are judgements we make about the world, and they are strategies for living in it. Fear, anger, love, guilt, jealousy, compassion--they are all essential to our values, to living happily, healthily, and well. Solomon highlights some of the dramatic ways that emotions fit into our ethics and our sense of the good life, how we can make our emotional lives more coherent with our values and be more "true to our feelings" and cultivate emotional integrity. The story of our lives is the story of our passions. We fall in love, we are gripped by scientific curiosity and religious fervor, we fear death and grieve for others, we humble ourselves in envy, jealousy, and resentment. In this remarkable book, Robert Solomon shares his fascination with the emotions and illuminates our passions in an exciting new way.

True Emotions discusses several key problems in emotion research. The question about the true nature of emotions focuses on the role of cognition in human emotions at different levels of analysis: functional role, types of processes and representations, and neural implementation. Truth to the self, or authenticity, has two meanings, psychological and normative, where the latter is analyzed as coherence between the evaluative content of an emotion and the subject’s internally justified beliefs and values. Truth to the world is argued to be a matter of correct evaluative representation of the emotional object on the one hand, and the existence of the object, or the actuality or accurate probability of the represented situation on the other hand. Finally, authenticity and truth are applied to analyses of the authenticity of occupational emotions and the constitution of sentimental values, respectively. Recommended reading for philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and gender researchers.

There is no place, it seems, that feelings do not run high about feelings. Western civilization is still caught between adoration of the emotions as sublime and denigration of them as merely animal. Can we trust our feelings? Should we suppress them or should we indulge them? In what part of our persons do feelings occur? Contemporary Christianity is no less vexed about emotions. The rise of the charismatic movement in the late twentieth century, with its emphasis on experiential Christianity, has led to an equally strong reaction of suspicion against talk of the emotions as significant for the Christian life. Though these questions have an everyday, practical importance, they also point to profound theological questions about the nature of the triune God and the ascription of emotions to him in the Bible. Does God himself have feelings? This stimulating volume, based on the 2011 Moore College School of Theology, offers perspectives on emotions. Topics include a cultural overview, theological anthropology, the question of divine passions, the emotional life of Jesus, the Spiritâe(tm)s work in perfecting emotions, preaching the Gospels for divine effects, and the place of the emotions in corporate worship including connections with singing and music. The contributors are Rhys Bezzant, Peter Bolt, Gerald Bray, Andrew Cameron, Keith Condie, Richard Gibson, David Höhne, Michael Jensen, David Peterson and Robert Smith.

This book is about feelings, and the ways that we, as individuals and as a culture, have numbed ourselves against them. It is about unleashing the possibility of conscious feelings to re-make our lives into what really matters to us. The Power of Conscious Feelings introduces readers to the concept of the "personal numbness bar"--a measure set high by modern culture as a way of keeping everything "cool," under control, and consequently out of touch. This book provides the insight and the means for lowering that numbness bar. "You can feel more," the author asserts. You can regain the intelligence and energy of your feelings, so long denied and dressed up to appear acceptable. "Being cool," Callahan states, "allows you to look the other way about torture, invasion, pollution and injustice," and to accept the generic malaise that characterizes so many relationships. The central framework of the book is built with the Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling, including: * Learning the potent difference between thoughts and feelings, which most people confuse * Sorting out feelings (based in present) from emotions (based in the past or in somebody else's life) * Fully allowing that feelings are absolutely-neutral energy and information, neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative. Each chapter is enriched with THOUGHTMAPS-clear diagrams of ways we presently think and ways we could possibly think-and supported by an abundance of practical experiments to try. The Power of Conscious Feelings is so much more than a book of self-help or inspiration. Ultimately, it is about our connection with and responsibility for the fate of the Earth. When we are no longer numb, we are freed from solitary confinement in our private world of thoughts and beliefs. We emerge, already connected with other human beings, connected in the world of feelings we all have in common. This book actually guides the reader through four distinct evolutionary stages: from Personal, to Relational, to Transformational, to Cultural, in showing us how to use our adult feelings as the fuel for living our destiny as creators of sustainable culture. Choosing numbness was probably unconscious for most of us. But, Callahan is committed to showing us, step by step, in this moment, how we can change the mind and learn to consciously feel.

Led by a counselor, brides share their feelings about such issues as being given away, wearing a veil, changing their name, and closing the hotel room door only to find themselves suddenly--married. The author unravels the psychology behind common difficulties and offers practical advice for handling the fears and doubts that so often run amok as wedding bells toll.

An extraordinary, powerful connection exists between feeling and feeding that, if damaged, may lead to one relying on food for emotional support, rather than seeking authentic happiness. This unique workbook takes on the seven emotions that plague problem eaters - guilt, shame, helplessness, anxiety, disappointment, confusion, and loneliness - and shows readers how to embrace and learn from their feelings. Written with honesty and humor, the book explains how to identify and label a specific emotion, the function of that emotion, and why the emotion drives food and eating problems. Each chapter has two sets of exercises: experiential exercises that relate to emotions and eating, and questionnaires that provoke thinking about and understanding feelings and their purpose. Supplemental pages help readers identify emotions and chart emotional development. The final part of the workbook focuses on strategies for disconnecting feeling from food, discovering emotional triggers, and using one, s feelings to get what one wants out of life.