> I think our feelings, as well as our thoughts, should be listened to But why? Not asking to be difficult; I'm trying to understand why we should listen to ei

> I think our feelings, as well as our thoughts, should be listened to But why? Not asking to be difficult; I'm trying to understand why we should listen to either. I've learned that my thoughts are often filled with unhelpful nonsense baked into me at an early age by the conditioning of traumatized parents. I've learned that I can change the kinds of thoughts that I have by learning new skills and reframing situations so that the next time I encounter a situation that would lead to unhelpful nonsense thoughts, those are no longer the default reaction. My thoughts aren't me - they're the results of processes in my brain. I've learned that often the most useful thing is to not listen to my thoughts, because they're spinning narratives that simply aren't true ("I'm worthless", "everything is my fault", "<person> must be thinking awful things about me", etc). Our interpretation of feelings are mediated by thought. Given the susceptibility of thought to conditioning and external shaping, what makes a feeling worth listening to? To be clear, I'm not saying that thoughts/feelings are never useful or true. We depend on them to make sense of the world and to survive our environment. I'm saying that they're often not true, and this raises the question: what differentiates the useful/true ones from the ones that are not? Simply having the thought/feeling isn't enough. I went through a period of time in my life when I experienced thoughts/feelings "as me". I felt identical to them. Once I realized that they're appearances in consciousness alongside every other appearance in consciousness: sights, sounds, physical sensations, smells, etc., my relationship with thoughts/feelings shifted. I appear to be closer to "that which is aware" of these appearances in consciousness. When you start observing these thoughts/feelings playing out from a distance, it becomes increasingly clear that they're often just plain wrong, but wrong for understandable reasons (e.g. the anxious brain borne of childhood trauma).