How do you know if your feelings are real or imaginary? It sounds, from the look of it, like a silly question. Feelings. What can be more personal, more you? If they aren't real, what about you would be?
There are likely to be times in your life when you have feelings, maybe even a lot of them. At these times you may feel overwhelmed, unsure, scared, confused.....you may feel a lot of things. But you'll be feeling and the feelings you'll be having will be uniquely yours, yours and yours alone.
You're gonna' try to think through your feelings. Most people do. It's a natural response to what you're feeling and what you're going through. Try to think it out, try to reason it out, and you wind up in quite the conundrum. Thinking and reasoning often don't really have much of a place where feelings are concerned. You can think and reason about your feelings all you want but the end of the day, you still feel your feelings, you don't just think about them. There's a difference.
Your feelings may fly all over the place. Feelings do that. They may seem contradictory at times. That's okay. Feelings do that too. You may not even always be sure of what you feel. We're often not sure of a lot of things.
When you are having these feelings, you're gonna' want to talk to people about them. You feel an irrepressible need to get them out of your body. They seem to be eating you up alive and the only way to protect yourself is to get them out in the open. So, you'll talk. And in the talking, will come an unexpected problem.
Everyone will have their take. People always do. People will care and mean well in what they say, in the points of view they give. People are mostly good. Mostly. In their effort to help, some people will say things that they hope will help, but in reality won't. A lot of times, people, when faced with someone feeling intense emotions react to those emotions based on their own experiences, on their own past histories. When we see someone, feeling intense feelings, it can scare us. There's an out of control-ness to it that is scary. As much as we love feelings, they scare us. As much as feelings make us alive, make us who they are, they're also scare us because they sometimes come out of nowhere, they sometimes feel like they're going to cause us to blow up from within, like some volcano. When we see this in others, we might put up a wall, we might back off, we might try to get some distance because, well, those feelings could scare us. When we put up our defenses, we might want to somehow explain what it is that we see in someone else. Explaining it helps make some sense of it. It too is a protective mechanism, a way to keep ourselves safe, keep ourselves safe from what we see and what we feel, even if what we see and what we feel is a result of what someone else is feeling.
Sometimes people will tell you that what you're feeling isn't what you're feeling, that your feelings aren't real. They'll say this, for lots of reasons. They may say it to try and make you feel better, in some sort of way. Mostly they'll say it in their way of making sense of what they see in you. Mostly, what they say is a response, a defense mechanism, a way of making sense of things, like I mentioned above. When someone you care about tries to tell you what you feel isn't real, it's likely to make you feel bad, it's likely to lead to self-doubt and confusion. That's natural. If you're feeling intense feelings you feel pretty raw already, so, the idea that what you're feeling isn't real, is likely to set off a whole other cascade of emotions and issues that just compound and complicate all the things that have come before.
No one can tell you what you feel isn't real. I mean, of course, they can and they might but when they do, do yourself a favor. Don't listen. No one can know the depths of another's heart. If you can't know the depths of your own heart, then, who can? Your feelings are your feelings and they can only be experienced by you. Maybe others won't be able to understand. Maybe others will be afraid of them, for whatever reasons in their own lives, but your feelings are yours, yours and yours alone.
Are your feelings real? Is this moment you're in real? Are the words your reading on your screen real? When you reach out your hand to brush the hair out of the eyes of the person you love, are the strands of hair you feel against your fingers, the brush of skin you feel against your fingertips, is any of that real?
How will you know if your feelings are real? Don't bother asking anyone else. You'll know.