# How to develop awareness of feelings

It is entirely possible to develop a strong [self-awareness](mind-awareness.md) over thoughts, but without awareness over our feelings.

- This becomes more common in proportion to our [intelligence](people-personality-ocean.md), since every new thought often carries new feelings with it.

## Find the origin

We must self-examine, but look backward onto the flow of specific [feelings](mind-feelings.md) we possess.

- It's not uncommon to develop a cascade of feelings that culminate into a much later [action](results.md).
- Typically, that flow of feelings was programmed into us by our [parent](parenting-children.md) (more often our mother at first), and it rarely needs modification until we create an unfavorable consequence.
- Since we usually have generated many mental [habits](habits.md) by the time we detect a need to change, we've usually combined all the feelings together into a mixed experience, and have to parse it out.

[Anger](mind-feelings-anger.md) is a secondary emotion, so detecting it means we have more to examine.

- The illusion of anger comes in how we tend to unveil anger *after* we've gotten past some other emotion that suppresses it (e.g, [shame](mind-feelings-shame.md)).