What I’ve learned: Think less, feel more.

Johnny VonPop
Aug 22, 2017 · 5 min read

A few months ago I discovered the terms “systematizer” and “empathizer,” or simply, as a friend of mine referred to them, “thinker” and “feeler.” We all intuitively know the distinction between the two, but we only contemplate it perhaps infrequently, if at all.

When you give something a name, you are able to define and conceptualize it. This is exactly what happened when I came across these terms. Once I understood what each means, what their relationship is, and how they manifest in everyday life, I learned something profound about myself: I am way more of a thinker than a feeler.

What does this mean? It means that I rely primarily on reason and logic to interpret the world. Not surprisingly, this takes shape in my personality traits. I love solving puzzles, analyzing things, and I consider myself a problem-solver.

Both thinking and feeling are forms of cognition.

However, this realization also taught me something important about others. Everyone expresses the traits of thinking and feeling uniquely, which means that there is a spectrum of people who may think more than they feel (as I do) on one extreme, and people who may feel more than they think on the other extreme. Being aware of this difference in character traits can be immensely useful for facilitating interactions. More on this in an example from my own life later.

After this epiphany, the next and more important question I asked myself was why? Why am I so analytical and logical, and why do I use my emotions so little to guide me through life? After doing some research and soul-searching, I found some explanations that proved to be suitable answers. The first reason I found is that I am male and have thus been subject to the influence of traditional — or as it is increasingly called today: toxic — masculinity.

For better or (more likely) worse, males in most societies across the globe are taught that it is only appropriate to express a limited range of emotions, and those that are not appropriate usually include an element of vulnerability, i.e. fear, shame, loneliness, etc. The essence of traditional masculinity is imbued with toughness and strength, and therefore anything considered a display of weakness is cause for humiliation and must be suppressed. The consequence of this emotional pigeonholing is that as boys develop, they become increasingly unable to properly deal with the socially-unacceptable emotions they experience. This results in all kinds of problems, such as:

  • The inability to understand your own emotions, and by extension an inability to properly cope with them or accurately express them to others.
  • The inability to understand or recognize the emotions of other people that you don’t understand in yourself.
  • General social disconnection.
  • The use of anger and violence as socially condonable outlets for suppressed feelings.
Men are taught to hide their emotions, often with devastating consequences later on. PC: Christian Hopkins

The next two factors I identified are tied to my upbringing. The second reason for my excessive thinker-ness is my father. As I grew up I was lucky to spend more time with my dad than most children do with theirs, so my father’s personality traits, derived from his own exposure to ideas of masculinity during his upbringing and his profession as a mechanical engineer, clearly influenced me profoundly. While I typically think of his influence as predominantly positive, I’ve come to realize that his — and now my own — tendency to use reason as a problem-solving method is actually the wrong approach for situations where the requirement to find a solution is to feel rather than to think. The situations I’m referring to most commonly involve conflicts between people. I’ve experienced this multiple times while arguing with my wife. If a problem arises, I come at it from an analytical standpoint, while she focuses on the emotional load that it brings. The result is that we struggle to understand each other and find a solution because we are speaking different languages. I want to address the factors that led to the problem, while she wants me to empathize first and foremost. In other words, she wants me to both experience the uncomfortable emotions she undergoes so she feels understood, and endure the vulnerability that comes from feeling shame about a wrongdoing. When I finally recognized this discrepancy and shifted my behavior to align with hers, resolving problems became much smoother.

The third and last reason comes from my mother’s influence during my upbringing. For years I endured almost daily emotional (and sometimes physical) abuse as the product of my mother’s mental illness. The mechanism I used to cope with her behavior was to emotionally shut myself off. I didn’t know it at the time, but in doing so I isolated myself not only from her, but also from everyone else. I’m not sure if you can selectively sever emotional ties with others, but if it’s possible, I didn’t have the finesse to do so. This coping mechanism, while effective as a form of self-preservation, brought severe long-term consequences that in many ways entrenched the social and emotional disconnection from the other two factors. It has taken me years to unlearn the habits of disconnection and to instead allow myself to feel exposed, vulnerable, and to cultivate emotional resiliency. Nowhere is this daily struggle more evident than in my impairment to form and maintain healthy relationships.

“We are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling [creatures] that think.” -Antonio Damasio

Identifying these three factors has helped me understand that emotions are not something to run away from. On the contrary, despite being so messy and complicated at times, they are an essential and primordial component of what makes us human. This is captured well in the quote of neurologist Antonio Damasio, who said, “we are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling [creatures] that think.” To overlook or eschew emotions is to reject a fundamental part of our humanity.

So what now? I’ve taken the conclusion about my emotions as a greater lesson about learning to accept the uncomfortable aspects of life as simply part of the journey. Instead of running away from them, I now strive to better tolerate the bitter moments. The best part about this is that in engaging with the uncomfortable and painful, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that my ability to experience joy, love, and positivity has increased. I suppose it makes sense if allowing yourself to experience a greater part of one end of the emotional spectrum automatically enhances the other end. As a final insight, I’ll leave with you with this: allowing yourself to feel more is better than feeling nothing. Our time here is too short to cut ourselves off from what life has to offer.

)
Johnny VonPop

Written by

Grad student | NYer | Jack of all trades

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade