Your Feelings Aren’t Wrong
On the Physics of Feeling
As with most things I write about, this started out with something that bugged me. It bugged me when people would suggest in whatever subtle ways that I get overly emotional. Never mind the fact that I’m crying right now over Céline Dion’s song At Seventeen. I’m not overly sensitive. You just don’t get it!
People sometimes ask me, “Is it bad if I feel happy right now?” (after teasing me about my Céline Dion fandom) and other similar questions. Is it bad to feel something? Some people think so, and if you don’t like Céline’s music, then maybe you aren’t feeling bad enough. But really, no — I don’t think feeling something is ever wrong, bad, inappropriate, whatever.
If I rage at you for not liking my favorite musical artists (the actually good ones), then there’s something wrong there, obviously (no matter how bad your musical tastes are). So, the purpose of this article is to give an account of feelings that explains some of the craziness we experience from ourselves and others when emotions are high. (I’m using “feelings” and “emotions” interchangeably here.)
Perceptions => Feelings
In our unified field of consciousness, we have all sorts of mental states happening all at once. We’ve got desires, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and more all moving around and interacting in beautiful anarchic harmony. Some of this is conscious, but most of it is not. Perceptions can cause emotional reactions, which can in turn cause thoughts that can then cause desires, and vice versa.
Despite what people might say, you don’t just start getting emotional for no reason. Emotions are caused by how we perceive things. If we perceive that everything is working out in our favor, we tend to feel happy. If we perceive that other people are opposing our interests, we may feel angry. If past events have caused us pain, that’s saddening.
Our other emotions usually tend to fit somewhere inside of these mad, sad, and glad categories. A more nuanced approach would reveal more nuanced emotions. In happiness we find joy, ecstasy, satisfaction, delight, glee, etc. In anger, there is contempt, indignation, hatred, irritation, aggravation, rage, and exasperation. In sadness, hiding in the dark is sorrow, despair, longing, disappointment, misery, and heartache.
Our unconscious mind processes 6,000 times what our conscious mind does. If our center of consciousness was a ½-inch marble, the rest of the marbles could fill 45 bathtubs. And so, it’s not always obvious what’s going on to our conscious mind. Often times, I have no idea why I feel the way I do. I cry during courageous and selfless acts of heroism in action movies, even if the story and acting sucks.
It takes some unraveling sometimes to figure out what it is we perceive about our environment that makes us feel the way we do. But when we know what we are feeling, we can work backwards a lot more easily. If it’s an angry emotion, then we know right away that something is working against our interests and may continue to be an issue. If we go even deeper and realize that it’s more specifically indignation, then we know that we perceive some kind of injustice happening. If it’s hatred, then we know it’s specific to a person or persons. If it’s irritation, then maybe it’s a bunch of little things that bother us.
What we don’t do is feel angry about things working out in our interests, or sad when everything is right with the world. We may get conflicting emotions, such as with the person who feels guilty that someone’s death made them feel happy, but each emotion was preceded by a different perception. The emotional reaction makes perfect sense for the perceptions we have.
If an emotional reaction doesn’t seem to fit the current circumstances, then the error is with how we perceive things, not with the emotion. If someone has mistaken a joke I made for a slight at their expense and they react angrily, then a younger me would have said that they are overreacting, or that they are being emotional. (I would think it’s a problem with their emotions.) But the problem is that they mistook me, not that they got angry because of it.
When people don’t treat perception and emotion separately, it can lead to some pretty frustrating interactions.
Non-Feelings
I’ve noticed that people sometimes use “I feel” statements but don’t follow “I feel” with any actual feelings. It’s like when people say “literally” when what they mean is “figuratively.” When I hear “I feel like you don’t listen,” I want remind them that “you don’t listen” is not a feeling.
I guess we could parse their statement into something comprehensible. Depending on their tone and body language, I might translate it and get, “I feel angry because I perceive you as being thoughtless,” or “I feel sad because I perceive that our missed connection means our relationship is in trouble.”
It may be totally innocent on their part, but it makes having productive conflicts with people more difficult. Making conflicts easier to resolve, to mutual benefit, seems like a good goal. But that requires we be precise in our language, I will argue.
You can’t argue with emotions; emotions just are. But the way we perceive things may be incorrect. Maybe I have listened, but they have told me that anecdote ten times before, so I am not as engaged.
If they say, “I feel like you don’t listen,” then I can argue with their conclusion, but then they may feel like their emotions are being invalidated. Invalidation can be a form of abuse, so we don’t want to get sucked into that vortex and end out on the other side as the bad guy in the interaction.
If someone is particularly manipulative, they can easily sneak their self-serving agenda past the goalie with “I feel” statements. When you argue with the conclusion, you fall into a trap, down into a pit of insensitivity, thoughtlessness, and cruelty. For example, if you argue with “I feel like you don’t listen,” that is just used as further proof that you don’t listen.
These kinds of interactions cause a lot of frustration because people aren’t speaking plainly and simply. There’s too much room for crazy to sneak in. Let’s either talk about emotion or talk about our conclusions. Let’s not pretend that they are one and the same.
Emotions can be very stimulating conversation, and developing a good emotional vocabulary can offer a great deal of clarity.
Rich Emotions
I wrote an article last week about frustration and how it can affect our mental health. You can read the whole thing here, but the basic idea was that it’s important for us to be empirical, and that frustration (loosely) is having expectations that don’t line up with what actually happens. When we expect to walk across the kitchen without stepping on a Lego, but we do step on a Lego, we feel pain, and then frustration. “Can’t I just get a glass of OJ without injuring myself?!”
When I was on the therapist’s couch, I would allow myself to experience all sorts of thoughts and emotions that I had denied myself for years or decades. My therapist made it a safe environment for me to explore the darker parts of my nature. Sometimes I’d feel a powerful and negative emotion like sorrow and it would feel strangely good to feel it, like I was becoming a more complete human being. Other times I would feel a powerful longing that didn’t feel strangely good. I felt shitty and there was no silver lining, just shit. I think the difference is frustration.
I didn’t experience much love growing up, and I used to experience longing like a big hole in my chest, like something was missing that could complete me. I hoped as I talked about it with my therapist that I could stop feeling the pain of longing. I talked and talked, even forcing shallow but related conversation, desperately trying to earn enough therapy points to reach the next stage and not feel pain anymore.
Alternately, when I felt the sorrow, realizing just how little love was in my life, I had no expectations about what was supposed to happen with that sorrow. It was just a novel experience; it was interesting to me. Just sitting with that feeling shined old memories in a new light and my world became a little more colorful. That’s how I see rich emotional experiences.
There is this weird dichotomy presented between reason and emotion, as if they are enemies. I love reason and have a strong capacity for critical thought, but I also love my emotions, all of them. When people talk a bunch of shit about emotions, I confess to immediately looking for irrationality in what they are saying.
It would be a delicious irony if the people who said those things didn’t have reason on their side either. And often there is something wrong with what they are saying. It’s almost as if they think that putting down emotion allies them with reason, and if they are on Team Reason™, then they automatically get points, or something like that.
And so we’ll leave it just how we started it: with me bothered by something.
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