Feelings or emotions are signals that we receive from our body or our spirit alerting us to the current state of our needs, whether met or unmet.
As they derive from both the body and the spirit, they can register smiles, looks, facial expressions, headaches, stomach aches, and emotions such as anger, fear, frustration, guilt, deceit…
In the whole creation, there is only one human nature and it does not change, not over time, from generation to generation, and not over space, from culture to culture or civilization to civilization. Feelings or emotions as well as the needs behind them are universal, everyone has the same emotions or feelings because these are related to the human nature that is unchangeable.
The key to identifying and expressing feelings is to focus on the words that describe our inner experience rather than the words that describe our interpretations of our and other people’s actions. For example: “I feel lonely” describes an inner experience, while “I feel like you don’t love me” describes an interpretation of how the other person may be acting.
Feelings and thoughts
Thoughts are cognitive or intellectual processes aimed at finding the truth; they start off from one or more premises and follow a logical deductive pathway advancing dialectically until they reach a conclusion that oftentimes is a decision. Thoughts can be abstract but most of the time they are about qualifying, quantifying and verifying realities.
As for the nature of thoughts, they may include beliefs, ideals, opinions, projects etc. What is the most personal and non-transferable in human beings are our feelings, however; thoughts can be copied but feelings cannot, they are somehow protected by copyright.
Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point – As Pascal found out, feelings are more difficult to define because they do not arise from the head, but from the depths of our being; they are not caused or provoked by us, and that means they are not subject to our will. There is nothing I can do to feel a certain feeling; they arise to our consciousness automatically, unwillingly and unannounced. They are unpredictable and because of this, they have not been the topic of study in any human science, not even in psychology.
In a way, we are not responsible for our feelings since we have no power over them. We cannot produce them, nor avoid them or erase them; however, they are ours as they come from within us and are not provoked by others or by any external circumstances.
Once they arise in our conscious we have no alternative other than to take responsibility for them. They are valuable alerts or messengers of our state of being -- physical, spiritual and moral. To ignore them is to divorce us from ourselves, not knowing whether we are coming or going, it is being lost. Our feelings are like a finger pointing to a need that is either met or unmet.
Spiritually, feelings are somewhat like life itself. Just as we don’t have power over life since we don’t own it, the same holds true with our feelings. We cannot command them as we cannot stop nor start any particular feeling and like in life, all we can do is to administer them. In so doing we can choose to ignore, repress, hide or express them; for this we need to have some emotional literacy in order to identify our feelings and be able to name them. Some are able to do this easily but many, many people because of our cultural education and formation are emotionally illiterate.
Cerebral people, for instance, tend to see the world in black and white, they do not like inaccuracy. They understand that people are very uncertain and inconsistent, so they tend to focus on more tangible things that are easier to conceptualize, all the while seeking truth, quantifying and qualifying it, and applying general rules. Brain people are seen by the feeling people as cold, heartless, nitpicking and calculating robots.
The emotional or sentimental people are more concerned with social relationships and considerations; they listen to their hearts and take into account other people’s feelings. For the sentimental ones, material things are worth only as much as they can be at the service of human existence, that’s what is most important to them. At work, they are sociable and helpful, and they make decisions based more on human values than on general rules. For the cerebral people, the sentimental ones cannot be trusted because they see feelings as volatile.
Within the human person, however, thoughts and feelings are bound to mutually understand each other; because they are so interconnected, an emotional confusion is also a mental confusion. People who are sensitive to emotions tend to see and experience the world through their emotions. Others do feel, of course, but they are unable to name or identify either the emotions, or their reasons or causes. On the other hand, since emotion is their main gateway of experiencing life events, they may come to label their thoughts as emotions.
For example, when someone says “I feel stupid”, both thoughts and feelings are inadequately expressed. Understanding this expression as a thought would be “I am stupid”; as a feeling it would be connected to a sense of shame, sadness or hurt. When a person feels emotions but is unable to label them, he would have more difficulty in dealing with them. Labels or tags are critical in managing emotions.
Emotional literacy – The affective is effective
Our culture does not train us to identify feelings and often we do not know how we feel or have no words to express what we feel.
We are therefore emotionally illiterate. To be emotionally literate means to know how to distinguish between thoughts and feelings, as well as be able to name our feelings and those of others, and to evaluate their intensity, their causes and what to do with them, and to assume responsibility for how much our feelings can affect others. It is also to be able to deal with our emotions and those of others, with the intention of improving the quality of lives of both. Emotional literacy consists of making our emotions act in our favour and not against us. Improving human relationships is to create affective ties between people, to facilitate group work, and to enable cooperation between individuals thus developing a sense of community.
We all have something to learn from our emotions. Some grow up with a high level of emotional literacy, others are emotionally illiterate. Feelings exist as an essential part of human nature; when we are disconnected from them, we lose a fundamental aspect of our human potential. It is in recognizing and managing our feelings, and in responding adequately to the emotions of others, that we increase our personal power both in private and professional life.
To be emotionally literate means to be capable of identifying emotions that I and others feel, in addition to gaging their intensity, and knowing their cause and what to do with them. To be emotionally literate means to know how to deal with our emotions because we understand them. It also means to develop empathy and learn to take responsibility for how our emotions affect others.
Newspapers are full of stories of how successful and bright people end up making serious emotional mistakes that ultimately ruin their lives. Emotions such as anger, fear, shame, lust, make smart people behave stupidly.
The true fortress
Never open up to anyone / However great your ache might be / Because whoever opens his heart to others / of himself becomes a traitor
Everyone in general, but most especially us men, grew up shunning and ignoring our emotions or feelings, with the belief that it is shameful, weak and frightening to voice them out. What we do to ourselves we also do to others, so that we equally despise and ignore the emotions and feelings of others when they dare to express them.
Our culture tends to reserve the experience of feelings within the bosom of the family; outside of it, in the professional life, at work and in the public social relationships, they should not be expressed because these need to be functional, neutral, innocuous, and impersonal. In the realm of public life, our culture does not advise us to be personally involved, we are supposed to hide our feelings behind masks that make us look like robots and our relationships a farce.
Since feelings reveal more about us than thoughts, our tendency is to hide them because it would make us look weak to show our vulnerable side and leave us as an easy prey in the hands of others. We are only open with friends and even with them we are quick to pull back if they turn out to be false, “Free me God from my friends, as from my enemies I free myself”.
When you see the shadow of a giant, look at the position of the sun to see if it is not the shadow of a dwarf. Friedrich Novalis
We are more inclined to apply the logic that works among animals; it is said that a dog can sniff out our fear and when this happens it attacks us more readily. We hide our weakness by projecting an identity that is not ours. A game that may not turn out well because if the other person becomes aware of it he will want to pull the rug from under our feet and then we will have to assume our true identity with shame and disgrace.
Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:10
For Rosenberg, however, to reveal our feelings, far from being counterproductive, is a great asset and he quotes several examples to substantiate what Saint Paul had already realized two thousand years earlier. When we take on our weaknesses with courage, we are then strong because we are in the truth as there is no other more vulnerable position than getting ourselves entangled in a lie and projecting it onto others.
Rosenberg refers to a visit he made to a high school to speak about nonviolent communication. Upon entering the classroom, the students who until then were chatting happily with each other suddenly became quiet. Rosenberg greeted them with a good morning but no one responded, the silence was deadly. He felt very uncomfortable but proceeded in his most professional manner to teach the lesson as if nothing had happened. The students did not seemed at all interested in what he was saying and each did his own thing; Rosenberg felt increasingly more uncomfortable but he continued to ignore it.
Finally, a student confronted him by saying, “You just hate being with black people, don’t you?” Surprised, Rosenberg realized immediately that he had contributed to this misperception by pretending to hide his discomfort from not feeling the connection that he wanted with the class. His mistake was to pretend that he was hiding well his feeling of discomfort when his body language was revealing otherwise. The mistake of the students was to interpret his body language as a sign of racism.
Acknowledging his feelings, he responded honestly by saying, “I am feeling nervous but not because you are black. My feelings have to do with my not knowing anyone here and wanting to be accepted when I came into the room.” This expression of his vulnerability was the magic wand that turned a disinterested class into one filled with participation and interest.
There was a time when it was said that men do not cry, not even in psychology were emotions studied because it was understood and accepted that it was impossible to approach them scientifically. After we saw tears in the eyes of some public figures, especially politicians and after Daniel Goleman published his book, Emotional Intelligence, which became a bestseller, feelings are now more valued and are no longer so quickly associated with weakness as with humanity. To be human is to be capable of compassion and mercy before one’s own suffering and the suffering of others.
Psychopaths can easily operate without the constraints that restrain other mortals. They can lie, steal, extort, maim and kill without any feelings of guilt. When they gain power over other people, they can become extremely dangerous. Let us recall the Roman emperor, Gaius Caesar, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. History is full of examples that are found from all walks of life: individual, family, politics, business, in the streets etc.
List of feelings when our needs are not met
Angry – annoyed – concerned – confused – disappointed – discouraged – distressed – embarrassed – frustrated – helpless – unhappy –impatient – lonely – nervous – overwhelmed – puzzled – reluctant – sad – uncomfortable
List of feelings when our needs are met
Amazed – comfortable – confident – eager – energetic – fulfilled – inspired – glad – joyous – inspired – optimistic – proud – relieved – stimulated – surprised – thankful – touched – trustful
Identifying feelings
Expressions of feelings that contain a self-evaluation
“I feel that I wasn’t treated fairly” – Rosenberg warns that we often confuse thoughts with feelings; therefore when the expression “I feel…” is followed by any word other than an adjective, we are not expressing feelings but rather thoughts or opinions. “I feel like I am talking to a wall” is a thought disguised as a feeling. On the other hand, to express a feeling we do not even need to say “I feel…”, we can express the feeling directly. For example, instead of saying “I feel angry”, I can simply say “I am angry”.
“I feel that I’m a failure as a guitar player” – In this expression I am not expressing a feeling but a self-criticism deprecating my ability as a guitar player. The actual feeling would be, “I feel frustrated (impatient, disappointed) with myself with respect to my performance in my last show”.
Expressions of feelings that contain an evaluation of others
“I feel that I’m not important to my boss” – This is a description of how I think my boss is evaluating me, rather than a genuine expression of feeling, which could be, “I feel sad or discouraged”. When we express feelings, others are not part of the equation because as we have said earlier, feelings contain what are the most private and personal to us. Others may trigger feelings in us, but their cause always comes from within me, not from others.
“I feel misunderstood” – This is another assessment of the other person’s capacity for understanding; the feeling would be “I feel anxious” or “I feel sad” or some other emotion.
“I feel ignored” – Once again this is a negative interpretation of the actions of others. The same situation or event could have two opposing readings; if we like the person who is ignoring us we would feel hurt because we want to be involved, but if we do not like the person who is ignoring us we would then feel relieved.
In order to avoid confusion, we avoid the expression “I feel...” so that we do not fall into the temptation to express a thought or an evaluation instead of a feeling; therefore we should use our emotional vocabulary and express directly the adjective that best qualifies our state of mind: I am confused, I am worried…
How to relate observations to feelings
After having expressed to our partner what we have objectively observed, we are personally involved in this observation by not mirroring a criticism or an evaluation, but rather expressing a feeling that the observation roused in us, naming the emotion or feeling that we feel without any moral judgment, thus allowing us to connect with the person in question in a spirit of mutual respect and cooperation.
We must carry out this step with the goal of identifying accurately the sensation or emotion that we, or the other person, are experiencing at that precise moment; not in order to embarrass the other for his feeling nor to try to stop him from feeling what he feels. Since feelings are hard to put into words we should do this by tentatively checking and making sure with our partner, to see whether we are right or wrong in our expression. Let us look at some examples:
- Only one hour left before the show begins, I see that you have increased your pace (observation), are you nervous? (inquire about the other’s feeling)
- I see that your dog is running around barking without a leash (observation). I’m afraid of dogs (feeling).
- I saw that your name was not mentioned in the acknowledgment (observation). Are you upset that they don’t seem to appreciate and value your contribution as you deserve? (inquire about other’s feeling).
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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