To Be Human Is To Know Feeling
Emotions! Feelings! What are they? How do we deal with them? When do we ever really learn about them?
When do we ever have any practical help or advice in handling the bully, the break-up, the divorce or the friends cancer? If we are lucky maybe when we are in the middle of problems. I remember often times even when I was in the middle of a problem never getting any advice. And still today it seems the therapy industry thrives on this need. Can we on the other hand be proactive and educated and prepared to handle our emotions? And yes I am presuming that to have problems is to feel and to be involved emotionally. I am also presuming that we do not know what to do in each and every situation.
Are you interested in how you feel? And or do you see how the way someone is acting or the problems they are having is really due to an "emotional" problem and not something they can just get over?
If we are honest and look around us almost everyone we know, including ourselves, has something about them that either bothers us or we sure wish we could understand better about that person or ourselves.
Why is it that this or that person is motivated to clean so much, to work out so much, to be driven to be such a good mother, or such a good cook or to drink so much or why do they bite their finger nails? Simply what is it that really makes personality? And what makes a personality healthy or not so healthy?
About ten years ago I had the thought that in the year 2000 we had a pretty good handle on a great deal of what we called science and medicine. We seemed to be getting to the limits of the "universe" and in general medicine we where now able to take care of many aliments. Through my professional and personal life what was clear was that we were very far away from understanding the human mind and healing it in any kind of predictable way and in a way that looked at the person as an integrated whole rather than a diagnosis.
It also hit me that we spent many years in school and learned virtually nothing about our emotional lives.
We were taught and treated as if we were only "thinking" machines to the point to where it is often startling how difficult it is to bring up the subject of "emotions" to almost anyone without making someone, that person, or someone in the group very uncomfortable. Once a man in his late fifties told me it was unfair to bring feelings into a discussion when I said I was "hurt" by what he said!
But I have been lucky enough to find what is a comprehensive view of the human emotional system that is accessible to all of us.
This lens will introduce you to that system.
One way I introduce it is to say that for our purposes here we can reduce our functions to three activities and they are:
Feeling - Thinking - Doing
I will use these terms to outline the thought of a great thinker Silvan S. Tomkins (d. 1991)
I am going to give you access to a lot of material if you want to read more, here I want to get you interested.
If Dr. Tomkins did one thing above all else he did this:
He showed us that we do things because we are pushed to do them by the way we feel.
So we feel and then we do something. We do not think about things so much and then do them! We feel and then do!
This is hard to accept for many people but we might as well start at this point because this is where he stops and starts.
It might from, the beginning, be helpful to say that when we are thinking we are "doing" something. That is we are thinking about doing something because we are feeling something.
This brings us to another very important point and that is for Dr. Tomkins INTEREST is a feeling.
So if I am "interested" in something this motivates me to do something. Now we have just begun and this might not set well with the reader but if you accept this or go away for a while and think about whether or not when you are "interested" in something whether or not you came to that interest by "reason" or by feeling (by being "attracted" to it), it would help you greatly in understanding everything I am saying. If you don't agree with the statement that "interest" is an emotion then we probably will not get very far.
I think of my "favorites": My favorite color, or car, or ice cream. These are "interests" that I/we come by purely emotionally and not by reason?
Now why do we feel and then do things?
Well, it turns out to be quite simple. If I ask you what do you really, really want above all else in life you and most everyone else will eventually end up saying some form of wanting "happiness."
So as babies and children we experienced joy and happiness and we learned that that is what we want.
So you see feeling did come first. As babies we were feeling first.
Now a simple thought. What makes us happy? Well, we often spend a great deal of our lives avoiding this but what makes us happy is some kind of real "interest" that will carry us through today. What does that usually translate to? Well, it translates to some kind of work or activity that we can at least tolerate and that we can get some reward from. It is also some activity that is related to our early experiences of joy and this we find in our interest in other people in some similar form.
Summary:
We all want to be happy.
As babies we felt before we started thinking and we still do.
We have our interests that we enjoy. As humans we need to now not lose site of that which makes us happy and employ our interest to engage reason so we can purse that which makes us happy daily.
So simple but easier said then done.
The world is a tough place and so much gets in our way. But, it helps to keep this simple system in place, to remember that we just want to be happy.
What makes it so hard is indeed we are small actors on a very large stage full of troubles. One way we deal with this is to pretend that we can handle anything that comes at us. Well almost. We, for example will recognize, now and then, that we can get hurt but only to a point. So we say "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me."
Well, Dr. Tomkins again, lets us know that we indeed do have quite a system built into us to help us manage all the negative. He explains that the reason we get scared or have fear or anger or feel distressed or shame is because there is something out in the world that in a sense "matches" that feeling.
This is a very big topic and involves all the ways humans interact with the world so we will have to be happy with a few examples at the beginning. I offer here two short videos from You Tube that you see below in my video section. Look at the third one of the baby and the dog. First of all, yes, dogs have emotions and yes they have the same ones we do. In this case the baby has a cry of "distress." The dog is upset about it and "mirrors" the cry and this calms the baby for a moment.
In the second listed video quadruplets trigger each others joy in succession once triggered by their fathers antics.
This, of course is only one of many ways our emotions are set in motion and that is by other people or beings. Our emotions are triggered by the world in general all the time. By a passing car, a sunset, the aroma of a cake, the ugly view or smell of a dump and by the pain of arthritis.
So we feel first and then we act and what we want is to be happy. That is about the size of it.
Now for some interesting specifics.
What is it that we do?
Well, we do a lot to get in our own way. If everything was smooth sailing you would not be reading this. You are reading this, I suppose, as there are some bumps in the road. So, we are going to concentrate on highlighting those bumps. What are they and how can we get rid of them?
It turns out we can be very clear about how we tend to get ourselves in trouble and take ourselves away from our true interests and joys or mostly how the world simply pulls and pushes us in ways we have little control over.
We are born with the capacity to resonate with our care givers. To be interested in those around us but many things can interrupt that flow of interest. Of course the caregiver might not be interested in us. When anger meets interest the outcome is not very good.
We say that there is this basic partial list of basic feelings we are born with : Interest, joy, surprise, anger, fear , distress, disgust and shame.
So, it is obvious that when the environment around us is full of everything to the right of "joy" that life might be difficult.
It is not being said however that we do not need all of these feelings only that they all need to be used and be controlled. If we are dominated by any of them, even interest, they are troublesome.
We believe that if our interest meets with overwhelming force from other negative emotion or action of any kind that can block our interest we are likely to feel a sense of confusion and hurt and shame. Now since we live in the "here and now" and are always "doing something" that moment of confusion will be in a moment when we will be "doing something." We will be in a conversation with someone. Listening at a table. Thinking quietly alone. We will be somewhere doing something.
We will act on our feelings.
Donald Nathanson working with Dr. Tomkins summarized our possibilities of acting as these:
He said when we feel hurt, confused and or shamed we will:
Withdraw
Attack ourselves
Avoid or
Attack others.
We will do these things simply because we have lost our bearings and cannot focus enough to employ our interest and direct it where it should be. Where is that? That is to where it will maximize our chance to be happy. We do not wish or choose to do these things but more or less have to do them as we have to do something in this state of confusion until we recuperate.
What we really want to do is be able to focus enough to "solve" the problem. Something is getting in the way of our interest and impeding the attainment of joy and so if we remove that "impediment" we should get to joy. If we one minute where we are happy and the next our wife is angry at us if we solve her problem then we are both happy are we not?
1) We want to be happy.
2) We feel and then we do things.
3) The world is always getting in our way as far as impeding our happiness.
4) This impediment causes us to do many things we wish we could avoid like blame ourselves and other people for things.
So that is about it. We have feelings and these feelings over time are related intimately to the way we do things. They are in fact the reason we do things. We develop "habits." I am feeling this or that and I do this or that. Now it need not always be a bad outcome of course as we have good habits also. In light of that we can think of employing interest to confront a problem in this manner: We can get some: 1) Distance on the problem and define it 2) Evaluate it 3) Do something about the problem 4) and then be in as much control as we can be. Once again either doing this or withdrawing, blaming or avoiding are not really so much "choices" but an intricate interplay between our life long experiences that are stored in the form of an "images" made up of what we feel and have felt, what we remember about situations in all kinds of intricate ways including what we should do now that we are experiencing a similar situation.
Now you might have noted that I have not used any "medical" words or talked about being ill or mentally ill. That is not to say that this material does not have to do with these matters it very much does but the point is it has very much to do with everything about human activity. So if you are "depressed" or suffer from "anxiety" or "panic" you might well find whole new ways of viewing those problems at the same time if you are looking for new ways to manage people or are worried about a more just world or would like to find new ways to improve learning and teaching skills here too you will find many ideas. Toward that end I offer three summaries of principles applied to three areas of life. Applied to justice, education and general life.
Twelve Steps To Emotional Health
Twelve Steps To Emotional Health
And if you like you can join in the discussion @
or follow the interesting postings.
This approach to life and living is a full system of thought and I want to emphasize that most anyone can learn it to a level that will be of some value. This is because it starts with the most basic of our building blocks and that is the feelings we are born with. Change is not necessarily rapid but in my experience it tends to be permanent once it takes hold. What to do now? For the non professional I would suggest an introductory text of which I know of two:
"How To Get Where You Want To Go", by Brian Lynch, MD
and
"What Babies Say Before They Can Talk", by Paul Hollinger, MD.
For the professional there is nothing at all wrong with the first two just mentioned and then read the classic presentation of Silvan Tomkins' work
"Shame and Pride: Affect,Sex and the Birth of Self", by Donald Nathanson.
On the Internet: There is a loosely affiliated group that works to promote Dr. Tomkins' work and that organization may be found at:
My work can be found at Brian Lynch.
