Miscellaneous: Feelings
My feelings are on my side -
they will not be denied.
My feelings are my own direct access to reality, and as such, they are my helpers every day of my life. They inform me and protect me from harm, they warn me when someone’s intentions are untrustworthy, and attract me to people and things that are good for me.
My feelings contain their own authority, through their dynamic presence in my body. It is through my feelings that I experience the world, and am able to be myself. It is through my feelings that I learn to become true to myself again, after the distractions and confusions of childhood and youth.
If, when we were children, our feelings were overridden or suppressed, if we were not allowed to express them, or not responded to when we did, if we were lied to or manipulated by those on whom we were dependent, the effects of all this on the natural operation of our feelings stay with us into adulthood, causing trouble in our lives, until we attend to them.
Most destructive behaviour is carried out unconsciously, by adults who themselves have become confused and shut down, due to a previous generation's unconscious behaviour, and so on. The buck only stops when someone stops passing it.
(Alice Miller, in The Drama of Being a Child, gives moving accounts of children’s experience, and the damaging effects on them of adult insensitivity.)
When feelings have become blocked or banished, to feel gets mixed up with to fear – so that any time we feel something, the feeling is tagged with fear – fear of punishment, of the ‘sky falling in’, of ‘something awful happening’ – childish fears of reprisals, which we must learn to acknowledge in ourselves, to bear, before we can be free of them - and heal.
feel - fear - bear - heal
threatening sky on the Forth
Once we start to release the fears we have shut away in our psyches since childhood, we may have to endure a phase where, even though we understand what we need to do, and know our fears are groundless, we still feel embarrassed, ashamed or humiliated about our feelings. This is part of the long process of self-liberation, an after-effect of childhood events.
In my experience, this dread and embarrassment has gradually ebbed, as I have got used to accepting and acknowledging my feelings, encouraging them to re-emerge from their inner prison - of me not wanting to know about them.
A Morning Walk
On waking, my thoughts are often full of apparently disparate, unconnected material – remembered conversations, ideas, dreams – that swirl around my mind. This ‘playback’ material tends to be feeling-neutral, at least at first.
But I have noticed that what I attend to, in this material, and how I take it, what I ‘make’ of it, depends on how I am feeling, in behind the conscious content of my thoughts, where I can’t see. The first I know that something may be wrong, is when I notice an increasingly negative cast to my ‘thoughts’ – as if dark paint has been sprayed on the material in my mind.
Often it is only later – once I have brought myself back to rest, and been freed from the ‘mood’ – that I’ll appreciate why I was feeling in a certain way, perhaps apprehensive, or resentful, or just unsettled.
Reflecting on these daily experiences, it strikes me that the word ‘feeling’ can be used in several ways. I have been using it here to refer to an inner condition or atmosphere, like our physical condition, or like shifting weather. I’ve used it to mean any ‘way of being’ that we find ourselves in, and don’t ‘get’, or ‘understand’ – a ‘mood’.
This is not the same thing as the feelings through which our inner senses inform and guide us through our lives, letting us know if something feels appropriate or welcome, or intrusive or untrustworthy.
Such moment-to-moment feelings are also emotionally neutral, and arise in spontaneous response to events, even to our own thoughts and impulses. They are our inner G.P.S., our reliable, inbuilt navigation system - and more reliable than a weather forecast!
A ‘mood’ is like dammed-up feelings, a stagnant residue that needs to be attended to – and so, released. By noticing our moods, we honour the actual feelings that have become trapped (by being overlooked, perhaps) and are probably being mined by ego to ‘make something of it’.
When we pay attention to our moods,
understanding often follows.
There is yet another group of what are commonly referred to as ‘feelings’: what I would call ego-tinged emotions, like jealousy, rage, hopelessness, passion. These extreme, fear-tainted and pressured states of feeling are poisonous broths that ego has curdled into fuel for its destructive and self-destructive operations.
If I am neglecting my inner life, my moods and feelings, and opting to 'just bash on' regardless, then a natural (and accurate) fear of abandonment is aroused in my psyche. My heart's fear of being unheard (I typed 'unheart'!) is justified, for no one else can attend to my feelings, if I don’t.
image by Adrienne Kalisch
Besides the suffering and sense of inner pressure caused by the presence of fear, such fears also invite ego to get involved in our affairs – ever-ready ego, always eager to ride 'to the rescue', always with a plan, a brilliant strategy, ‘the solution’ – which, if I go along with it, will certainly embroil me in further complications.
In summary, there are three distinct kinds of experience we can label as ‘feelings’:
1) our subtle, spontaneously arising responses to situations, events and people;
2) our mood, or state of mind; and
3) the emotional complexes (or ego-tinged emotions) that hold us in their grip.
Throughout these Guides, when I refer to feelings, I will mean the first kind – the emotionally neutral, information-type responses (but which may also include fear, where appropriate).
I have learned I can safely rely on my feelings as guides or as alarm bells. They may advise me to turn away from something that is enticing me to focus on it, or else attend to something that needs my attention, something I have been ignoring, not noticing.
Notice - know 'tis; noticing - not icing!
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