Imagine your doctor said you might have a dread disease. Your heart pounds, your mouth goes dry, and all your plans vanish. You’re rescheduling everything for medical tests. You tell yourself not to panic, it’s too early to freak out. The tests might show you don’t have the dreaded disease after all. You push the fear down and try to think about other things. In those few moments, you experienced something both utterly familiar and deeply mysterious: feelings. The fear that gripped you, the forced calm you tried to maintain, the worry you pushed aside, these are all part of the complex landscape of human feeling that you navigate every day, often without understanding what’s happening. Feelings are how you encounter your very existence. When you’re out of touch with your feelings, you’re out of touch with life. They’re how you meet joys and sorrows, ups and downs, and everything in between. They help you foster and navigate your relationships, make choices, and adapt responses to events. But sometimes, feelings are a bit much. That’s what feelings are. Now, for what they are not. Feelings are not exactly the same as emotions. People use the words interchangeably; but if we’re really going to understand them, we need to tell them apart. Feelings are conscious emotions. Emotions are subconscious feelings. What consciousness does to emotionsYou were mindful of your fear long enough to do something about it, before letting go of it. The fear was still there, even though it was out of sight. Consciousness is like a flashlight in the mind. You can see what’s in the light beam. There are many other things that exist, not caught by the light; but if you move the light around, you can see anything in the subconscious. (The unconscious, on the other hand, you will never see.) In this case, the flashlight of your consciousness illuminated your fear, but you pulled away from it, sending your fear into the darkness before it freaked you out. Emotions work perfectly well without us being conscious of them. They process sensations, quickly plan a response, and execute it just fine without your awareness. Your fear accomplished its goal by making sure you did those tests and kept you prepared to deal with threats. Throughout the day, you were a little jumpy and had elevated cortisone levels and blood pressure, all evidence of continued fear. Some of your muscles were tense, particularly in your jaw and neck. You stooped a little, as if you were curling in on yourself, protecting your vulnerable chest and belly. It was a little harder to breathe. As you went through the day, getting more and more tests done, feelings of fear returned to consciousness in new forms. Beyond the fear of death, you became afraid of what all this was going to cost, afraid people would start treating you like an invalid, afraid your illness would curtail your activities, afraid your wife would worry and nag you about your health, afraid that going to the doctor would be your life from now on. It was as if you were examining different sides of your fear by rotating it, bringing new aspects into the flashlight beam of your consciousness. When you felt afraid of how much this was going to cost, the fear of death receded because it had been cast into shadow. Many feelings are multidimensional in this way. You must sustain consciousness before you understand them fully. This is why, in therapy, we analyze things repeatedly, going over significant events again and again. We must allow time for new perspectives to emerge and hold old insights in place as we look at new ones. However, holding a feeling in consciousness can prevent you from paying attention to anything else. Throughout the day, you experienced many emotions, some of which never rose to the level of consciousness. One of the nurses was attractive, so your heart skipped a beat when she came into the room. Your body responded without you knowing it. You didn’t name it because you weren’t conscious of it. If you had become cognizant of it, you might have rejected it as inappropriate for the circumstances and suppressed it just as you suppressed fear. Although emotions work perfectly well in the subconscious, when you’re conscious of them, you can shape them to a more acceptable form. It begins when you give them a name. An emotion has no name until it becomes a feeling, and then it’s retroactively given the same name as the feeling. When a feeling is named, it’s defined. Then it can be re-defined to become a more acceptable feeling. Then the nurse broke the spell by giving you one of those ridiculous hospital gowns to wear. Your previous emotions gave way to shame. A blush gave you away. Your body communicated its shame, acknowledging that sitting bare-assed in front of a fully clothed stranger violated social norms. Again, you may not have been aware of feeling shame. If you were, then you might have shaped the raw shame into something more fitting to the circumstances. You might say you felt embarrassed, not ashamed, reasoning it’s not like you chose to be half naked; you were told to put on that gown. This is why we therapists are always urging people to talk about their feelings. In many cases, they don’t even have feelings before they begin talking about them, but they do have emotions. When they become conscious of the emotions, and they become feelings, then they’re able to do more with them. In this example, we’ve started with the unconscious physical response, gone to the moment of awareness, the naming and shaping of the feeling, and finally, the ability to work with it constructively. Understanding this process is crucial for navigating life’s challenges and relationships. In the chapters ahead, we’ll explore how to recognize emotions before they become overwhelming, how to name them accurately, and how to work with them rather than against them. But first, let’s look at what happens when we try to ignore our feelings altogether. Feeling FINEAfter spending all day at doctors’ offices, you went home, and your wife asked how you were. She knew you had a routine doctor’s appointment, but you hadn’t told her about being sent for more tests. You ducked her questions and answered that you’re fine. You may have actually been feeling fine, while inside was a seething cauldron of emotions. It was possible because the flashlight of your consciousness was only shining on the fact that, at last, all the doctor’s tests were over. Why weren’t you totally honest with her? You told yourself you were evading the truth for her sake. You didn’t want her to worry unnecessarily. You’ll tell her if you need to, after the results of the tests come in. You barely admitted to yourself that you were afraid and never admitted you were feeling attraction or shame earlier. Throughout the day, there was lots of evidence of your fear. Your lie was further proof of it. The emotion of fear affected your behavior, causing you to make choices you wouldn’t normally make, like lying to your wife. As a therapist, whenever I hear someone tell me they’re fine, I see red flags. I know how the word is used. The letters in the word FINE could just as well stand for Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional. Fine is a cover up. It’s an answer you give when you don’t want to give an answer. Fine is also the reply we give when we enact the standard greeting ritual that goes, How are you? Just fine, and you? In that case, it’s fine to say fine because nothing more is usually expected. How are you? is generally not a real question, so fine is a perfectly acceptable non-answer. IntuitionAlthough you thought you were protecting your wife from worry, she knew something was up and worried anyway. Her intuition told her you weren’t fine when you said you were fine. She saw it in your face. Your face betrayed you by revealing your emotions. You can thank micro-expressions for giving you away. They’re the fleeting signs of emotions your face makes before you cover them up. Others can sometimes ascertain these signals subliminally. They’re too quick for other people to be conscious of them, but almost everyone can pick up some vibes. Intuition is a way your wife can perceive something when she can’t point to the evidence. First, she collects some cues subliminally, like a fleeting look of fear. Then she recreates that same expression on her own face so the expression can kindle the corresponding emotion in her. Traffic goes both ways between expression and emotions. This is how happy people make us happy, sad people make us sad, and the way laugh tracks make us laugh. It’s also how you can access the emotions of others. Unfortunately, intuition is never a clear signal. Your wife knew something was wrong when you said you were fine, but she didn’t know what it was. PowerlessnessA couple of days went by and when you still didn’t have the results of your tests, you started feeling powerless. Powerlessness is an even more uncomfortable emotion than fear, because with fear, at least you can do something about it. One glance of powerlessness in your flashlight beam will make you decide you’ve seen enough and pull it away. If powerlessness keeps coming back into your awareness, you might take drastic steps like indulging in compulsive behavior. Drinking is a popular choice, but there are many other ways to behave compulsively. The idea is to do something, anything to prove that you’re not powerless. Getting drunk shows that you have some control over the way things go. Compulsive behavior might keep you from feeling powerless, but it never lasts for long. Powerlessness is still there, hanging out with your fear, making you tense and miserable, even if you’re not always aware of them. They force you to escalate compulsive behavior. You turn to stronger drugs. A popular choice for some, particularly men who can get away with it, or drunks who’ve forgotten their manners, is rage. Again, emotions don’t need you to be conscious to be effective. You can effectively kill in blind rage. But you need the clear light of consciousness to think about what you’re doing. You didn’t know you were turning into a mean drunk, but your wife sure knew it. She had evidence in empty beer cans and how quickly you took offense at imagined slights. Whenever she tried to get you to open up about what was wrong, you’d snap at her some more. You claimed the problem was all those affronts, not the underlying, unresolved fear. The best you could say was that you were in a bad mood because you were stressed. Here we see the cascade: from fear to powerlessness, from powerlessness to compulsion, from compulsion to rage. Each step takes us further from the original feeling, yet each is connected to it like links in a chain. Understanding this progression is crucial because it shows us how unacknowledged feelings don’t simply disappear; they transform, often into something more destructive than the original emotion. A Bad MoodYou can think of a mood as an emotion trying to get noticed. It wants to become a feeling, so you’ll do something about it. Moods are like children, pulling at their mother’s skirt saying, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom. They’ll keep it up as long as it takes till you deal with the emotion. In this case, your emotions have transmogrified. What started out as a simple fear of death, which motivated going through those tests, has evolved into powerlessness at not getting the results. You want the ordeal to be over and have gone first into drinking, and then into rage, so you don’t have to feel so powerless. Getting hammered and thoughtlessly snapping at your wife for asking what’s wrong doesn’t resolve your fear. You’d know that if you were in touch with your feelings. But because you can’t admit you’re powerless, you can’t admit you’re angry about being powerless. If you could admit it, then you’d see how your powerlessness channeled itself into compulsive behavior and turned your wife into an innocent bystander who got her head chopped off when she was only trying to understand. It wasn’t until you and your wife had a long, drawn-out fight before you told her about the tests. Then she understood. She was annoyed you didn’t tell her sooner, but she now could get where you’re coming from. You acknowledged your powerlessness and continued to have some rage, but it was downgraded to impatience. That’s what consciousness can do. It can introduce rational thought into the equation, allowing you to face the facts, consider what you’re doing, and frame your emotions in a new way. How Emotions, Feelings, and Thoughts Work TogetherThrough this entire ordeal, from the initial fear, through powerlessness, to eventual understanding, emotions, feelings, consciousness, and thoughts work together like parts of a corporation. The emotions are the workers, involved in the down and dirty, moment-to-moment operations. Rational thought is like the CEO. He can see the big picture. Consciousness is like the CEO’s private secretary, controlling access to the boss, so he doesn’t have to deal with every little thing. Feelings are like the middle managers, representing the workers to the CEO and the CEO to the workers. Just as the CEO can get out of touch with the realities of the business, thoughts lose touch with the realities of life. If you’re cut off from your feelings, you’re like a company whose CEO and workers have nothing to do with each other because there are no middle managers. The workers violate company policy, and the CEO has his head in the clouds. When the middle managers have failed to represent the workers to the CEO, the workers develop a bad attitude, called a mood. When the dysfunction goes too far, they go on strike, what we know as a mental illness. I hope I’ve made a good case for getting in touch with your feelings. If you listen to them, they’ll tell you about your emotions, which is to say information about the state of your body and the world affecting it, enabling you to fashion an effective response. Does this mean you should throw away the flashlight of your consciousness and switch on the flood lights, instead? Is it better to be conscious of everything? No, it isn’t. That would be too much information. Thoughts have a relatively limited bandwidth, compared to emotions. They can only process so much before they overheat and shut down. Emotions can handle all the data fed to it by the sensations. They do it quickly, efficiently, and decisively. Emotions are built for action, thoughts for contemplation. Feelings are like the gatekeepers informing the thoughts of what they need to know. In our medical test scenario, this is why you couldn’t, and shouldn’t, stay constantly aware of every aspect of your fear. Your emotions handled the immediate responses: scheduling tests, staying alert to health concerns, preparing for possible outcomes. Your conscious thoughts needed to focus on specific tasks: talking to doctors, understanding procedures, making decisions. The problems arose not from having emotions, but from failing to let your feelings act as effective middle managers between your emotional responses and your conscious thoughts. Understanding what feelings are is one thing; expressing them is another matter entirely. Even though we know they’re important signals, many of us, even the most emotionally aware, struggle to put them into words. But feelings aren’t just internal experiences; they’re also expressions that we share with the world. Sometimes these expressions start as raw emotional outbursts, but they can evolve into something more profound. They can transform into art. ReferencesFeelings are conscious emotions. Emotions are subconscious feelings. This comes from Antonio Damasio, who has spent three decades making the case that the words feeling and emotion shouldn’t be used interchangeably; most fully in Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Harcourt, 2003), building on Descartes’ Error (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (1999). You can thank micro-expressions for giving you away. Micro-expressions were first noticed by Ernest Haggard and Kenneth Isaacs, “Micromomentary Facial Expressions as Indicators of Ego Mechanisms in Psychotherapy” (in Methods of Research in Psychotherapy, 1966), who found them by accident while scanning psychotherapy session films frame by frame. Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen rediscovered and named them three years later, independently, while reviewing a film of a suicidal patient hiding her true state from her psychiatrist: Ekman and Friesen, “Nonverbal Leakage and Clues to Deception,” Psychiatry, 1969. This is how happy people make us happy, sad people make us sad, and the way laugh tracks make us laugh. This is the theory of emotional contagion: Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson, Emotional Contagion (Cambridge University Press, 1994). The letters in the word FINE could just as well stand for Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional. This is folk wisdom rather than a scholarly claim. It circulates widely in twelve-step recovery culture (AA, Al-Anon) and shows up often enough elsewhere that no single coiner can be credited. Invite your friends and earn rewards
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