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Emotions and Intellect
As I mentioned in my introduction, humans utilize emotion and intellect to process our experiences in life.
I want to try to explain the differences between the two. This is important because our culture encourages us to focus on intellectual functioning. Our entire academic process from Kindergarten through a Ph. D. is about ignoring or denying our emotions, and uplifting thought and beliefs. We are even taught that our emotions are detrimental, that they get in the way of “logical thinking.” There are no courses in school about our emotions, how to process them and respond to them. The only model we have is what we see at home. If we have a functioning family, we learn to process our emotions from our family.
But the defining rule in a dysfunctional family is “Don’t feel, don’t talk about feelings, no matter what.” It doesn’t even have to be spoken, it is so powerful, everyone just knows. So in a dysfunctional family we learn that our emotions are our enemy, we learn to suppress them, not talk about them, dismiss them as “childish” or “immature.”
Our current use of language does not help. For a long time, English speakers were very clear about “I feel” and “I believe.” Declaring each process, before stating the rest of the sentence.
In the 1970s in the United States, we all became more “politically” correct and conscious of not wanting to offend anyone. We were exploring the tricky landscape of diversity. So we all started saying “I feel” when we were actually stating an opinion, which is a belief. This practice has permeated our language, and as innocent as it may seem, it is very confusing in terms of identifying difficult emotions and articulating them.
This is one of those subtle but significant uses of language that is very important to a person in life, who is dealing with difficult emotions.
So instead of saying “I believe that I should not do this thing because it is risky and I am uncomfortable with that risk” we say “I feel that it is risky.” Notice how the second statement denies our emotional process. This is one very simple example of what I am talking about. The emotionally functioning person declares their emotions with relative comfort (“I am uncomfortable with that risk”).
Try this exercise, notice how many times you open a sentence with “I feel” and then go on to EXPLAIN something. It’s pervasive. We say things like “I feel that the Droid phone is better than an iPhone.” What we really mean is “I BELIEVE that the Droid phone is better than an iPhone.”
Basic sixth grade English, “A sentence is a complete thought.” Emphasis here in THOUGHT, which is a part of intellectual functioning, not emotions.
So a lot of us in this culture are either unaware of our emotions, and often consider our hard emotions to be unwanted intruders into our daily life. A “hard” emotion is one that is not received easily by others, risks us being ostracized from our family and friends, and even potentially cast out of society. Many of our fears are dealt with by ignoring them until they ambush us. We just don’t talk about these feelings. Admitting to them is too frightening.
A good example of this was a moment I had over the phone with my father years ago. It was in the last months of his life, with advanced congestive heart failure, he often spent nights unable to sleep, fighting for breath. He told me that he had been up most of the night, forcing breathing because of the fluid accumulation in his lung cavity. I said to him, “That must be very frightening” to which he shot back, “I’ve never been afraid of anything in my life !!”
For his generation in particular, part of what Tom Brokaw calls “The Greatest Generation” having survived the Great Depression and World War II, fear was not an option, so admitting it was out of the question.
Unlike Mr. Brokaw, I cannot enshrine these folks as somehow being better than the rest of us. I just know that being afraid and remaining paralyzed in that fear was not an option for them. And what Mr. Brokaw perhaps has not considered was the elevated suicide levels and extreme alcohol consumption that accompanied our parents suppressing those fears, not to mention family violence and a host of other maladies that their children had to deal with. The youth rebellions of the 50s and 60s was a direct outcome of the “hard times” that our parents survived.
So I just think of them as a most emotionally repressed generation, and it is why many of them became such mean and difficult people in their old age.
My aunt Louise (her story is here) once told me that in the late 1940s or early 1950s she was so unhappy, angry and filled with resentments that she gave herself cancer. There were few treatments in those days, so part of her healing was becoming a Christian Scientist, where she learned that forgiveness was essential to healing.
Repression of emotions is lethal. It is the root cause of many physical illnesses and a lot of family discord and violence. In this culture, we often express difficult emotions with silence. We just don’t know what to say, so we say nothing.
One of the first tools to identifying our emotions is to utilize this simple tool of stating our feelings with one word, without explanation, in a way that remains in the present tense. Feelings are always in the “here and now.” They don’t require explanation or embellishment, at least initially.
Try this simple exercise. Sit quietly and consider your body, then starting at your feet, slowly describe the experience of sitting and what it feels like. It might go something like this, “I feel my feet in my socks, the shoes around them are (loose, tight, comfortable), my legs are held up by the floor (or dangling), my thighs are pressed against the chair, my back is slouched against the wood of the back,” etc.
Once you identify that, use the same process to describe your feelings. As I sit in my desk chair, typing this, I can say, “I feel content” (that I am finally putting this down in writing) “I feel pain” (in my hands, arthritis). “I feel excited” (about writing and sharing this). “I feel anxious” (about possible criticism from others about this).
Emotions ONLY exist in the present. They are the essential “I AM” that God used to describe himself to Moses from the burning bush. This why people often will share about a moment, in an idyllic setting, or in religious worship or meditation, in which they felt close to God. It is my belief that being in the present, the “here and now” is living in the “I AM” state that God is always living in. It is being close to, and in communion with God.
The moment we use a sentence to explain ourselves, we are no longer acknowledging our present emotions, but rather sharing thoughts about past emotions, or speculation about future experiences.
We are talking ABOUT our emotions, but not actually feeling them.
Emotions are an incongruent and often illogical set of experiences that co-exist within all of us. We don’t need to “fix” them, and we can’t really change them very much, but if we honestly acknowledge them, we have a better chance of using them to process our lives in a healthy way that enhances our satisfaction in life.
The most important thing is to stop trying to control or predict your emotions. You can always control your behavior, your response to your emotions.
The best you can do is acknowledge how you feel, honestly, and use your feelings as a partner in your journey through life.
More will be revealed.
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