'I need to feel my feelings'
'I'm just avoiding my feelings'
'I need to learn to sit with my feelings'
'I need to know my feelings are valid'
'I need to honour my experience'
Etc.
I don't know about you, but I feel a lot. If I stop and ask
myself whether I'm feeling something, I probably am. If I concentrate really
hard, I can usually find some apprehension, dissatisfaction, something
simmering and unnameable somewhere just below the surface like a nascent boil.
Of course, I will sometimes be overwhelmed by waves of emotion coming seemingly
from nowhere. And sometimes I deliberately ask myself what I 'feel' about a
situation as part of the decision-making process.
However, what I feel is not the point.
Yesterday, I was presented with a possible decision to make,
and my initial 'emotional' response was one of great apprehension and guilt.
For a moment, I thought, 'I just need to "listen" to that "instinct"
and take it seriously'. Fortunately, I came to my senses and realised, once I
was away from the situation and had time and space to talk to a friend, that
the situation required cold analysis, not blind obedience to emotion. I took
the situation and, using my feelings as a guide, asked myself what the pros and
cons were. Some of the pros and cons were suggested by emotional responses.
Others revealed themselves only on objective appraisal of the situation.
Lesson № 1: feelings alone produce a limited navigation
system.
What I then observed was that some of the objections were
entirely valid (the venture might have little purpose, and may not prove 'value
for money'), whilst others essentially boiled down to fear of having my
'buttons pressed', i.e. having to show strength of character in the face of a
potentially difficult situation. Cowardice and laziness will very often
masquerade as legitimate fear or apprehension.
Lesson № 2: feelings alone produce a skewed navigation
system.
'I need to feel my feelings' or 'I'm just avoiding my feelings'
Well, your choice with a feeling is either to feel it and
accept that you are feeling or feel it and pretend that you are not feeling it.
If you have ever had a bad feeling (fear, guilt, frustration) and tried to
command yourself not to feel said feeling (with no other injunction other than
to stop feeling), you will have rapidly discovered this to be impossible.
Likewise, I have never been successful in prompting feelings of warmth, affection,
or enthusiasm by dictate or order. I cannot choose to feel or not to feel.
It is equally useless to pretend I am not feeling something.
It is like pretending I do not have diarrhoea. Even if I succeed in deceiving
myself, no one else will be in any doubt.
The levers that can be pulled are thought and action. If
there a difficult situation in my life, e.g. a past romantic disappointment, I
can deliberately think about the negative situation and magnify the emotion
through mental concentration. I can pull a Miss Havisham and renounce romantic
involvement, thus crystallising my victimhood in perpetuity. Alternatively, I
can deliberately think about something else. I can also take action that takes
my mind off the situation or indeed moves my life forward such that the romantic
disappointment becomes irrelevant (e.g. taking the positive action of joining a
dating website and going on a date). By adopting one or other course, I rapidly
prove that if I want my feelings to change, I will need to change my thought or
my action.
I've heard people assert that engaging in good things (e.g.
work, doing things for others, prayer, etc.) is just 'avoiding one's feelings' and
a form of 'spiritually acceptable denial'—essentially 'fixing oneself' (as
though it were a deleterious drug). This is on the basis that, when one engages
in such activities, one quite forgets the earlier upset. This does not mean one
has gone into denial: it means merely one has regained perspective and
re-accessed the truth of the benignity of the world. When you switch on the
light and discover that the ghosts you discerned in the darkness are unreal,
you are not in denial; you are in reality.
One caveat: it is possible to use excessive activity to
avoid a matter that must be faced: some decision or action that needs to be
taken or some fear, resentment, or shame that requires a cognitive adjustment
for peace to be achieved or restored.
It is important to discern between this illegitimate
avoidance and the decision not to over-indulge negative emotion. It should be
noted, in particular, that illegitimate avoidance is avoidance not necessarily of
feeling but of inventory, confession, humility before God, restitution, and true
service. The problem is not one of feeling but one of resistance to change.
'I need to learn to sit with my feelings'
Whether or not this is valid depends on the situation.
If it means, 'I need to stop rushing round for long enough
to admit the truth of what I feel, examine objectively the thoughts and actions
that have given rise to it, and make a decision to trust God with regard to
what I cannot change and seek God's guidance and strength with regard to what I
can change', then this is wonderful advice. Very often, I can trace my
defective thinking (for from this flows all evil) only through negative emotion
as the gateway. It is no accident that the first two inventories forming part
of Step Four in the Big Book concern resentment (disturbance at what was or is)
and fear (disturbance at what may be): we are most acutely aware of emotion,
and it might only be via emotion that we can access the cognitive culprits in
the recesses of our minds: the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs (cf. page 27 of Alcoholics Anonymous) that need to change.
If it means simply retreating from outward-turned action and
refraining from the mental discipline of turning thoughts towards the positive,
instead indulging the emotion, replaying past and future scenarios of doom, and
refusing to pick up the critical scalpel of the Steps to actually address the underlying
causes, it is deadly.
Sadly, this injunction all too often means the latter: a
friend, who was going through a difficult time a few years ago, asked an
acquaintance what to do. The acquaintance suggested sitting with her feelings …
and nothing else. I have never found this effective as a cure-all.
Postscript: one must certainly not berate oneself for
feeling something. Whether one feels this or that is a matter not of the will
but of cause and effect: if I think and act in a certain way, I will feel a
certain way; target for criticism, if anything, the thought and action, not the
feeling.
'I need to know my feelings are
valid' or 'I need to honour my experience'
An AA member memorably recalls
her sponsor saying, 'We're not going to be talking about emotions. Cuz they're
based on a delusional mindset. They're based on something that isn't there.
Let's talk about delusion,' (anyone who was at Stateline in 2010 may remember
who this was!)
This is the rub: whatever
events occur or circumstances prevail in my life, what I feel is not a direct
response to such. Before I feel anything, there is cognitive processing. My
ideas, attitudes, and beliefs condition what I feel. My feelings are neither
valid nor invalid: they just are. What I can legitimately judge as valid or
invalid are my ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. Are these rational? Are these to
be trusted or disregarded? Do they help or hinder? Do they move me forward or
hold me back? Do they leave me paralysed by self-pity or render me useful to
others?
Some of us have had very bad experiences.
I suffered some particularly unpleasant events as a child. The events were
real, and the feelings were real. If a feeling is there, it is real; there is
no question of that. I also drew conclusions about myself based on these
events: 'I'm a bad person', 'I'm sick', 'I'm different than others', 'I'm
spoiled forever'. These conclusions, too, prompted plenty of emotion. Was that
emotion valid? Wrong question: the emotion was real, but based on invalid
interpretations. To examine critically the false ideas, attitudes, and beliefs
is not to disrespect the person or pretend the foul event or circumstance is
not there but to create the conditions in which the evil spell can be lifted.
To conclude: I will continue to
feel whatever I feel, but I must be careful not to navigate solely by emotion,
and I must not balk at questioning the underlying ideas, attitudes, and beliefs,
if I am to get and stay well.