What are Feelings and When Should You Be in Touch?

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 a response 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.

Fear
Imagine your doctor has said you might have a dread disease, so he wants you to get some tests done today. That should get your attention immediately. It made you briefly feel afraid you were going to die. The evidence of the fear was the fact that you canceled everything else you were planning on doing, in favor of those tests. Then you sensibly chose not to dwell in fear, telling yourself it was too early to freak out, for the tests might show you don’t have the dread disease, after all. You sent your fear into the subconscious by turning your attention to other things. Some feelings can be so strong they occupy all your consciousness, become obsessive, and make you forget everything else. Then you need to turn away from them. They never go far.

The difference between an emotion and a feeling is the presence of consciousness. You 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, come up with a quick plan of how to respond, 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. You might not have been aware of any of this, the sensations of fear are sometimes subtle, but people who know you well might notice. They’d pick up on some vibes and know you’re on edge. They have this ability to intuit your emotions so they can be warned of a threat, also.

As you went through the day, getting more and more tests done, feelings of fear were apt to return to consciousness in new forms. In addition to the fear of death, you became afraid of what all this was going to cost, afraid people will start treating you like an invalid, afraid your illness will curtail your activities, afraid your wife will be worried and nag you about your health, afraid that going to the doctor will be your life from now on. It was as if you were examining the 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 was not so prevalent because it had been cast into a shadow. If you were to keep the fear of death in the shadow while the fear of cost was in the light, you might ditch the tests to save a few bucks.

Many feelings are multidimensional in this way. You must sustain consciousness before you understand them fully. This is why, in therapy, we analyze things to death, going over significant events time and time again. It’s why therapy of insight takes so long. 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.

Lust
You sent all those new fears into the dark, just like the original one. As the day progressed, you had quite an array of emotions, none of which rose to the level of consciousness. One of the nurses was cute, so you had the emotion of lust. The evidence of this was how your heart skipped a beat when she came in the room. She may have caught a lecherous look on your face, but is so used to it, never allowed it into her consciousness, either. Your body was getting ready for sex, without you knowing it. You didn’t call it lust, for you weren’t conscious of it. You didn’t call it anything at all. If you were to become cognizant of lust, you might reject it, saying it was inappropriate for the circumstances, porno tropes aside, and suppress 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. What began as nameless lust can be adapted to become enchantment.

Shame
Then the nurse broke the spell she had on you by giving you one of those ridiculous hospital gowns to wear. When she returned and saw you in it, your subconscious lust gave way to shame. A blush gave you away. Your body communicated its shame, which is to say that it acknowledged that sitting bare-assed in front of a fully clothed stranger violated social norms. The contrast between her perfect appearance and your far-from-perfect one was obvious, so you endured a reduction in status, compared to her. She was the top dog now, and you had your tail between your legs. 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’re a sex pervert, half naked in front of a stranger. You were told to put on that gown. Embarrassment is a less severe version of shame, a feeling that carries less moral condemnation.

Again, shame, like any emotion, does a fine job of communicating inferiority to others without you ever being conscious of it. But, if you were to get more conscious of feelings, you’d be able to spot small differences between them with more granularity. You’d be able to put your shame in context, change your focus, and understand your shame in a way that was impossible when it was subconscious. You’d be able to see that you were not at fault for flashing your ass at a pretty nurse.

This is why we shrinks 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. Shame is a big, dumb, crushing emotion that can be cut down to size by talking about it. People unnecessarily carry shame for all kinds of terrible reasons: because of their race, family background, intrusive thoughts, or bad behavior everyone else has forgiven. Because shame is such an ugly, uncomfortable emotion, people often push it down into the subconscious, where they don’t have to know about it. However, it continues to affect them. If they were to know about their shame and process it in the clear light of consciousness, they might relieve themselves of such a heavy burden.

Feeling FINE
After 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, much less that you briefly fell in love with a nurse. 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 wouldn’t you be 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 lustful and ashamed. 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.

Intuition
Although 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.

Intuition generally operates on an emotional level. That is, you’re not conscious that the emotion of another has been transmitted to you and cannot say how you know what you know. However, to the degree you’re in touch with your emotions, you can be in touch with your intuition. You’ll experience your intuition as a gut feeling. This is one reason it would be good to understand feelings. You’ll be better at understanding other people. It would make you a good poker player. You’d be better at picking up on tells.

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. Intuition is better at answering questions about emotions like, is my poker opponent happy with his hand? rather than something concrete like, what card did he just draw? If you want to know what your opponent drew, count cards. If you want to know if he’s bluffing, get in touch with your feelings.

Powerlessness
A 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.

Moods
You 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. If you let your mood, go too far, it can become a full-blown mental illness, like depression. Then attempting to push down the depression can contribute to a substance use disorder or an intermittent explosive disorder.

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 of the tests. 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 does not 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.

The guy who doesn’t know his feelings is like a guy who has a car making strange noises. He may be so ignorant about cars, he can’t even hear the noise; or, if he does hear it, all he can say is it’s a noise. The guy who doesn’t know his feelings doesn’t know why he’s acting the way he does. All he has are emotions. If he feels anything, he’ll say he feels stress. Saying you feel stress is as vague as saying your car’s making a weird noise. He needs to get a shrink to get under the hood and recognize what he’s feeling.

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.

Rational Thought
Emotions, feelings, consciousness, and thoughts are 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. It can see the big picture. Consciousness is like the CEO’s private secretary, controlling access to her boss, so he doesn’t have to deal with every little thing. Feelings are like the middle managers. A good middle manager represents the workers to the executives and vice versa. They listen to the workers, let the CEO know what they’re up against, and communicate policies and directives down from 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 emotions, 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 executives, 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.