Some feelings can fake you out. That is, they don’t match the corresponding emotion.
Let me tell you the difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings are conscious emotions. Emotions are subconscious feelings. If someone were to come up to me and tell me how much they loved my books, I would spontaneously stand a little straighter, put my shoulders back, and have a positive opinion of myself. If I was conscious of this, I’d say I felt proud. Pride, in this case, would be a feeling originating from an instinctive emotional response.
I Am Humbled to Receive This Award
Unfortunately, pride is a complicated feeling for me. I was taught by my culture to be suspicious of it. Pride comes before the fall. It’s one of the seven deadly sins, associated with arrogance, hubris, vanity, and all that. Consequently, I’m on guard against pride. I can’t stop myself from having a spontaneous prideful reaction, the emotion of pride, but when I admit feeling proud, it’s as if I’m confessing a flaw. Instead, I try to act humble.
Humility, in this case, could be called a phony feeling, trotted out to conceal my pride. You’ll often hear people say they feel humbled to receive an award. They’re probably doing the same thing. They don’t want to appear proud. They may, like me, not even want to admit to themselves they’re proud, so they claim to be humble, instead. I can sometimes feel myself going from pride one second to feeling ashamed of feeling proud the next, without any deliberate direction on my part.
Some would call this kind of humility a phony feeling, but is it, really? It’s phony in that it doesn’t come naturally. It’s secondary to pride. You could call it a mask that I put on to be acceptable to others. You could also say that I’m fooling myself by saying that I’m humbled. It’s the worse sort of denial, the crudest ego defense.
However, I don’t think humility, in this case, is entirely phony. It would be more accurate to call it a revised feeling. If you think of it in terms of predictive text, pride is the word your phone suggests when it thinks it knows what you’re going to say; but humility is the word you replace it with.
When someone praises me, the emotion of pride quickly prepares me to accept a higher status. Like any superior, I stand straighter, so I can be seen; I put my shoulders back, so I can be heard; and I have a high opinion of myself, so I can lead. What we call pride are the tools necessary to command people in a crisis. Emotions are primarily concerned with preparing us for crises, when we don’t have time to think, so it makes capable people proud, so they can take charge.
Leadership, when there is no crisis, requires a more deft, nuanced approach. I can’t appear to be too uppity, or I’ll be resented. I must be a man of the people, so the people can trust me. Accordingly, when there is no crisis, I correct my pride with a measure of humility. I would argue that this humility is just as real as the pride it’s hiding. The mask you choose is as authentic a feeling as what lies beneath. Appearances do matter.
Metaphorical Feelings
One type of feeling that doesn’t match a corresponding emotion is what I call a metaphorical feeling. For instance, when somebody says they’re in pain, you don’t know if they’re referring to physical pain or what is called emotional pain (incorrectly). Despite the term, the only one of the two that matches the corresponding emotion is physical pain, therefore I prefer to call emotional pain metaphorical.
Metaphorical pain is not the same thing as burning your hand on a hot stove even though there are striking similarities. Nociception is absent and, in most cases, there’s no adrenaline rush. Everything else is the same, which is why many use the same word, pain, to describe somewhat different experiences. With metaphorical pain, like when your friend dies, you get a hot, searing jolt of grief that’s not actually hot and searing. Hot and searing are used as metaphors, as is pain in this case. A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes something in a way that’s not literally true. When someone says they’re in pain because their friend died, they are actually in grief, but the grief is so intense it’s as if they were in pain.
I’m not saying that metaphorical pain isn’t real. All I’m saying is, in taking the experience of physical pain and using it to describe what you feel when your friend dies, there are some things that are going to match and others that don’t.
It’s important to know what metaphors can do for us and the ways they fall short. For instance, if I say to someone, You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, I’m not saying that they have long, soft, silky ears. Using the metaphor of a hound dog is a vivid way of illustrating that they’ve been pestering me a lot and won’t take no for an answer. It some ways the metaphor fits, in other ways it doesn’t. No person is a perfect match for a hound dog.
In the same way, you may say you’re in pain when your friend dies, but you aren’t actually in pain in the same way you are when you burn your hand. You’re metaphorically in pain.
If you listen, you’ll catch people using feelings as metaphors all the time. Yesterday, someone said to me, I get anxious when I have to speak in front of a group of people. I asked where she felt the anxiety on her body. Did she have butterflies in her stomach, nausea, a racing heart, difficulty breathing? She had none of those. What she meant was that she was eager to do it, was very focused on her performance, and could imagine saying something wrong. I’m glad I asked those questions because what she was experiencing was not anxiety, strictly speaking. I might have concluded she had a social phobia when she was really just describing a pretty normal and desirable state of being prepared to give a speech.
This woman used feelings as metaphors several times when we were speaking. She said she was afraid of saying something wrong, when, as I discovered after questioning her further, she really meant she could imagine saying something wrong. She said she was worried when she was focused, nervous when she was eager. In every case, she was using a feeling word as a metaphor.
If I wanted to be super rigid, when she said she had a feeling, I should have insisted she refer to an experience that includes a body sensation. There was a big difference between she, who gave the speech and did fine, and someone else who might have been so nauseous and unable to breathe that they couldn’t go on. That person would have been truly anxious.
Now, I don’t go around correcting people who use feelings as metaphor, nor should you. It’s really fine with me if they do. I’m just pointing out a distinction that can be confusing if you’re not aware. I also want to warn you of what might happen if you take your own metaphors too seriously. They can capture you and not let you go.
Let’s take the woman who’s preparing to give a speech. She’s eager, focused, and can imagine saying something wrong. If she calls this anxiety, she might mistake her condition as more serious than it is, as I almost did. She has something in common with a person so nauseous and unable to breathe that they couldn’t go on. They both have the same thoughts, but they don’t have the same feelings. She has as much in common with that person as a pestering individual has with a hound dog. She is at risk of being captured by a metaphor.
Being captured by a metaphor is an awful thing. It’s easy to get in their clutches and hard to escape. This is how it happens. First, you use a metaphor to capture a meaning. You say to that guy who won’t take no for an answer, You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog. The description seems so apt that you always think of him as a hound dog and start treating him as such. Then you start thinking of anyone who asks anything of you as a hound dog even though they’re deferential and respectful. Before you know it, all men are hound dogs. You can’t think outside of the metaphor. You’re its prisoner.
Now, in the case of the woman who’s preparing to speak, she notices that she’s eager, focused, and can imagine saying something wrong. She’s ready to give a speech, but she doesn’t say that about herself. If she says she’s anxious, she starts to think that she’s just like the people she’s seen who are so nauseous and unable to breathe they couldn’t go on. Then, she imagines this happening to her. The next thing she knows, she’s starting to get nauseous, frenzied, and unable to breathe. She thought of herself as anxious until she became anxious. See how that works?
Go ahead and use metaphors to describe your feelings if you want to; but know their limits. Don’t confuse a metaphor for the real thing.
How Do You Really Feel?
People will sometimes ask how you really feel. How do you answer?
Let’s set aside the answer they seem to want to hear. Do you still love me? Are you sorry? Do you think I’m getting fat? Are you as worried as I am about this operation I’m having? In those cases, you know what you’re supposed to say. These aren’t real questions. They’re bids for reassurance. It’s not necessary for you to search deep within your soul for the answer. The only thing you need to consider is whether to reassure her.
I’m talking about the times when you really need to know how you feel. You’re trying to make a choice, you compare costs, benefits, and features, but can’t decide what to do. It’s sometimes not an easy matter to know how you feel. People will tell you to go with your gut, but is your gut trying to say anything, or is that indigestion?
Let’s take a look at a guy who’s unhappy in his marriage. He admits to me, his therapist, that he’s unhappy, but he can’t decide whether he’s so unhappy that he must end it. Ending his marriage would upset his family and affect his finances, so he’s not sure it’s worth it.
The first feelings to look at are the feelings he’s showing to others. These are generally the most polite, least objectionable version of his feelings he can come up with. They’re called the public face, the mask, or the persona. Most of us cultivate our personas as carefully as we edit our social media pages. Indeed, social media pages are other, virtual versions of the persona. You probably possess several personas, some for work, others for family, and another for each circle of friends.
In public, this man plays the part of the happily married man. None of his friends, or even his children suspect there are problems in the marriage. However, the fact that he is respectful, considerate, and deferential towards his wife in public matters. The fact that he is mindful of how friends and children suffer when a couple is fighting in front of them, also matters. His masks are his real feelings. It’s just that those are not his only real feelings.
I’ve learned not to ask people how they really feel, for that privileges more primitive feelings over the revisions. Instead, I ask him what his other feelings are. They’re pretty mixed up. On one hand, he says she’s very annoying; but on the other hand, he’s learned to cope with it by calling it funny and remembering he has his quirks, too. He has overlooked a lot and forgiven the rest because he believes in preserving the marriage for the sake of the kids. However, the kids are grown, so he’s reconsidering whether it’s necessary to continue to set his own needs aside forever.
I press him to talk about why he calls his wife annoying. Then I learn that she’s critical of everything he does. They haven’t had sex in years. She spends as if there was no tomorrow and will not let him leave the home to spend time with his friends. Eventually, I meet her. She comes across to me as a selfish, castrating harpy who blames everyone but herself for everything. I find myself enraged by her for him.
The man’s natural feelings of rage have been repressed for so long that he barely knows he has them anymore. They are meant to protect him from abuse. By silencing his rage and downgrading it to feeling annoyed, he has declawed himself. His failure to check her may have created a monster. I want his rage to have equal airtime, a place at the conference table. On the other hand, I also admire him for being so patient, gracious, and committed that he put up with this for so long.
A therapist can sometimes sound as if he favors the more primitive, selfish, individualistic side of clients over the part that wants to get along. We’ve been accused of breaking up marriages. We often go too far in saying that only the most primitive, selfish, and individualistic feelings are real. It’s wrong to go that far, but that side must be given its due. Only if the man can get in touch with and acknowledge his rage, as well as his other feelings, can he know how he feels.
However, we needn’t stop with rage. He covers his rage with patience, but his rage is covering something else up. He feels hurt and betrayed by her, hopeless to change anything. The further we go, the more raw and uncomfortable the feelings are. What’s at the bottom of it all? It’s feelings all the way down.
Peeling the Onion
Finding your true feelings is like peeling an onion, not like cracking an egg. With eggs, there’s a clear division between the inside and the outside and, once you get in, you’re all the way in. Onions guard their insides more assiduously. You wouldn’t think so looking at the fragile skin they cover themselves with, which is easily rubbed off and sticks to your fingers. Onions are devious and defend themselves by raising a stink, bringing tears, and presenting layer after layer of vacant, unremarkable surface. Peel off one stratum and you’re presented with another until, at last, when you believe you’ve reached the core of the onion, you find that there is no core, there are only layers, in the end protecting nothing.
Maybe the fact that onions have nothing in their core is what makes them so preoccupied with security. They don’t want you to know the truth; the truth that they have no truth.
So, if people are like onions does this mean you have no real feelings? Is there nothing but layers of masks? What is your true self?
There are two ways of looking at this. One way is to say that all the layers of the onion are the onion, and all the layers of your feelings are your feelings.
The other way is to remind yourself that feelings are just names, words describing something indescribable. So, in that sense, none of your feelings are real. They are all guesses, approximations of how you’re experiencing yourself and the world.
What is your true self then? Well, who has been doing the peeling?
Keith Wilson - Counseling 
