How Do You Feel About That? Part Two

While speaking to a group I was recently asked “What is therapy good for when all you guys do is ask over and over again about how someone feels?  How is that helpful?”

This is Part Two of a blog series where I try to answer that very important question and in this second installment we explore why a savvy understanding of feelings is so important for healthy relating.

As we reviewed in Part One, feelings begin with emotions that are bodily sensations generated by the nervous system. They are connected to survival in sensing what we should move toward and pursue as an opportunity, as well as what we should move away from as a potential threat.  It is normal that intimacy and closeness with another person will stimulate intense emotional states in us (both good and bad) because intimacy triggers issues of vulnerability and dependency in ways that more superficial relationships do not.

In your closest relationships, if you do not understand how feelings work, we will often rely on two polar extremes based on our upbringing and family history as a way of dealing with intimacy.   One extreme style relies too heavily on emotions and lets feelings run the show too much of the time. A strong focus on emotions in your intimate relationship is a style that can be helpful for passion and depth of feeling, but too much of this can ultimately be overwhelming and has the potential to create a lot of instability over time; this is because feelings are ever changing so of course the relationship would be more turbulent.  The other extreme is a style that eschews emotions relying instead on logic and mental calculus. This style can be experienced as cold, sterile, and too ridged and inflexible to sustain a satisfying and warm intimate relationship over time.  The happy medium is to be in touch with your deep emotional life while learning to regulate intense emotions and integrating feelings with higher thinking, too.  In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) we teach about the integration of Emotion Mind with Rational Mind to form a more balanced perspective that gives us Wise Mind.

(Wouldn’t it be great if some of our leaders and entertainers would practice Wise Mind?)

Also, intimate relationships are inherently complex and so are feelings.  How you feel can very easily get confused with how your partner is feeling. Example: Let’s say you are happily preparing dinner when your partner arrives home from work in a bad mood. You can tell by the way the door is slammed as well as the look on their face. Do you immediately become anxious and unhappy because your partner appears anxious and unhappy? If you would likely answer yes, you are probably experiencing emotional contagion. Emotions have a way of being contagious especially when we don’t understand them well. In this example the skill needed is boundaries. Boundaries are critically important if you wish to maintain healthy intimacy. Without a good understanding of boundaries, people can get all tangled up in a mess of merged feelings with loved ones that can cause a lot of unnecessary confusion and strife.

Finally, it is important to become savvy about your internal feelings states because humans have a tendency to externalize. This means that when we feel especially bad but we can’t own or even identify unpleasant internal states, we will often externalize our bad feelings and see them as coming from “outside” of ourselves. This shows-up most often in blaming others for how we feel and also blaming others for how we choose to respond to our own feeling states.  Instead of taking ownership, we make it all about someone else.  Very often we blame our intimate partner, and this can be very damaging for relationships.

Brene’ Brown has a fantastic short video about blame that is worth checking-out here:

Another kind of externalization is projection. This can happen when we have learned to disown negative feeling states, such as anger. If we are unable to identify our own anger we will start seeing it as a problem for others while continuing to disavow it in ourselves. What does this look like in real life?  Projection can be crazy-making.  If we project anger, we might tend to complain a lot about the angry behavior we see in others while angrily denying that we ourselves feel angry.  See?  Crazy making!  With significant lack of awareness we may even sometimes create situations where others eventually act-out our anger for us. No one is perfect nor should we expect perfection, however, the more skilled you are with feelings the less you will fall into these kind of traps.

I hope these two blogs have helped answer why therapists focus on feelings and why becoming savvy in this area is so critically important.  We have very few role models in public life right now that demonstrate a mature and balanced blend of emotion and intellect.  And the younger generations are fixated much of the time on personal devices rather than practicing skill with human interactions and complex feelings.  It is truly in your best interest and in the interest of our society and culture to become savvy about feelings and emotions.

It is my hope that this leaves you feeling eager to learn more!