Friday, May 12, 2017

"Feel your feelings"

That's a bit of advice I keep seeing. It's pretty good advice, to a point. In order for this advice to be any good to you, however , you need to know how to feel them.
Your goal is to extract the greatest experience of flavor from the rum, so don't be in a rush to decide whether you "like" a particular rum or not. Suspend judgment for as long as you can. The minute you decide that you "like" the rum (or not) you stop noticing the rum and start paying attention to your judgment. Your evaluation gets in the way of your perception and tasting is a game of sharpening perception. (from A Short Course in Rum by Lynn Hoffman)
That advice can be applied to a far-wider range of experiences than just tasting rum.

One place that definitely can be applied is to feeling your feelings. Start off by noticing them. Just sit, or stand, there and feel what you are feeling. Suspend judgment as to what these feelings mean, whether they are good or bad and what you have to do about them.

Since reading his book two years ago, I've come to think that Mr. Hoffman is correct in that if you start paying attention to your judgment you lose touch with thing you should be experiencing. He's too polite to say so but the further problem is that your judgment tends to become a performance. You want people to know what you think and you want them to be impressed that you have the sort of fine, discerning tastes that they should respect.

Feelings are no different. When I decide I'm feeling sad, or happy, or vindicated I don't just get stuck on that judgment, I start to behave in accord with it. My "feeling" becomes a performance. It's a way, I suppose, of paying attention to my judgment and it rapidly becomes a way of getting others to pay attention as well. I don't think it's healthy.

Sometimes understanding the lesson is a simple matter of paying close attention to the language used. Compare these two expressions:

  1. Feel your feelings
  2. Express your feelings

Those are two very different expressions and yet the second is often offered as a replacement for the first. We're often told that we should learn to express our feelings. That is good advice if there is some positive benefit to letting others know how we're feeling. Oftentimes, however, people tell us that expressing our feelings is a way of "getting them out", as if expressing them was a way of letting off steam that might otherwise cause our internal boiler to explode. If little boys, for example, aren't taught to express their feelings they will learn the habit of bottling them up and, boom, male suicide rates will spike.

And male suicide rates have risen so it all seems vindicated.

Except for one tiny problem and that is that male suicide rates have risen. They used to be lower back when men were taught not to express their feelings. That doesn't prove that expressing their feelings has made men more likely to commit suicide. There may be other factors at play. There almost certainly are. It does, however, cast serious doubt on the claim that rising suicide rates are proof that men need to "express" their feelings.

The thing about expressing feelings is that, as Hoffman tells us,  it tends to validate our judgments about them and, therefore, to amplify to replace our actual feelings with a need to validate our judgments. You can prove this for yourself with a simple experiment. Next time you're all alone, think of some past betrayal. Say out loud what happened and then say how angry it made you. Just keep talking about it, expressing your anger. It's a virtual certainty that your voice will rise and your feelings will get stronger and stronger. If you really let it go, you'll work yourself up into an intense rage. If we're honest with ourselves, we will realize that this will work even if our judgment about this past betrayal is wrong, even if we were not actually betrayed.

If you tell yourself you're sad, or angry, or jealous, you will start to feel that way even though, and this is the really important thing, you might be wrong about how you're feeling.

Far better to feel your feelings. Just spend sometime noticing yourself and what you're reactions are instead.

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