Are we our feelings?

I just completed a short webinar, “Calming the Emotional Storms," for year-end professional education credits. This consisted of a mini-palette of techniques and principles in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, while the presenter made the disclaimer that she uses DBT to treat a variety of problems, not just Borderline Personality. Here were the main topics: role of mindfulness in emotion regulation; importance of naming and validating emotions; opposite to emotion action (where one forces a behavior that is “opposite” to what the destructive emotion would naturally compel); nonjudgmental stance; accumulating positives; cope ahead (creative visualization). As this was an interactive seminar, I typed in a comment as the presenter talked about assuaging painful emotions. I said that therapists may need to have the client question her naming of a feeling, micro-explore what her actual experience was. For example, she may feel “guilt” in wide swaths of her life, yet the therapist will point out that it can’t be guilt she feels, as “you didn’t do anything wrong.” What has happened is that in her remote history, “someone made you feel bad about yourself.” The webinar presenter did not understand my meaning. It was literally too deep for her agenda, which was the manipulation of emotions as surfacely experienced in order to feel better. She thought I was merely in favor of “validating” the client’s feeling, not x-raying, revealing, transmuting it.

But the presentation brought me back to a perennial question or conundrum; actually, one that I have neglected to inspect through the two decades of my practice: How much of our feeling do we accept as who we are and how much do we reject?

The webinar used “shame” as an example, basically channeling President Coolidge’s comment on the preacher’s attitude about sin: “He’s against it.” One shouldn’t drown in it, the DBT folks might say. But I think of shame as, according to Donald Dutton, the primary factor in a boy’s life – injected by his abusive father – that will lead to his becoming domestically violent later on. So if I am working with a perpetrator, don’t I want him to feel the buried-but-alive shame that grew a toxic and barbed wire surface that hurts people? Yes. I would not DBT it away. But this wouldn’t be just a matter of “staying with" such a terrible feeling. It would also be the “working through” – grieving long and hard a childhood.

Other feelings: Does someone “feel” suicidal? Or does he feel awful – maybe cavernously empty – and then allow fatalistic thoughts to give definition to the feeling? I want someone to feel the worst,* to let it pour out into the caring vessel of the therapist. But not if the dire thinking remains clutched to the body emotion. Then there would first have to be a surgical separation of thought and feeling. Anger, too. The “opposite to emotion action,” according to Emotion Regulation skills, would be to resist the “urge” to “attack,” and instead “gently avoid” and “be civil.” But brute-forcing nobility and passivity will not mitigate anger. I want the person to feel the full chemistry of it. There will be profound frustration, profound hurt – the child's hurt – within it. The anger is legitimate, but it is just a devolution of the other feelings.

In our daily lives we will have countless moods, each of which will feel to be our true nature during its moment. I, myself, have experienced infinitely more transitory moods and emotions following my epiphanic defense-busting and newfound health twenty-six years ago, than I had felt in the forty-two years before it. Are they “me,” as they seem, or just waves upon a deeper and abiding ocean? One mood state feels like my identity forever. Should I somehow reject it, waiting for a better one? Is there a deeper Self, or just a chain of feelings loosened, a broken-open kaleidoscope? As they seem.

I’ve written before (“Our thinking”) about thinking as a prosthetic support that grows when pain and absence of identity-feeling have made it impossible to move well into adulthood, to carry out our lives. We have reversed, as Vereshack described, the feeling-thinking axis to be cognitive-heavy people, unlike children. I have to wonder if this means (though this would be a conclusion of “pure logic” not clinical research) that most of our feelings must be negative and unsustainable, thanks to our history as birth-traumatized and injured children. If we need to live mostly on the terrain of our beliefs and philosophies (as corrupt and rationalized and delusional as many of them are), wouldn’t that mean we can’t trust our sickness to hold us up?

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* Paul Vereshack's on-line book: “THE CENTRAL PARADOX of all experiential therapy emerged, which is that, when we move to the absolute feeling centre of the most painful and the worst that has ever happened to us, barriers within the mind collapse, the pain is experienced and an emotional completion occurs.”