We Can't Feel a Thought
On looking at our own filters through two words.
The first class for my master’s in clinical mental health counseling was challenging. This wasn’t so much because of the content itself–there was some of that, which you would expect that in any new area of study. It was more in really understanding what the program would require for self-reflection.
I have always been self-aware and able to reflect on personal experiences in order to grow my own knowledge and insight. This is part inherent and part built from years of yoga, both as a student and as a teacher. But when I think about where I am now vs. where I was in January 2022 at the start of school, there are some big differences. I am far less shy about expressing real emotional experiences. For the class I’m just wrapping up, we had a major assignment to create and write about our family genogram and consider what the process was like (a genogram is similar to a family tree but used to explore patterns within a family, so you might use it to understand substance use or communication habits, among other things). I pulled up some terms I do not think I have ever used before while writing and reflecting. I also do not think I have ever been more accurate in capturing my feelings, either.^
Counseling school has taught me ask far better questions, too. This is not just when it comes to mental health things, but in life more broadly. I think I have always been good at inquiry, but I have developed new perspectives and tools for getting people to share different things than maybe I had ever previously considered. Curiosity trumps all, and while asking questions might involve leading someone toward an answer, the best insight you get is when you’re truly asking from a place of wanting to understand. To see in a new or fresh way.
Then there’s the insight gleaned from the first class of my program back in January 2022 that impacts me every single day. I reconsidered my use of one phrase and it’s not only changed me as a person, but it has made me a stronger listener and a much more frank communicator, too. It’s this: I spend more time before saying the words “I feel” or “I think” and choose which is the appropriate phrase, not the one that allows me to escape a challenge.
I cannot speak to all of culture, even all of American culture, or even to all of the culture within my own town. But I think it is fair to say that on the whole, Americans are terrible about expressing emotion or feeling. It’s ground out of us as a result of our cultural upbringing, as well as our continued and stubborn beholdenness to capitalism. Until recently, social-emotional learning was not part of in public education. Anyone who has paid attention over the last few years knows that it has become more integrated and that is in and of itself under attack. Not only are we really bad at emotions, we are robbing the next generation of developing the tools for expressing and interpreting them because it undermines productivity.
Feelings force humanness into a system that would rather we don’t–we’re to be cogs in machines that make money.
There is one emotional thing we are good at though. We tend to believe that if someone has a feeling, it’s seen as irrefutable. There’s good reason for this. Feelings are subjective, and you can never know what someone is truly feeling. Crying or smiling or laughing or grimacing don’t actually tell you anything. They’re a symbol for a feeling, not necessarily the feeling itself.
There are only six universal emotions, even if there are thousands of possible other emotions to feel. Those feelings exist on gradients or with various shades or somewhere on a wheel, depending on how you choose to understand emotions (I personally find the wheel useful, especially when it’s depicted as connected to bodily sensations or to behavior). Accepting someone’s feeling is a good thing. Emotions are valid things.
But accepting someone’s feelings is also tricky. It opens the door for manipulation, especially in our culture, where it provides the perfect kindling for propaganda. If we are not good at expressing or talking about emotion, and we simply accept someone’s stated feeling, then they can wield that as a weapon.*
“I feel” are two words we regularly and easily slip into using in everyday conversation and in writing. But how often do those words actually mean what is intended and how often are they a protective shield from needing to do the deeper, harder work? “I think” requires a level of confidence that is much different than “I feel.” “I think” demands sometimes not having an answer but a willingness to wade into uncertainty.**
I watched this play out on a Facebook post recently. The topic was about needing gun control, and dozens of comments–all of which agreed guns are the problem when we see yet another mass shooting unfold, to be clear–couched a lack of knowledge and research or willingness to research under a feeling.
“I feel like only mentally ill people would buy assault rifles,” read one of the comments.
How do you argue with someone who feels that way? Most people wouldn’t.
That comment, while ostensibly one that agrees with the fact guns are the problem when it comes to why there are so many mass shootings in America, also throws all mentally ill people under the bus without pausing to reflect on the other factors at play. The commenter might feel that way, but that’s because saying “I think” is far scarier and more vulnerable.
“I think” invites the opposite to be true.
“You’re failing to address the ways in which guns are celebrated culturally, the ways in which they are revered as a status symbol, and the lengths to which a whole political party ardently defends the rights of people to own gun over the rights of people not to be shot,” I responded. “Millions of mentally ill people would never consider touching a gun, let alone go on a shooting spree. The intent in your statement might not be hurt, but the impact to the mentally ill people who see it is real.”
By “feeling” a way, it’s possible to dodge “thinking” a way. It is a defense mechanism. Social media lets us do it seamlessly.
I feel sad, annoyed, and disappointed that someone sees only mentally ill people attracted to guns. I think they have not done the work, the research, the deep intellectual effort to consider who falls under the umbrella of “mentally ill people,” and they fail to look broadly at the other factors that make guns sexy in a country founded on genocide. I feel angry these conversations can never be more nuanced, and it is partially because it is easier to default to conflating thoughts with feelings. Because in the desire to be seen and heard, we take to social media to express, be it because we think we need to or think if we don’t, we’ll be seen as quietly believing or advocating for the opposite of the thing under discussion. Because a moment of social media adrenaline and dopamine is also real.
We want to do both, think and feel. They are essential components of the human experience. Yet we are terrible at both: we can’t even pause and figure out which one is happening at the moment. You’re not emoting a thought, just as you shouldn’t think an emotion (that is a defense mechanism, too and one that especially plagues intelligent, research-loving people!).
My intentional reevaluation of “think” and “feel” isn’t exactly new, but its manifestation and context is different now. One of the most common changes I make whenever I edit another person’s writing is deleting phrases where the writer inserts themselves and it’s not necessary. They might set off a strong statement–one with sound proof and support cited–with “I think” or “I feel.” They’re filler words in those instances; a reader knows that they are reading someone else’s thoughts, even in the “hardest” of hard news.^^
“I think we need to stop banning books.” Why “I think” when “We need to stop banning books” implies the “I think” and is a much stronger sentence? The filler words are a step away from ownership, a way to protect the soft spots a writer may not even know they have. Being strong is being vulnerable.***
I come back to thinking and feeling over and over through the course of anti-censorship work. I feel burned out, and yet, I keep showing up. I am angry–things aren’t changing, my own books are targets, people steal my work without giving me credit for putting it out there, the most at-risk kids are those being put further at risk with information and stories being stolen from them by political wing-nuts–but I separate that anger and burnout as feelings from what I am thinking in the moment. I think it is vital to keep sharing this information and to keep demanding people listen and pay attention. I think we are in a place where the only way through is litigation and every new lawsuit popping up gives me the slightest feeling of hope that maybe we can get something on the books to point to as a standard.
It feels hopeless a lot of the time. But I don’t think it is. If anything, I think we’re in a tremendous moment of opportunity. We’re seeing change, even if it is slow. Even if it is coming with right-wing tactics emerging in new, different ways (we went from individual books to lists of books to, well, book fairs). Those new tactics come up, but we’re so much faster in digging to the truth of it now. We see the contours of the situation and share them.
Feelings are imbedded in the work, but they hinder the work less now. This is an aspect of resiliency touted in the literature about learning to live with trauma. You can appreciate and be with both the thoughts and the feelings without one acting as a replacement for the other.
On a recent bonus episode of the fantastic “If Books Could Kill” podcast, Michael Hobbes talked about how often people tell him he is so intelligent. To that, he responded that he does not think he is–he simply reads the entirety of a report or white paper or gray literature on a topic, rather than stopping after the headline or developing a feeling and letting that sway his thoughts. This resonated and speaks to precisely what has shifted for me in the last few months. I still feel deeply, but rather than letting what I feel dictate what and how I present something, I do a little more work both in reading the entirety of a report and in checking in–do I truly think something here or am I having emotions about something? Either is valid, but the answer to this question changes what I choose to do.
The thing is, maybe you don’t really think anything. It might simply be a need to express an emotion, something which might require more work or different work–and invite less social media clout or connection–than thinking.****
As I have seen several of my favorite creators write about recently, we are not built to see every unedited thought or feeling a person has online. A pause to evaluate what’s needed in the moment and what the truth is of that internal experience can make all the difference.
We don’t need to share it all with the world.
Sometimes, it’s better when we don’t.
#
Notes:
^My professor, in the days after we finished this assignment, offered to drop the next short paper which asked us to reflect upon the reflection we did for the genogram. He posited that sometimes, we get too self-reflective and it hurts us. He compared it to driving a car: you need to have your eyes on your rearview mirror, but if you spend too much time there, you drive right off the road. It was a nice reminder, especially because this assignment took it out of me in ways I could not unpack for a couple of weeks.
*Think about this from the perspective of how people telling you something feels is deeply manipulative. Fortunately, the era of clickbait headlines with emotional keywords in them are gone (“Sad! Dog Remains Unadopted at Shelter” is very different than “Dog Remains Unadopted at Shelter,” isn’t it? That one word told you how to feel about the story, rather than have you ask yourself why that dog might not be adopted yet.). But that took advantage of your human feelings, much as you likely noticed a recent president used to do on social media all the time to rally his eager-to-be-angered contingent.
**I don’t need to articulate this is also deeply gendered. Consider who is more likely to be seen as emotional and thus, couch thoughts as feelings.
^^Of course, we have to take into account literacy here. The proliferation of fake news in conjunction with mis, dis, and mal information have made such comprehension harder for the average American who might not know that what they read is the work of someone else’s thoughts or feelings. No news is unbiased, even if we still say that unbiased news still exists. Bias is okay, but in a society where the tools of understanding it are dull or poorly used, we set ourselves up for trouble. That’s where appealing to emotions, rather than thoughts, has continued to take hold with so many outlets and even more so on social media. Create outrage, drive stories in the algorithm, profit, and begin the cycle again.
***Brene Brown is an absolute leader in the world of talking about vulnerability and her work continues to be invaluable right now. I wrote about where to begin with Brown’s work before, but if this essay resonates with you and you’re curious about being better about emotions and feelings more broadly, I highly recommend her most recent, Atlas of the Heart.
****You can definitely connect with people over feelings and indeed, maybe even more deeply than with thinking. It might even happen on social media. But the ugly truth of it is, you’re probably not going to have those true emotions in a thread about how it’s the guns killing innocent people. You’re more likely having thoughts, and that’s okay, too.
There has been a lot of really good work out there about parasocial relationships over the last few years, and I think one reason so many people become susceptible to deeply parasocial relationships is because we’re eager to connect emotionally with others. The ability to do so one-way in a relationship is less vulnerable, even if it ends up still feeling that way.
# I had one of the most profound experiences at a yoga retreat this month. My teacher, who I’ve known for a long time and with whom I’ve done this retreat for several years, offered up an emotional balancing session. Each of us had 20-30 minutes of time with him by ourselves. He pulled an oracle card and we talked about what came up for us with it (I love using cards like this, especially for journaling). The card I got was about appreciation, and the message from the booklet that came with the deck went at length about gratitude. I sat quiet for a few moments, then began to cry–something that I typically would apologize for but in that space, did not. I then told my teacher about how difficult I find our culture’s pressure to practice gratitude, that in so many ways, it’s performative and devoid of meaning. We talked then for my session about the differences between gratitude and appreciation and I walked away not only feeling seen and validated–he agreed with me and we were able to wrestle with the nuances of each of those concepts–but it really hammered home how these kinds of emotionally-wrestling conversations simply cannot happen on social media or in a public-facing way. The results of those conversations can, but the conversations in and of themselves are meant to be messy, uncomfortable, ugly, and confusing. That’s what makes them so important and so valuable.