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If you’re like me, you missed the class in school on the value of human emotion. I used to think that emotions were just a minor, accessory part of life, and as a male, something to be expertly hidden and only revealed in rare circumstances. I developed this mindset in response to the inundating cultural messages that emotions are supposed to be controlled, regulated, and downplayed. I was shown that most emotions are a nuisance, especially compared to the far “superior” capacity of human thought.
And so I began to put my thinking mind on a pedestal … and watched as my vitality slowly drained away and got replaced with numbness, stress, and reactivity. It took me a long time to realize what I’d given up and why I felt so lifeless. The journey back to a rich emotional life has returned me to vibrancy, fulfilling interpersonal connection, and meaning. I’m now convinced that emotional experience is the juice of my life.
What the F are Feelings?
We use “emotions” and “feelings” interchangeably, but many experts make a distinction between the two. According to the American neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, emotions are biologically hardwired responses that are measurable through facial expressions and blood flow changes. They also lead to specific action responses (e.g., running because of fear, avoiding eating because of disgust).
Feelings, on the other hand, are internally felt sensations that can happen in response to emotions, in other words, they are our felt sensory experiences of biological states. Emotions are publicly observable, whereas feelings are the private, internal sensory experience of emotions, moods, and drives.
Most emotions and feelings have a component of pain or pleasure, in other words, a positive or negative valence. For emotions and feelings with a painful valence, often labeled “negative,” they function to show us that our well-being may be at risk and motivate us to take action to deal with those threats. Like the drives of hunger and thirst, emotions like disgust, anxiety, and fear are “homeostatic” in that they help us remain safe and in equilibrium with respect to our surroundings.
In other words, “negative” emotions are our friends, they help us stay in balance. We often treat them like the opposite. Feelings with a positive valence (e.g., joy, excitement, admiration) encourage “approach” behaviors and help us move towards experiences that benefit us.
As a bio-nerd, I love the idea that feelings and emotions serve me on a biological level. Like eating well and exercising, welcoming and listening to my emotions contributes to my balance and wellbeing. This knowledge also helps me understand why “bottling up” my anger and other emotions wreak havoc on my physical and mental health: I’m literally preventing my body from completing homeostatic processes and therefore contributing to the imbalance. Many scientific studies have validated how repressed emotions and stress over the long term can predispose us to disease.
Feelings are experienced in the body
How do we know if we’re feeling an emotion? What signals do we get? With any feeling, there is a flurry of sensation that occurs in the body, with its own distinct pattern, which gives us information on our feeling states. Joy might be felt as a fluttery, warm, and spacious set of sensations in the chest. Sensations of anger often feel like heat in the face, muscular tension, and electric sensations in the skin. Affection may include pleasant and warm sensations in the face and heart areas.
Check out the graphic below from a study on how people experience emotion in the body. Red indicates increased sensation relative to neutral, and blue indicates a decrease in sensation.
Image courtesy of Lauri Nummenmaa, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari, and Jari Hietanen.
Since feelings are experienced as bodily sensations, an excellent way to practice emotional awareness is to bring mindful attention to the body, scanning it and noticing whatever sensations are there.
If you try this, don’t be surprised if you find a lot of numbness in the body or a fuzzy experience that may not be discernible. Most of us are culturally conditioned to literally “be in our heads,” and so the flashlight of our attention is almost always pointed at our thinking processes. It may take some time and practice to become aware of our emotional states again, and a great start is to simply welcome the sensations of numbness and explore what that feels like.
Welcoming feelings
I’ve found that the most liberating approach to my emotional experiences is to bring welcoming, nonjudgmental attention to them as they occur and change in real time. By treating them with respect, “hearing” them, and trusting the sensations, I expend less and less effort controlling my emotional states through internal or external means. I also increasingly feel internal freedom because if I can learn to welcome everything, I resist nothing.
Many of us—through experiences of trauma, abuse, or simply from cultural conditioning—have reacted to emotions in a way that creates vicious cycles. We’ve learned to be averse to the real-time experience of emotional sensations and then resist them, push them down, and/or drown them with self-medicating behaviors. We also create secondary responses that trap us and cause suffering, for instance, the pattern of fearing and avoiding the sensations of fear itself— an experience common to those with trauma and PTSD.
For me, welcoming feelings is like inviting guests in for dinner: I want them to feel heard and honored, but I may not necessarily agree with what they believe or want me to do. And like people, feelings tend to relax and soften when they “feel” listened to, regardless of agreement or obeyance. They are simply my loyal messengers and tend to shift and subside as soon as I allow them fully in.
Pro-tip: don’t try to welcome feelings with the subtle intention of getting them to go away, it tends not to work. It helps to truly value the experience, even when it’s painful. Practice leaning into uncomfortable sensations, and you’ll find that they are often far less scary when simply felt. The resistance, in my experience, is the most painful part. The old adage goes: pain multiplied by resistance = suffering, so if we can bring our resistance to zero, suffering also goes to zero.
Freedom Stems From Choice
Welcoming in feelings is a helpful first step, but it doesn’t necessarily stop there. Often these experiences give us information that will influence our choices and actions.
Let’s look at fear. I think there are fundamentally two types: fear that serves us, and fear that doesn’t. A glaring example of the fear that serves me is to avoid stepping over a cliff and plummeting to my death. On the other hand, fear of rejection usually doesn’t serve me if it prevents me from socializing and making friends.
I’ve learned that the best way to approach the non-serving type of fear is to welcome it in, listen to its message, communicate that I hear it, and then proceed with the action that best serves me. That way I don’t have to hide from it, pretend it doesn’t exist or overcompensate. In fact, it’s empowering for me to own the fear and proceed anyway. It feels like courage.
For all of the emotions with a painful valence, welcoming them while having a behavioral choice can feel freeing. Not only that, these feelings often convey vital information that would be lost if we didn’t pay attention (think gut feelings or the uncomfortable sensations that can occur when we need to say “no”). Wisdom comes from choosing which feelings to listen to and act in accordance with, and which ones to lean into and then behave differently.
On Courage
Too often, especially in our culture’s framing of masculinity, we equate courage to the absence of fear. Men, young and old, pretend not to be afraid and disconnect from their bodily experiences in order to prove their masculinity. This is not courage. It’s numbing, and it hurts us.
True courage, in my view, is to feel the strong “pull” of fear when contemplating an action that benefits you or the world and then proceeding anyway. Courage is hard and beautiful because it happens when the uncomfortable sensations of fear push us to run away, but a higher level of intention and value supersedes it and carries us through.
We can’t be courageous without fear, and in that way, fear is our benefactor. I want us to let go of this cultural idea that fear is un-masculine. It’s the opposite: fear allows us to find our strength and conviction, it helps us forge our courage and effect positive change.
Regain What We’ve Lost
Losing contact with our emotional experiences is not an experience exclusive to men, although it is almost ubiquitous for us. I remember being a boy and feeling the freedom to experience and express however I wanted, without resistance or censorship. Life felt so abundant then, so fluid and unconstrained. As I grew into manhood, I learned to censor and repress the very emotions that made me feel so alive as a child, and in so doing, I lost the “flow” and freedom of that lack of inhibition.
The tragedy of that loss, on the scale of millions of boys and men, is astounding to me. I can’t accept that as a necessary reality, and I hope that you won’t either. I believe that our path forward is to reintegrate our emotional experiences, discover the freedom of disinhibition, and reclaim our right to exist as emotion-based beings once again.
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This post was originally published on MindfulMasculinity.com and is republished with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
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