Monday, October 3, 2011

If I feel it, it must be true!

Pop psychology and psycho-babble has done us a real disservice. In the 1970s and 80s, the height of the "Me Generation" (although the 2000s make those decades pale in comparison) people began to get enough psychological information to be dangerous, but not enough to be helpful. The proliferation of "reality" TV shows emphasizes this ad nauseum. Everyone is an amateur shrink, has supposedly incredible insights, and if only everyone believed what she said, then they'd "grow" so much.

There's this disorder that I've discovered called, If I Feel It, It Must Be True. Recently, I conducted a cognitive assessment on a 12-year-old girl who did NOT want to go through with it. Usually, I can reason well enough to get kids to cooperate, but she was having none of it. She has an extensive abuse background and has tremendous trouble controlling her emotions. In fact, she's learned to use her emotions to get out of things she doesn't like to do. This was her plan that day. She worked herself up, yelling that she didn't want to be here and she just wanted to go home. She ended up at the point where she concluded that He's EVIL!

Conclusions are not feelings.

"He's evil" is not a feeling. It's a conclusion. It's a value-judgment (not a very nice one). When you catch yourself confusing a conclusion for a feeling, ask yourself whether you're using feeling words. Yes, I know it sounds corny, but there's a lot of wisdom there. Feeling words are words like hurt, sad, pain, confused, angry, mad, frustrated, and many others. Conclusions are thoughts, not feelings. Feelings are not "I feel that you're an idiot." The word "that" leads to a conclusion, not a feeling. I see this all the time with the couples I work with.

"He's home late again. He must either not like me or think I'm important," concludes the wife. "Man, she's got a sour look on her face. Here I am exhausted after a long day and she can barely say hi to me," he thinks to himself. She's probably feeling lonely and put-off and she reaches conclusions that are very negative about her husband. He does the same thing.

Feelings are extremely important clues. They can tell us when something is wrong, when something needs to change. Feelings are probably universal. When I tell you that I'm sad, you know what it's like to feel sad. Feelings can help us feel connected. I believe that connectedness is one of the basic human emotional needs. They help us understand each other.

When we communicate feelings to each other, although it can be vulnerable, it is extremely powerful. Sharing with each other our sadness, our tears, our fears, our joys, makes us so human, and I'd argue is also a spiritual exercise. Doing so helps us connect at a heart level.

On the other hand, when we only communicate thoughts, conclusions or judgments, we can get quite defensive. One of my absolute favorite authors, psychologists, and researchers, is John Gottman, Ph.D. He writes and speaks extensively about the effects of defensiveness. It keeps us disconnected, contributes to anger and resentment, and when it gets really bad, leads to contempt. Dr. Gottman explains it well when talking about how contempt affects us. Contempt is when you truly think that the other person is a bad person. If you're married or in a close relationship with this person you deem worthy of all this contempt, first of all it prevents you from seeing him or her in their full human-ness. Secondly, if this person is really such the loser that you may believe she or he is, then what does that say about you? What kind of person are you that you're with such a worthless specimen of the human species? Dr. Gottman calls contempt the worst of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. See his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work for not only an excellent explanation, but some very helpful ways to deal with defensiveness.

This will sound weird coming from a psychologist, but feelings are not the end-all and be-all of the human existence. Yes, they're extremely important information. Understanding what you feel and, at times, where those feelings come from, can give you tremendous power in determining how you want to behave and move through the world. But feelings do not determine reality, and often don't even reflect reality very well.

Emotional Intelligence, sometimes referred to as EQ, is quite helpful in determining success in life. Daniel Goleman, made the term popular in Emotional Intelligence, his book published in 1995. High emotional intelligence is probably a better predictor of success in the real world than cognitive intelligence (IQ). Emotional Intelligence is basically the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions and those of others. Knowledge and the ability to think well are definitely good qualities to have. So are the ability to throw a 100 mph fastball or slam dunk a basketball. Being able to sing (or lip-sync), dance, and shake everything that God and/or the plastic surgeon gave you can also be quite lucrative qualities. But for the vast majority of us, having a decent EQ has a major impact on one's personal, relational, and professional success.

High EQ allows the human organism to recognize and deal with his own emotions as well as those around him. Instead of "I feel it so it must be true," the person with good EQ knows how to take her emotions as important information. She can determine where the emotions are coming from, what they mean (and don't mean), and how to manage them.

I love the word "manage" when it comes to emotions. We certainly can't control what we feel. Feelings just are. They just happen. We can't control where they come from, but we can control what we do with them. We manage them. They give us important information. If I hurt, there's a reason for it. If I know or can learn what that reason is (or reasons are), it gives me power I can use to move through life.

If I feel hurt, there can be a multitude of reasons. It may be that the person who hurt me is just being mean, being intentionally hurtful. It could mean that I have some experiences that have left open wounds. Certain words or experiences poke those wounds, making me hurt. I may need to do some work to heal those wounds or protect them. Knowing these things gives me power and gives me strength. My feelings become sources of important information rather than something I have to be enslaved to. I can choose to act or not act on my feelings, rather than just react in a knee-jerk sense. In my opinion, we should act based on what we know and what we value, not just on what we feel.

Remember, feelings do not dictate reality or truth. And we can all be quite thankful for that.

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