Cognition is a frail craft floating on a sea of emotion
— Donald Nathanson
Clients often ask me why feelings matter so much. Often this question doesn’t come as an explicit declaration that they don’t like feelings and don’t want anything to do with them—but many of us are reluctant to have our feelings. This is profoundly unfortunate, because our feeling world is a source of the richest connectivity to our true nature.
Gabriella is about to read me something that she’s writing to post on Facebook, about the death of her good friend, Erin. She just came back from a cross-country trip to remember her soul-sister, who died tragically early in her young life. But the memorial service was so large that not everybody could speak personally, and she wanted to say something out loud to her community to remember her beloved fellow-traveler.
She begins to read me what she’s written, and then she pauses and her hand goes to her heart area. “I feel vulnerable,” she says—and in that moment I know that I’m going to feel moved by what she’s written. I spontaneously move my posture a little closer to her—after all, when we talk about being moved we are really reflecting something that actually often physically moves us—and I begin to listen as she reads more.
Even her going to the memorial had moved me: at one point prior to going she said to me “I have to go.” And some perfectly-communicating dance of her voice tone and her body language, and how I knew her in that moment let me know this was crucial to her. So as she began to read more, I closed my eyes: I could have been busy with my thoughts as she read her words in memoriam, but I knew these words were coming from her heart, and it was in attending to my heart that I could hear them best. My thoughts can serve my heart and my feelings, rather than the other way around.
My expectation of being moved was not disappointed: as she neared the end of her writing about her friend my eyes filled with tears, and the rich sense of having received much more than her words literally conveyed. We forget sometimes that we were born as feeling beings, and it is on this primal substrate of feeling that we are trained into the whole edifice of language. Amazingly, well-crafted language and the dance of our bodies and our life situations—think of your favorite TV show or movie—can move feelings in us that we didn’t even know we had access to.
I found myself thinking differently about her friend Erin after she read this to me. I felt a different quality of respect in my heart for Erin, and for her struggles. I felt moved to a different place by her memorializing words, as if in writing these words she had shared her own heart-seeing of Erin, and in hearing the words I was moved to seeing Erin anew from the same heart-view.
All this richly illustrates my answer to Why bother with feelings? Languages differ radically across the world—but feelings do not. The face of someone grieving in Turkey communicates perfectly to a Londoner who does not understand a word of Turkish. And this universality of feelings connects all of us in ways that we may not even be conscious of. As the responses to her Facebook post began to come in, many of them expressed their gratitude that particular parts of Erin, aspects of her easily overlooked but important not to be forgotten, got illuminated by her posting. It is as if in feeling, the full spectrum of our beings is really known, and only in feeling. Once this full-spectrum is felt, our unique sense of a person can blossom and become more radiantly obvious. Language comes a poor second in this process, and cannot truly lead it: only feeling can.
In therapy, attending to the dance of feelings in the room is crucial because difficulties with feeling are generally what brings a person into therapy—yet they experience themselves as alone with what they feel. To be gradually able to share what they feel—and discover that the therapist is feeling it right alongside them is both humanizing and healing. Welcome back to the human race, I sometimes say to people experiencing relief when a feeling is shared.
When a client says something that moves them and the therapist is able to pick up on the feeling that moves in that moment in the room, trust and connectedness blossom. Sometimes simple statements: I miss her; I was so angry at him; I didn’t know what to do with myself in the moment; I don’t know if I love him anymore—have an emotional potency to them that begs for someone to resonantly notice it, and attend caringly to the deep emotional experience from which it comes.
