Daily Excerpt: Learning to Feel (Girrell) - I Think, I Feel
excerpt from Learning to Feel (Kris Girrell) --
1
I Think I Feel
“I still don’t think you’ve done the deep work on yourself,” Sarah told me.
“What do you mean? I have gone to therapy and done tons of work to discover thesource of it,” I defended.
“But you haven’t uncovered the real issue, in my opinion,” she replied. “What wereyou feeling that caused you to do that?”
Sarah has been my marriage partner and partner in life over the last thirty plus years and, at the same time, the thorn in my side who won’t permit me to ignore or step over issues. We were talking about a time in our marriage quite some time ago when I allowed myself to fall into a sexually flirtatious email exchange with an old flame. It was a painful time that was almost the undoing of our marriage. While I have journaled on it and gone to therapy on it, all in the effort to discover what in me would allow or cause such an action, her claim that there is still more to uncover is persistent and lands on me as hauntingly true.
Don’t get me wrong. I have done “The Work,” going deep into my unconscious to unearth the beliefs and self-concepts that drive my every action. And what, in particular, Sarah has been quick to point out is that I have never felt as if I’m enough. There has always been something inside me that continues to seek validation outside myself or my marriage. I know that I am not alone in this regard!
It is an age-old challenge that many of us face, and it all begins when we were little tykes. Psychologists tell us that we learn 90% of our vocabulary before the age of five. All of our polysyllabic, fancy words we use in adulthood represent less than 10% of our full working vocabulary. And since the bulk of those words we were learning as little ones described objects and situations in the world around us, 90% of the concepts we have about the world were learned at that same time. The issue is that when we were learning our words, everything around us was bigger, faster, stronger, and smarter than we were and that, therefore, we were not (big, fast, strong, or smart).
Adults and the world around us taught us that we were just little and not very powerful. That’s why when we learn our first power words no and mine (usually around two years old), we exercise them as often as we can just to try and have some control over our world. Of course, we then find out that our no is not as powerful as mom’s or dad’s and that adds to the belief that we are not enough. Not good enough, not fast enough, not powerful enough, not smart enough. Not enough. And in that moment, we adopted one of two beliefs that drive our behaviors for a good portion of the rest of our lives:
• We overachieve: “Oh, yeah, I’ll show you that I am something! Watch this.”
• We underachieve: “Oh, (sigh), I guess I really am just nothing but a squirt.”
You will certainly recognize one of those scripts as yours. For me, it was the former. For the bulk of my adult years I have been pushing myself to prove that I really am enough. But if the underpinning of that drive is the real belief that I am not enough, then nothing I accomplish will ever convince me of anything else. That is the inner work Sarah was referring to. It is not sufficient to discover the source of those beliefs—family of origin, daycare, teachers, or other adults and older siblings—one must be able to uproot them at the source and eradicate the beliefs altogether, supplanting them with new and more functional beliefs. Perhaps equally as important as that uprooting process is the fact that for all those years where I was operating from a place of not enough, I was also actively suppressing my true feelings. After all, if I am not enough, then my feelings would not be enough, or appropriate, or worthwhile as well.
It may seem strange for a person whose career was built on psychology, theology, and emotional intelligence to admit that he was not fully aware of how feelings wereexperienced, but that truth has been part and parcel of my development over the last two decades or so. It is one thing to be able to rattle off a bunch of emotion names and even to be able to define each as distinct from the other, but it is quite another thing to have the understanding of those emotions by virtue of having felt and experienced them.
In a 2016 TEDx talk I delivered,1 I told the audience that same message: that I had studied emotions and taught emotional intelligence for a good chunk of my career but, with the exception of perhaps the purer feelings of love, anger, and joy, it was more or less a cognitive understanding that I had. In that talk, I told the audience about how, by virtue of dealing with deep loss and sadness, I had been opened up to the experience of many more emotions.
There is also an additional complicating factor that suppressed my emotional development—that is the simple fact that I am a man and grew up in a time when boys and men were taught not to feel. Through sports, I learned to deny my feelings. Pain, I was told, was weakness leaving the body. Anger was not useful because it blinded you from seeing what needed to be done. As a wrestler, I was taught that anger would cloud my thinking and result in defeat. And as a football player, my coach would often say of any minor injury (like a dislocated finger or a cut), “Spit on it and rub it in the dirt. You’ll get over it.” Yes, that is an actual quote!
In his seminal book, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, therapist Terrence Real refers to the socially accepted definition of what it means to be male, then the processes by which we impose those definitions on boys sharpens into clarity. [This] passage from boyhood to manhood is about ritual wounding. It is about giving up those parts of the self that do not fit within the confines of the role. It is about pain and the withstanding of pain… These emotional amputations can be effected through active or passive injury, in transactions severe or seemingly mild.
As boys growing up in the 1950s, we were all taught that “big boys don’t cry.” Feelings were scoffed at as not objective or real information. Even as an adult, I had a friend who, when asked if he felt things, would always quip, “I feel; I feel with my hands!” Though that was always said in jest, that view was something most other men could relate to and chuckled about. Oh, there were times as a kid when I quietly cried myself to sleep so as not to let my brother hear me, but the messaging was clear and ubiquitous: Feelings just got in the way.
It didn’t help much to be told that I was gifted with an intellect, so as a result, I began to process everything through my thinking. I would even say such things as “I think I feel” rather than simply going to the feeling.
There were many times as a young adult when I found myself saying that I didn’t know how I should feel or how to feel it. There were (and still are) complex situations wherein a number of emotional responses well up. And this was true even into my mid-years, at 50, when I had traveled to Kathmandu and was sitting near the banks of the sacred Bagmati River. On the far side of the river there were three funeral pyres. A father was having his head shaved as a mark of his mourning for the child who had died, whose pyre burned nearby. Just above them were two temples, one of which was having a very festive wedding ceremony. On my side of the river there were children and older women selling garnet necklaces and silver jewelry. And beside them there were the sadhu, yogis who live on goat’s milk alone and who could contort their thin but aged bodies in the most unusual ways—asking if you want to take their picture—for a few rupees, of course. At any moment one could feel sad, joyful, pitiful, curious, compassionate, and fascinated—and often all of those landed at the same time. Trying to process that as a combined set of feelings was confusing, to say the least, and is complicated by the socialization we males had undergone.
It is possible to go through life with a working tool kit of just a handful of basic emotions—happiness, anger, sadness, and a few others—but it is quite limiting to have to force fit all experiences into those big buckets of general emotions. And the result of having a limited set of emotional labels is that it further impacts the number of limiting self-beliefs we end up with. So, these two vectors—learning that we are not enough and learning that our emotions are either in the way or limited in their capacity to describe and process the world and our experience of it—collide in a way that becomes an impediment at the very least and debilitating in the worst-case scenario.
It is that mashup of half-baked skills, forgotten memories, strange and unusual experiences, and the interpretations they all left me with that resulted in my being rather ill-equipped to answer Sarah’s challenge of figuring it all out. It was a challenge I finally needed to accept.
Questions to ponder:
1. When do you remember having strong feelings that just didn’t fit the words you had to label them?
2. How has your gender effected your ability to experience your emotions?
3. What have been the consequences you have experienced when feeling something deeply?
AWARDS (FIRST EDITION)
Independent Press Distinguished Favorite Award
Literary Titan gold award
For more posts about Kris and his books, click HERE.
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