Creating the Webbd Wheel: Feelings
In which we allow ourselves to feel ...
The core of the Webbd Wheel series is emotional intelligence, and the core of emotional intelligence is feelings.
Not coincidentally, our feelings and thoughts about them are the center of human experience. Feelings and thoughts, as I explain in the linked essay, are not the same thing. Feelings are raw data: mad, sad, glad, scared, ashamed. All the extras about why we feel the way we do, who made us feel that way, and how broken we are to feel the way we do are thoughts, the frame we put around our simple felt experience.
Emotional intelligence is a large subject, one I will spend the rest of my life exploring, and the foundation of my blog, Harvesting Stones. Sadly, I was never even introduced to it until my fifth decade.
Modern culture encourages us to repress, deny, and avoid our feelings. That’s why we’re all so happy and healthy. Disowning our feelings is like disowning a family member. We can stomp and yell, change our will, tell someone to never darken our door again, refuse to speak his or her name, and generally carry on as though that person is dead to us, but that’s all surface garbage. The truth is, a family member is a family member for always. Nothing can change our shared blood and genetics. We may never speak their name again or acknowledge them in any way, but they live on in our hearts, minds, roots, and memories.
Feelings, whether we admit them or not, are real. They are part of our human experience. We may numb them, or be numb to them. We may avoid them, repress them, deny them, try to amputate them, but they remain in our bodies, hearts, and minds. If we are to thrive in life, we must learn how to manage them tenderly and prevent our thoughts from disabling and distorting our feelings.
Our physical forms help us in feeling management. Our senses give us information about pleasure, disgust, and pain. Sexual and sensual expression live in the body, and much of my writing appeals to that part of us not dominated by thought, but by feeling.
For me, thoughts and feelings are a balance, one that must be constantly maintained.
Many of us, after a lifetime of feeling repression, believe if we allow full expression of our grief and rage we’ll never stop crying, or actually kill someone. We don’t think we can live through the tidal wave of feelings that have built up in us over a lifetime.
I believed that with my whole heart. I knew if I was honest about my feelings everyone would see exactly how ugly and broken I am. Nobody would love me. I would find no mercy, no understanding. I would be alone, and I would lose my sanity if I let my feelings loose. I would fall over some kind of unseen edge into darkness and never come back into daylight.
I was wrong. Feelings, when freed from the thoughts around them, can and do pass through us. I promise. We were specifically made to cry, to use our bodies, to use our voices, and to create. Feeling our feelings does not mean we have to be violent or hurtful to ourselves or anyone else. Feelings can be released in myriad ways, and the creators and artists among us know our feelings, the more chaotic and tumultuous the better, provide the best kind of rich creative compost.
In post #15 of The Hanged Man, Juliana and Morfran explore feelings, and their shared emotional intimacy subsequently leads to physical intimacy. Emotional and physical intimacy are closely linked. Those who are not available emotionally to themselves and others will not be available physically, aside from the strict mechanics of sex.
Morfran tells himself crying does no good. It solves nothing. It does not bring his sister back. But the point of feeling our feelings and finding healthy ways to express and process them is not about fixing discomfort or problems. It’s about embracing and expressing them. Those of us who have spent countless dark hours wrestling with our feelings and attendant demons know it’s ineffective to run, hide, or numb. What is effective is to embrace our feelings and allow them to be, allow them to inform us of how deeply we are hurt or made joyful, accept and express them appropriately, and release them.
Sometimes the only effective thing we can do, the only thing in our power, is to feel our feelings and follow them to the end, where we find the next step.
(This was published with post #15 of The Hanged Man.)