You think you are happy (or tired, or angry): Are you sure?
Psychology Today blog: Body Sense
by Alan Fogel, PhD
If you are thinking about feeling, you don't know how you feel
Liz: "How are you?"
Tom: "I'm fine."
L: "Really?"
T: "I'm OK."
L: "You don't sound OK."
T: "Really, I'm fine, just a little tired."
L: "OK, if you say so."
Liz obviously detects something in Tom's demeanor suggesting that maybe he's not so fine after all. Tom isn't really fine; he's got a lot on his mind. But what does Tom feel? He may be acting evasive because he doesn't want to talk about how he really feels. But maybe Tom doesn't even know himself how he feels. He knows he's not fine, and Liz, he thinks, is right about that much. He settles for saying he's OK (a tad less well than "fine"), just a little tired.
Tom thinks he's a bit off and he thinks he's tired. The problem is that he's thinking about how he feels. He is thinking about how he feels because that's how Tom, in his busy and demanding life, goes about solving most of his problems: he thinks about them. He ponders, he considers, he evaluates, he plans, he makes choices.
At the gym, Tom thinks about his body. He thinks he's sexy and well-built (or soft, or too flabby). Tom thinks about who might be watching him and indulges in imagining that others are watching him, admiring his body or his prowess. Or maybe he thinks that he does not want to be observed and he thinks about ways to fit into an unobtrusive corner away from all the mirrors. He thinks: "I hate the gym, the pressure, the attitude. Why the hell did I come here?" He thinks about how much longer he needs to work out before he can go do something else. He thinks about the meeting he had in the morning, the people there, what he did say, or should have said or done. Tom thinks.
Tom also thinks about sex a lot and thinks about Liz having sex with him even when he's with her in the act of making love. He has thoughts like "she's so beautiful," or "she doesn't look as good as she used to." Tom thinks it would be a good idea to touch Liz here rather than there, and he think about her response to his touch, like, "She likes that," or maybe, "Hmm, not sure, try something else." Afterwards, Tom is still thinking -"Was I OK for her?" or "I wonder what's up with her?" -- and most of his thinking is in words that run through his head.
Somewhere along the way, Tom forgot how to feel. He never lets himself melt into Liz's embrace, swept away by the bittersweet pleasure of falling into the arms of love after a stressful day out in the world. He watches the clock and thinks about something else during a game of chess with his 8 year-old instead of being pulled into the intensity of longing and desire that inhabits every fiber of the child's engagement with his father: the disappointment of losing and the terror and elation of beating his dad. Win or lose, Tom misses the real stakes of the game and another opportunity for human connection passes by him. What's more: he didn't even notice. The clock and habit tell him when to eat, or watch TV, or go to bed.
What does Tom really feel? Not only doesn't Tom know what he feels, he also doesn't know that he doesn't know what he feels. Liz and the kids don't even bother anymore to bring Tom along on their emotional journeys, unless it's an argument, in which case everyone is caught up in strategic thought. People say what they don't really mean because they are thinking too hard about scoring points to notice what they really mean, what they really feel which would probably, if they let themselves go there, sound something like: "Please, this is so draining and all I really need is a hug because I feel so alone and helpless."
Conceptual self-awareness (thinking about ourselves) certainly has its place in the pantheon of human abilities. No other creature can do that (lucky them?). It is also the human ability that is most removed from our essential embodied self-awareness, the body sense of our concrete feelings, sensations, and emotions. Without body sense, we are adrift in an endless sea of questions, doubts, and maybes.
One of my great teachers, Marion Rosen, said that "The body tells the truth." In the world of thought, there is no truth. Everything is relative, contextual, subject to more and more analysis. The body sense is . . . well, it just IS. It is pure being: Direct, in the present moment, unmediated experiencing. It is true, not in the sense of something that needs to be proven, but in the sense of feeling right, as in, "Yes, that is what I really feel. I can't help it. I can't explain it. I just feel this way." If you are asked to justify your feelings, you might as well be composing fiction by trying to come up with a reason.
After years of listening to people talking to her while she touched them, Rosen found that when words expressed something from deep within, uncensored, there was always a significant and noticeable response in the body. Sometimes she saw the person take a deeper and more natural breath. Sometimes there was a sigh. Sometimes a tear filled the corner of the eye, or she noticed a flushing of the skin as blood began to flow into previously tense parts of the body. The truth of the body is primal and immediate, wet and warm: totally different from the tenuous truth of a set of logical (or seemingly logical) statements.
Closer to the home field of Psychology, remind yourself of humanistic psychologists Eugene Gendlin (Focusing) and Carl Rogers (On Becoming a Person). While less explicitly embodied than me, they were following the same intuition about direct rather than thought-mediated experience. Here's a passage from Gendlin:
Asking, "Am I just lazy?" is making a judgment by claiming ownership of a category - laziness - presumed to typify the self. If I'm lazy, there is not much I can do about it. Not only that, I can start to doubt or blame myself. In the process, I've completely lost my embodied self-awareness. I might look to others for a confirmation or a denial of my laziness, I might work more to prove myself or I might throw in the towel and just accept my lazy, good-for-nothing bag of flesh and bones. The category starts to become who I am, at the expense of never finding what might be underneath it, the feelings and sensations in my body that might have (erroneously) created the impression in my conceptual mind that I am lazy.
People who get lost in judgment and expectation can get worn out with the task of trying to figure out how to behave, how to please, how to be better. It is exhausting because the part of us that trades in concepts has to exert neuromuscular over-control (tense muscles) to suppress the part of us that can open to embodied self-awareness. Opening to the embodied self can bring not only enlightenment but profound relief. Because this opening typically occurs when someone or something resonates with our inner self, our sense of relief - the sigh, the tear, the breath -- is accompanied by an opening of the heart toward that which succeeded in ‘reaching' us and ‘touching' us.
We all have a bit of Tom in us. It is part of growing up in a technological society. It is what we mostly learn in school. So, you think you know how you feel? You think you know when you've gotten to the bottom of your feelings? Rosen also said, "You don't know." You can never know, if knowing means a thought process, what else the body has to say. There is always more to feel than you ever know and it usually takes a sympathetic listener or a supportive and listening touch to go deeper.
Alan Fogel is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His most recent book is The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense.
Psychology Today blog: Body Sense
by Alan Fogel, PhD
If you are thinking about feeling, you don't know how you feel
Liz: "How are you?"
Tom: "I'm fine."
L: "Really?"
T: "I'm OK."
L: "You don't sound OK."
T: "Really, I'm fine, just a little tired."
L: "OK, if you say so."
Liz obviously detects something in Tom's demeanor suggesting that maybe he's not so fine after all. Tom isn't really fine; he's got a lot on his mind. But what does Tom feel? He may be acting evasive because he doesn't want to talk about how he really feels. But maybe Tom doesn't even know himself how he feels. He knows he's not fine, and Liz, he thinks, is right about that much. He settles for saying he's OK (a tad less well than "fine"), just a little tired.
Tom thinks he's a bit off and he thinks he's tired. The problem is that he's thinking about how he feels. He is thinking about how he feels because that's how Tom, in his busy and demanding life, goes about solving most of his problems: he thinks about them. He ponders, he considers, he evaluates, he plans, he makes choices.
At the gym, Tom thinks about his body. He thinks he's sexy and well-built (or soft, or too flabby). Tom thinks about who might be watching him and indulges in imagining that others are watching him, admiring his body or his prowess. Or maybe he thinks that he does not want to be observed and he thinks about ways to fit into an unobtrusive corner away from all the mirrors. He thinks: "I hate the gym, the pressure, the attitude. Why the hell did I come here?" He thinks about how much longer he needs to work out before he can go do something else. He thinks about the meeting he had in the morning, the people there, what he did say, or should have said or done. Tom thinks.
Tom also thinks about sex a lot and thinks about Liz having sex with him even when he's with her in the act of making love. He has thoughts like "she's so beautiful," or "she doesn't look as good as she used to." Tom thinks it would be a good idea to touch Liz here rather than there, and he think about her response to his touch, like, "She likes that," or maybe, "Hmm, not sure, try something else." Afterwards, Tom is still thinking -"Was I OK for her?" or "I wonder what's up with her?" -- and most of his thinking is in words that run through his head.
Somewhere along the way, Tom forgot how to feel. He never lets himself melt into Liz's embrace, swept away by the bittersweet pleasure of falling into the arms of love after a stressful day out in the world. He watches the clock and thinks about something else during a game of chess with his 8 year-old instead of being pulled into the intensity of longing and desire that inhabits every fiber of the child's engagement with his father: the disappointment of losing and the terror and elation of beating his dad. Win or lose, Tom misses the real stakes of the game and another opportunity for human connection passes by him. What's more: he didn't even notice. The clock and habit tell him when to eat, or watch TV, or go to bed.
What does Tom really feel? Not only doesn't Tom know what he feels, he also doesn't know that he doesn't know what he feels. Liz and the kids don't even bother anymore to bring Tom along on their emotional journeys, unless it's an argument, in which case everyone is caught up in strategic thought. People say what they don't really mean because they are thinking too hard about scoring points to notice what they really mean, what they really feel which would probably, if they let themselves go there, sound something like: "Please, this is so draining and all I really need is a hug because I feel so alone and helpless."
Conceptual self-awareness (thinking about ourselves) certainly has its place in the pantheon of human abilities. No other creature can do that (lucky them?). It is also the human ability that is most removed from our essential embodied self-awareness, the body sense of our concrete feelings, sensations, and emotions. Without body sense, we are adrift in an endless sea of questions, doubts, and maybes.
One of my great teachers, Marion Rosen, said that "The body tells the truth." In the world of thought, there is no truth. Everything is relative, contextual, subject to more and more analysis. The body sense is . . . well, it just IS. It is pure being: Direct, in the present moment, unmediated experiencing. It is true, not in the sense of something that needs to be proven, but in the sense of feeling right, as in, "Yes, that is what I really feel. I can't help it. I can't explain it. I just feel this way." If you are asked to justify your feelings, you might as well be composing fiction by trying to come up with a reason.
After years of listening to people talking to her while she touched them, Rosen found that when words expressed something from deep within, uncensored, there was always a significant and noticeable response in the body. Sometimes she saw the person take a deeper and more natural breath. Sometimes there was a sigh. Sometimes a tear filled the corner of the eye, or she noticed a flushing of the skin as blood began to flow into previously tense parts of the body. The truth of the body is primal and immediate, wet and warm: totally different from the tenuous truth of a set of logical (or seemingly logical) statements.
Closer to the home field of Psychology, remind yourself of humanistic psychologists Eugene Gendlin (Focusing) and Carl Rogers (On Becoming a Person). While less explicitly embodied than me, they were following the same intuition about direct rather than thought-mediated experience. Here's a passage from Gendlin:
"If you have trouble getting to work, for example, it is futile to ask yourself, ‘Am I just lazy?' ‘Do I have a wish to fail?' . . . Such questions, spoken as it were in mid-air, are ineffective . . . Only by referring directly to his experiencing can the individual even find (and later interpret) in himself that which . . . makes it difficult for him to get to work. Directly, in his experiencing, he can refer to that ‘draggy feeling' with which he ‘wrestles' when he tries to work. As he attends directly to it, he may find (differentiate) an apprehension of failure, a conviction that he will fail. . . It is this ‘heavy sureness' (so it seems at this moment, now) that he has to ‘drag' to work, and that makes it so hard."
Asking, "Am I just lazy?" is making a judgment by claiming ownership of a category - laziness - presumed to typify the self. If I'm lazy, there is not much I can do about it. Not only that, I can start to doubt or blame myself. In the process, I've completely lost my embodied self-awareness. I might look to others for a confirmation or a denial of my laziness, I might work more to prove myself or I might throw in the towel and just accept my lazy, good-for-nothing bag of flesh and bones. The category starts to become who I am, at the expense of never finding what might be underneath it, the feelings and sensations in my body that might have (erroneously) created the impression in my conceptual mind that I am lazy.
People who get lost in judgment and expectation can get worn out with the task of trying to figure out how to behave, how to please, how to be better. It is exhausting because the part of us that trades in concepts has to exert neuromuscular over-control (tense muscles) to suppress the part of us that can open to embodied self-awareness. Opening to the embodied self can bring not only enlightenment but profound relief. Because this opening typically occurs when someone or something resonates with our inner self, our sense of relief - the sigh, the tear, the breath -- is accompanied by an opening of the heart toward that which succeeded in ‘reaching' us and ‘touching' us.
We all have a bit of Tom in us. It is part of growing up in a technological society. It is what we mostly learn in school. So, you think you know how you feel? You think you know when you've gotten to the bottom of your feelings? Rosen also said, "You don't know." You can never know, if knowing means a thought process, what else the body has to say. There is always more to feel than you ever know and it usually takes a sympathetic listener or a supportive and listening touch to go deeper.
Alan Fogel is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His most recent book is The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense.
