Feelings aren't what you think. Or are they?

A deeper look at feelings (and thoughts, and emotions) and how they're all mixed up in our modern understanding

For years, I did Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

You probably know CBT — it’s easy to study, easy to bill for, and one of the most common types of therapy (or “modalities”), around.

And I used to swear by it.

“Kate, your feelings aren’t facts. Nor are your thoughts. Get up and move. Mood follows action, after all.”

While I don’t disagree with any of those statements (and do believe CBT can be disseminated effectively and kindly), that was not my experience. Mine involved convincing myself that everything I experienced in my body and mind wasn’t real. I used as a way to discount my thoughts and feelings in the same way I discounted hallucinations, and the result was deeply unfortunate – further self-loathing, disembodiment, and dissociation.

But I couldn’t have explained what was really going on with me then, until this past summer when I was sitting on a dock in Maine (yup, literally on the dock of the bay). It was stunning outside – those days you dream of.

Tuggie was snoozing beside me. Waffle was in the shade of a tree nearby. And I, even though I was on vacation, was reading PubMed about dissociation like the nerd I truly am. Then I stumbled on an article: “Emotion Theory and Research: Highlights, Unanswered Questions, and Emerging Issues.”

It surprised me — something that rarely happens to me when reading psychology materials. I literally said “holy shit” outloud. (I was actually so loud I woke both dogs up from their naps. ) No wonder we’re so fucked!

I read that article. And then I read all the articles in its bibliography. By the end, I have a very different understanding of myself and all the signals my body and mind conjure in communication.

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The First Time It Clicked

Fast backward, to my first day as a patient at the OCD Institute, at the McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside of Boston.

Oh, West Egg.

I was there to try to treat my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, to try to manage my perfectionism, my rituals of doing everything in sets of three and body checking. What had started as a coping strategy for my memory loss from Electroconvulsive therapy had turned into a labrynth of rules and rituals that I HAD TO ABIDE in order to “STAY SAFE.”

Unlike the OCD that came later – built on fears of contamination, going outside and being seen and “ solved” with cleaning rituals, my first rituals, were all born in the desire to remember myself. At the time I believed if I wrote things down absolutely perfectly, I would one day wake up the next day — memory damage and all — and remember everything that happened to me.

Those rituals, like most, progressed quickly, bleeding into every word, sentence, email, and paper I wrote by the time of my arrival at the OCDI.

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table with me as I tried to finish writing a 38 page paper. I was working on the bibliography and she found a period that was incorrectly placed, one single period! To stay in line with my mind and the rules it had created, I had to start over started at the beginning. I scrolled all the way back to page one and began reading it again. When my mom questioned this, I completely lost it on her in a full-blown toddler tantrum. That’s when she realized how debilitated I was. That’s also when she began the application for me to go to the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Institute at McLean.

So it was summer, and there I was.

I sat by the door, watching the other new patients and their mannerisms. Some had OCD the way movies portray it – repeating behaviors and words over and over – endlessly stuck in actions that looped again and again. But most? Most looked like me, just a human sitting in a bright room waiting for the clinician to begin explaining the work ahead.

They started with this.

Your feelings, they are not facts. And what we will do here is learn the facts by challenging your feelings over and over again.

Now, don’t get me wrong, your feelings matter, and your thoughts matter. They are what brought you here, as they inform your belief of fear – a belief that that fear is so great you cannot face it or else you will not survive.

But that is not true.

That is your brain mis-wired to be scared of things that you very much can survive. I’m not going to teach you this. Here, you are going to teach yourself. Because only you, by facing that fear, can change your feelings so you can move forward.

And that’s what I did all summer long.

I faced my fears. Over and over and over again.

In doing so, I re-wired my brain and I learned that mood follows action and that healing is not built on the feelings of joy and comfort but instead on bravely leaning in to discomfort.

Yes, healing is the act of (1) honoring feelings, (2) feeling feelings and (3) facing them head on, little by little, day after day.

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What I’d Missed that Summer

That summer, I relearned how to read and write. I also learned how to dress imperfectly, stop journaling every waking moment of my day (and document it with photography of equal perfection). And thanks to that work, I was able to go back to college in the fall.

But either because I was too stressed to fully process the clinicians’ teachings or because it wasn’t addressed, I missed a critical piece of information: that what happens in your body needs to be listened to and that all discomfort is not the same.

And that’s where that article that I read and the many that followed in Maine came in. The overarching theme and lesson:

They started with this: emotions and feelings are actually not the same thing.

I had never heard this before.

Or maybe, I had and disregarded it. But either way, the articles explained this:

• Emotions are the body’s automatic response — data.

• Feelings are the mind’s interpretation — meaning.

To heal, we need to honor both and rewire both. And to do that, we need to first get to know our bodies and minds, as they are, instead of as we think they should be.

This clicked it all into place because I had always squished emotions + feelings together as essentially the same thing. On top of that, I had also told myself over and over that feelings aren’t facts. And your feelings? Well, they are wrong and need to be managed away.

But that’s not true. And when we separate emotion from feeling and hold steady to the fact that both are valid and born of survival, we set ourselves free of the shame and blame that keeps us trapped in our pathways.

Yes, when we separate and honor them both, we see clearly: nothing is broken. Both belong. And both – if we listen long enough – will show themselves as being truths that were miswired along the way.

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So what are the differences between Emotions and Feelings?

The word “emotion” comes from the Latin word emovere, meaning “to move out” or “to stir up”. It entered English through the Middle French word esmotion, which also meant “to set in motion” or “move the feelings”. This etymology suggests that emotions are, in essence, a “movement” or an agitation of one’s inner state.

If emotion is something that moves within you, feelings are the thoughts that arise afterward. Here’s another way to look at it.

If we understood emotions as survival data instead of moral data, we could stop treating them like character flaws.

In the same way we’ve discussed about understanding your Nervous System’s responses as a means of survival, our emotions similarly give us information we can use to heal.

And so, at the OCDI, when I finally heard, “Your emotions are miswired because of the hard things you’ve lived through,” a wave of forgiveness washed over me — and so many more things became possible (because no one can shame or blame themselves into change). We can only love ourselves there. And with these truths, we get to see Emotion is simply the body’s truth. Feeling is simply the mind’s meaning. And healing is the honoring of both.

Now, what does that mean?

Well, we will get into it in this segment on feelings.

But for today, all I need you to know is that every feeling you have and every emotion you feel belongs here with us. They are teachers and together, we will learn to listen to them and walk with their truth towards a new one that serves us even more fully.

Wishing you a day.

Kindly,

Kate