“Trust your feelings!” we’re often told. So pithy and affirming. Who could argue?
And yet I struggle to think of worse advice.
What does it even mean? What exactly should we trust? If the suggestion is that we should trust that our feelings are real in the sense that we are actually having them, that they inform much of our lived experience, and even further that our they are essentially reasonable responses to something real that has happened to us in this world, then count me in. But if the suggestion is that our feelings are to be trusted as a basis from which to understand what is happening in any given moment, a lens through which we might derive our notions of fact in the here-and-now, and a sacred heuristic within which our consequential behaviors might find ultimate justification, then little in this world could be more misleading, more unwise, more dangerous.
In our culture we take our feelings way, way too seriously. I often say this to my clients and am met with raised eyebrows. “What therapist would make such a claim?”, these eyebrows say. “What exactly am I paying you for?”
Among other things, you are paying me (I might respond) to help you orient to what is true; to forgo your participation in fictions; to cultivate within yourself more power, more resilience, more equanimity, and ultimately, more effectiveness in steering your life towards satisfaction. Yes, we need to know your feelings (easier said than done), and we would do quite well to honor them and meet them with compassion and respect and kindness, for they are human and they are real. And yet we should also learn the ways in which our emotions can distort - typically totally unconsciously - our discernment: that is, the force of our emotions all too often obstructs our ability to know what is really happening in a given situation, and what we need to do in order to move towards something more reliably nourishing. In too many cases, emotions implicitly trusted come at the great expense of wisdom.
It is quite common for someone to come into my consulting room and in the first session tell me that they are feeling, say, secretly ashamed (but it could be anything, or any combination of emotions). "Why do you imagine you’re feeling this way?”, I might ask. And they’ll think for a moment and tell me that they’ve fallen short of this or that, their career isn’t what they’d hoped, or their marriage, or their finances, etc. And I’ll ask them how long they’ve been feeling this way, and I watch as almost invariably my client will silently reach back in their memory, and back, and back further, until they are quite likely to say, “Well I guess on some level I’ve always felt this way.”
Anyone who’s had the experience of reading a journal from earlier in their life will have the uncanny experience of instantly recognizing in their present experience much of the emotional content. The specific relationships and events of course will change as life presents its endless narrative wheel, but the subjective experience of one’s life and one’s self remain remarkably consistent. This is because we all have tendencies (emotional, cognitive) at the level of our inner subjectivity. The world is not experienced directly, as photographic film registers light; it is instead experienced through the mediating apparatus of our own consciousness, which has its own particular features and habits.
If we are to be freed from experiencing the endless recurrence of these habits, we must learn what they are and see them for all their power to distort our wisdom - our ability to see the whole with more clarity.
Now, of course the emotional and cognitive habits of the mediating apparatus of our own consciousness are not random; typically, these habits are the result of some combination of our temperament (which we’re born with) and our learning (that is, the impact of all the stuff that happens to us once we’re born). Many of our emotional habits can be understood (and ultimately met with a natural kindness) once we understand that they are completely reasonable responses to important truths during formative moments and phases of our lives. Once formed, however, these reasonable feelings can be overlaid onto current situations in most unreasonable ways, distorting our ability to see the here-and-now clearly, and clouding behavioral paths that will lead our way to more satisfying ways of being.
If we are to be effective stewards of our own lives and loving participants in our relationships and in our society, we would do well to be quite interrogating of our feelings, and seek to place our emotional experience in a context of deeper understanding. This, of course, is one of the primary tasks of good psychotherapy, in which we learn to understand but not necessarily trust our feelings, and in so doing cultivate the capacity we can trust - our growing wisdom.