Feelings, emotion, mood, sentiment; there are many words we use to describe the transient fluctuations of sensation that pulse through our physical bodies. In this post, I’m going to outline the two classes of feeling, and try to make the case, that none of these experiences are without purpose. Moreover, that a failure to acknowledge the somatic messages from our bodies, disadvantages us in the grander scheme of our lives, by relegating us to possibly damaging or unsatisfying circumstances, and potentially destructive or dead relationships. By the end, you should have a good sense of why we (you) feel the things we (you) do.
The Different Categories of Feeling
Of the many sensations we experience in our bodies, they can broadly be classified in to two groups; the somatic or largely bodily-based happenings, and the more complex emotionally-based feelings. For the sake of the case I’m wanting to make, I’m going to start by discussing the body-based experiences, and use these as the foundation on which to build an exploration of the arguably more complex experiences of emotion.
Bodily or Somatic Feelings
To start off, I’d like you to imagine holding your breath (you can actually hold it if you would like to try). How long were you able to do that for? Was it possible to prevent yourself from breathing until you lost consciousness? Unlikely. At some point, if you held your breath long enough, you were undoubtedly confronted by the immensely unpleasant feeling that began to build in your chest, before you were forced to release the spent air in your lungs, and replenish it with a fresh batch. That feeling, is called suffocation.
In groups I’ve run, I’ve sometimes asked members why they breath. I often receive answers like: “because you need to breathe”, “because you’ll die if you don’t breathe”, and other similar answers which seem to carry the assumption that breathing is a rational choice. While we do of course have some agency in when, and how much we breath, if push-comes-to-shove, that agency is bent toward an activity which supports survival.
A similar case can be made for other physical sensations such as itchiness (to motivate the removal of physical irritants or contaminants on the skin), hunger (to motivate the consumption of life supporting nutrients), or physical pain (to motivate the escape from, or avoidance of body damaging activities). While I would argue that this is generally the case, I’m by no means oblivious to instances where we overcome the impulses, often to our detriment. Self-harm, and painful methods of suicide are two such examples which come to mind, along with disordered eating in the form of anorexia (where sufferers very literally ignore hunger, and starve themselves to the point of emaciation, and sometimes worse). It is possible, through sheer will and through other psychological and neurobiological means, to sometimes conquer, or circumvent these life-intending impulses, but this is rarely to our benefit. It is also possible to act on feelings thoughtlessly, without considering the options available to any given person to adequately address them, and then selecting the best option. This is equally problematic for different reasons.
Emotion-based Feelings
We can make a very similar case for emotion-based feelings such as anger, disgust, guilt, grief, sadness, and the myriad of others. Considering anger for instance; it often arises out of circumstances where our physical or emotional boundaries have been violated. In such circumstances, we feel a burning heat in our chests, a flushed face, our breathing intensifies, our muscles tense, and we’re motivated by the emergent feeling to do something to re-establish the violated boundary. Now, when I refer to a boundary violation, I’m talking about the experience, by a person, of another who literally or symbolically enters their world, and participates in an actual or perceived-to-be, destructive or damaging activity of some sort.
People deal with their anger and aggression in various ways, from the one extreme of the spectrum in utter avoidance, through to the other pole in the form of violence. Between these extremes are changes in visual demeanor, negotiation, insult, sarcasm, spiteful activity, name-calling, seduction, persuasion, “I”-statements and assertiveness, verbal and gestural threats, mediation, compromise, arbitration, and a host of other strategies which people use to re-establish an agreed or coerced order.
As with the body-based feelings, all emotional feelings have their own distinct purposes including the avoidance of, or expulsion of contamination (disgust), the repair of relationship ruptures (guilt), the neutralization, avoidance of, or escape from danger (fear), the pursuit of resources or sex (desire), or the preservation of a relationship or person (love). Of course, these examples are a drop in the ocean of various feelings which we all experience in our day-to-day lives. It would be near impossible to fully cover the range of feelings, and the various functions which they all serve in our daily operations.
These intrapsychic happenings are not random, or without cause. To consider them from a neurobiological or evolutionary standpoint, they are our primitive means of making decisions. The mechanisms which we relied on before the development of our newer and more logic or rule-based neo-cortex. They specifically alert us to the presence of needs which are fundamental to our survival, such as food, air, companionship, shelter, safety, reproduction, community, and the near infinite list of necessities involved in day-to-day life.
Conclusion and Summary
Our job then, is to recognize, speculate around, and act on our feelings in ways which both satisfy the salient need[s], but which also allow us to continue our co-existence with other people (or arguably and more broadly, given our climate and other environmental problems, to continue our co-existence the various components of our broader ecosystem). To sum up, feelings have a purpose, they are ignored at the peril of their target, but they need to be dealt with thoughtfully, otherwise they have the potential to lead us astray or get us in to trouble.
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