Learning to "Feel my Feelings": The Contributions of Silent Listening, Emotional Granularity, and Metaphoric Yoga
I first was encouraged to "feel my feelings" about 50 years ago during psychotherapy. My therapist gently suggested that I talk less and feel more. He said something to the effect that while I seemed to know more about psychological theories than he did, he wondered where my own inner experience was in all my theory-laden excursions.
Though I can't recall my exact response, I can remember that it was not an accepting one. It may even have been a bit dismissive. I said something like, "The problem isn't that I don't feel my feelings. The problem is that I feel CRAPPY, and very strongly, too much of the time. I was hoping that therapy would help me not to feel more, but to feel differently—to change my feelings."
I've learned a lot about feeling my feelings, and its benefits, since my original reaction.
But I've never reflected on the course of my learning and what the learning has come to mean to me now in my early seventies. In this essay, I offer such reflections, including my experience in psychotherapy as a young man, my learning about the concept of emotional granularity, and my yoga practice today.
Silent Listening
One of the first things I learned from psychotherapy is that words, especially conceptually complex words, could be a distraction from my feelings. In this sense, words could be a defense, one that I suppose therapists would call "intellectualizing." For example, I remember initially talking to my therapist about my father with conceptual language, pointing out his early social and political liberalism, which I found admirable, and how it seemed to give way to a Reagan-admiring conservatism, which I found misguided, or about how he was steady and predictable, a virtue, but not all that engaged with me or my brother, a disappointment.
My therapist wanted me to root down beneath my conceptually oriented language to the ground of my feelings. It took me a while to hear and understand what he was encouraging me to do. But I recall that it helped when he invited me to sit silently and simply listen to what feelings, memories, or experiences came up.
As I learned to sit and listen in silence, a powerful image that arose for me was of my father being dead to me. This was an image I explored in a recent essay Why Freud and Psychoanalysis Matter. The image spawned several other images and feelings, like the image of myself as a blur, an ill-defined haze of a boy, a kind of mirror of the lifelessness my dad was offering me. What also emerged was a thwarted desire for connection. I wanted my father to spend time with me, to play sports, any sport, with me, the way many of my schoolmates' dads did, to tell me more about his work life, and to ask me with genuine interest how I was doing and feeling. That he didn't do these things hurt. It made me feel that I was not worth his time, that I didn't matter all that much, that I was not enough to warrant his care and attention.
Silent listening was, for sure, not all of what I did and learned in therapy. Through the therapeutic relationship, I came to see how, when, and where I transferred onto people and situations in my present life emotional reactions fashioned in childhood. I learned, too, why this might be the case and what steps I might take to move beyond my habituated responses to freer, less predetermined ones. But what I unearthed in therapy from silent listening became the fertile ground upon which I was able to pursue constructive investigations of my inner life and make genuine commitments to change.
Emotional Granularity
If I learned in psychotherapy that words could be a way of distancing myself from my feelings, I learned from the practice of emotional granularity how powerful a role words could play in feeling my feelings fully and keenly.
Emotional granularity has an everyday meaning and a more theoretical one. I first learned about the everyday meaning from my high school English teacher. She did not refer to the concept with the technical term “granularity,” but I think she was expressing the practical gist of the idea. What my teacher said was that we, her students, should write with specific and reasonably precise words rather than overly general and vague ones when describing our feelings or the feelings of another person, either real or imagined. So, for example, instead of writing that a person was sad, we might say that they were feeling a gnawing despair, a heavy grief, or some other gradation along the general dimension of sadness. The idea was to offer the reader a clear and nuanced picture of what we or our characters were experiencing and feeling.
Although I remember thinking that my teachers’ instructions about granularity made sense, and I did try to follow them in the papers I wrote, I did not think about the application of her advice in my personal life. A well-differentiated vocabulary of feeling seemed fine in the classroom but didn’t appear to matter all that much when spending time with my girlfriend, my guy friends, or my family.
But the personal value of emotionally fine-grained language did become clear to me a half dozen years later in the psychotherapy I described earlier. Once I began to let go of my intellectualizing and touch into deep and difficult feelings, I could tell that the kind of specific and subtle descriptions of feelings that my high school teacher urged on us was important and beneficial when talking with my therapist. I learned that when I could express in a specific, genuine, and non-defensive way what I encountered through silent listening, and the therapist listened in an accepting way, I felt seen, heard, and supported. This fostered a kind of inner release and an inner healing.
As I grew further into adulthood, I tried to apply with trusted friends and family members this process of silent listening and then choosing words thoughtfully to reveal what was true for me.
And then about 15 years ago, I encountered in the literature on psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on emotional granularity. Granularity in Barrett’s terms was about using fine-grained language to pinpoint the specific and distinct emotions we experienced. This kind of word-choice discernment was similar to what my high school English teacher taught.
But the difference between Barrett’s concept of granularity and the everyday concept of using specific, differentiated words is that Barrett’s concept was embedded in a theory called the theory of constructed emotion (as one good resource on this theory, see her 2017 book, How Emotions are Made). The theory was and remains controversial because it placed such a high emphasis on the way culture and language form and shape emotions and rejected the traditional view that some emotions, such as anger, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise, and caring, are universal and hard-wired in us as a species to help us adapt to our environment.
I won’t be addressing the theoretical controversies here. What I would say in this paper is that Barrett's research sensitized me further to the intimate connection between words and emotions. What made a feeling an emotion in her view were the verbal labels we attached to feelings. Words transformed a basic feeling, like a pleasant sensation, into an emotion with a distinctive character and meaning, like the emotion of sweet delight. (I would probably call “sweet delight” a feeling and not necessarily an emotion, but in Barrett’s theoretical framework emotion would, I believe, be the appropriate term.)
I also learned from Barrett’s research that fine-grained language can have positive effects on emotional self-regulation. The research suggested that if I felt angry, for example, emotional granularity could help me to work with and manage my anger. Compared with just saying to myself "I'm angry" and then moving on, if I said that I was enraged, aggravated, disgruntled, frustrated, hostile, or vengeful, depending on the circumstances, I would be more likely to calm myself down and make better decisions about what to do with my feelings.
It's not exactly clear to me why this is so. But perhaps choosing and using well-tailored descriptive language, as distinct from reacting right away with whatever words first arise, encourages us to do what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman described as “slow thinking,” a deliberate, carefully considered kind of process, compared with “fast thinking,” an automatic, immediate kind of response. Perhaps, too, finding just the right word to give voice to our emotions is a way of respecting our experience. We may show ourselves that our felt experiences are worthy of the time and attention it takes to describe them well.
Barrett's work on emotional granularity reinforced my commitment in mid-life to write more about my emotions and to try to write in fine-grained detail. I wrote for years, on and off, in a journal, and for the past three and a half years have been writing and publishing personal essays that are anchored in large part to my emotional life. Barrett’s research helped me to see that writing was not merely a way of tracking and sharing my feelings. It was a way to deepen, enrich, and more fully appreciate the feelings that I was having in different life circumstances and to work with my feelings in a satisfying way. Fine-grained descriptive language, especially when used in writing, has become an essential tool in developing and engaging with my emotions.
Metaphoric Yoga
Metaphoric yoga is a shorthand I’m using for the purposes of this essay. The shorthand is a way of expressing the symbolic nature of yoga. Well-drawn metaphors in yoga, like the fine-grained descriptive language that my English teacher and Barrett referred to, endow yoga postures and movements with distinctive emotional meaning. Metaphors carry the potential to transform ordinary, routine physical actions and exercises into more imaginative and novel feeling states.
Let me give some examples of the power of metaphor to change the emotional quality of a physical action.
One very simple example concerns the difference between the conventional and somewhat mechanical instruction to "pull” the knees to the chest while lying on the floor and the cue to "melt" the knees to the chest. The metaphor of melting is richer in feeling, suggesting a softer and more liquid-like flow than the cue to pull.
Another example involves the slight movement of the tailbone in Downward Dog pose. When I’m in this pose and imagine myself unfurling my tailbone and wagging it subtly up and down and back and forth, I naturally start smiling. The wagging feels playful, the kind of action that a frisky young pup might happily carry out. The movement might further initiate a supple wave-like flow of energy up through my spine’s natural curves, from my tail to the crown of my head. In this instance, my tailbone and spine strike me as wondrous inner resources.
A third simple example is linked to the action of bending forward from the waist. As I bend, I might imagine myself exhaling and releasing into gravity’s embrace. Forward bending becomes not just a demonstration of how the hip joint works and how the spine can move in a particular direction. It becomes an act of letting go into the welcoming arms of Earth.
Metaphors can also carry the twinkle of mystery. I still remember being struck with a metaphor I encountered in a yoga class a dozen years ago, for example, which likened mindfulness to the "gentle rain of awareness." I recall feeling that this was an apt image but also a creatively ambiguous one. It prompted me to let my mind roam more freely around the notion of mindfulness and to wonder what the gentle rain image might mean. One interpretation that came to me, as best as I can recall, was of awareness as a gift of fresh perception that flowed from the heavens, something to be both open to and grateful for, and not so much something to be produced or achieved.
Metaphors of my own creation, like feeling into my hip joint as an “egg in the nest,” have had a special resonance (see, for example, Three Metaphors to Add Enchantment to Yoga). When a metaphor comes to me, as distinct from receiving one from a teacher, I feel like I’m more deeply connecting with my own experience.
I’ve also been able to use self-generated metaphors as a resource in working with my body. The egg in the nest metaphor, for instance, helped me learn to seat the head of my thigh bone, the egg in this case, more snugly into the socket of my hip joint, the nest. This in turn reduced the irritating friction that had resulted when I let the head of the bone push up and jut forward into the rim of the socket. Self-generated metaphors have helped me to see and feel the workings of my body and open up possibilities for helping my body work more freely and harmoniously.
To be sure, I don’t always view yoga movements metaphorically. At times, I devote a portion of my practice to achieving greater strength, increased flexibility, and improved balance without reaching for some deeper symbolic meaning. But for me, metaphors are an important aspect of yoga because they widen the range of emotions that I experience and enhance the meaning I derive from the practice.
Learning to feel my feelings has been and continues to be an engaging and evolving process. One part of the process is to make sure I’m not using abstract words to distract myself from difficult feelings and to allow myself to listen quietly to the feelings underneath the abstractions. Another part of the process is to appreciate that when I use specific and distinct words that are closely matched to my experiences and the contexts in which they take place, the words not only represent my feelings but nurture them into nuanced emotions. Finally, a third part of the process is to enlist in my yoga practice metaphorically rich guidance to feel a broader spectrum of feelings. Learning to feel is not a straightforward matter. But as I reflect on the process over the decades, I can say with confidence that it is a fascinating and fruitful one.
Acknowledgments. Many thanks go to my wife, Yvonne Chang, for her perceptive critique of an earlier draft of this essay and to Kasey Stewart, my astute, tried-and-true editor.
This is fabulous piece of writing Glen. What a wonderful account of your journey from youth to where you are today.
Thank you for giving me and your other readers a look at how you have learned to use silent listening, emotional granularity and metaphoric yoga to enrich your life.
From my point of view, this has been a very fine journey.
Your best piece ever, in my opinion.
Continue your writing, my friend.
While I’m familiar with the concept of emotional granularity with writing, I’ve never put any thought into doing the same with my own feelings off the page. What great value though, in not only self-discovery, but also relationships. Thank you for sharing this lovely essay Glen.