What Are Feelings For?

We humans! We feel happy, angry, scared, sad, surprised, hurt, disgusted. We have developed an enormous vocabulary and numerous nuanced ways of talking about and expressing our feelings. However, these six, appear to be the universal irreducible array from which all others—guilt, shame, disappointment, hope, joy, frustration, anxiety, loneliness, helplessness, to mention just a handful—are derived. Neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor tells us that contrary to what many may wish to believe, we are not thinking creatures that feel, but rather “feeling creatures that think.” This statement is based on her knowledge of the fact that our brain has evolved from an earlier feeling model and huge amounts of its real estate are heavily involved with sensing and feeling—the brainstem, the limbic system, most of the right hemisphere of the neocortex. But what are all these feelings for?

Logic, language and the ability to plan were among the most recent (meaning last) capabilities to evolve, yet they, too are heavily influenced by feeling. Dr. Antonio Damasio has shown us in his landmark book, Descartes’ Error, that we really can’t think without being connected to feeling. There is no such thing as pure, unfeeling logic. In his Theory of Somatic Markers, he clearly establishes how critical it is to be able to quickly, automatically reference the body, its sensing, feeling and stored experience, in order to think and make decisions. With the left brain, we can learn the technical aspects of composing music but it takes the feeling input of the right brain to choose one note over another in order to create a sonata that will strike the heart-chords in an audience. So feelings are not just nice…they are a critical enablers of thought. That’s one of their functions. Clearly, there must be others.

It was only in the 90’s that psychologists and neurologists en masse began such an investigation. Until then, Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and its entire perspective dominated how we saw humans. Fortunately, in the last two decades, we have learned a tremendous amount.

Feelings serve our survival. We have the capacity for fear because fear generates enormous energy in our systems so that we will run from danger with all our might. We have the capacity for anger because anger generates enormous energy in our systems to fight to save our lives. You could ask, “Isn’t there a better way to accomplish these goals?” but Nature has already answered the question. She has favored this design for literally hundreds of millions of years. Actually, you could say billions of years because even ancient invertebrates have the capacity to flee from or fight with a potential enemy. So whether or not there was ever a different choice than the fight-flight axis is a moot point. This is the one Nature has chosen as workable through an astonishingly wide variety of creatures.

But what is the purpose of happiness? It also serves our survival. It is a state that we experience when our needs are met, including our needs for safety, food, mates, adequate rest, play and social companionship. It stimulates our vitality. As Allan Schore (Affect Regulation and the Repair of Self) points out, when infants experience elation in their interactions with their mothers, growth of the right cortex of the brain is stimulated. So one of the earliest functions of happiness is to stimulate the brain toward optimal development. As we gain control over our bodies and begin to move into the world, happiness is a feedback loop that validates choices that are good for survival beyond just avoiding predators. It is a building block of any community, beginning with the earliest family units and clans.

What is the purpose of being able to feel disgust? It teaches us, “Don’t eat that! It’s not good for you.”

What is the purpose of being able to feel surprise? It teaches us to be curious, to be open to new experiences we didn’t expect, to learn from them.

No doubt you’ve noticed I left sadness as the last core feeling to address. Why? Because we seem to have quite a challenge with this one in our culture…and in many cultures. However, the truth is that sadness serves our survival as importantly as these other feelings. Sadness lets us know something is wrong, that we are lacking something or that we have been hurt. From that knowing, we can make adjustments, better choices, better plans, better relationships. When the sadness is deep enough, we cry. We are the only creature on the planet capable of deep emotional weeping. We don’t just shed tears. We wail. We sob. Our entire system is energetically engaged as fiercely as it is by the different energies of the other feelings. Each feeling has its own energetic state for a purpose. What purpose is served by deep crying? Actually, there are at least a few. Crying helps shed our systems of stress and pain. Fifteen years of research done by Dr. William Frey at the University of Minnesota established that there is a significant presence of ACTH—adrenocorticotrophic hormone directly associated with stress-- being shed in tears along with toxins that build up in the body during stressful experiences. In Frey’s research, this was true of emotionally shed tears and not true of tears shed from exposure to irritants, such as an onion. These latter tears depend on a different neural setup—the fifth cranial nerve which, if severed, will prevent the tearing reaction to irritants but will not interfere with the shedding of emotional tears. Emotional crying is clearly in a different category and has a different neural substrate. Studies have affirmed that most people do report feeling better “after a good cry.” This can readily be explained by the idea that the biochemical correlates of emotional pain are being excreted and our nervous system is shifting from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic mode, from fight and flight to rest. Of course, there are times when we don’t feel better, or at least not much better after a cry. This might be the subject of another blog post but for now, let me share this as an indicator of cause. My mother died 2 years after my dad. When I lost her, I cried hard numerous times. After the first three or four bouts, I didn’t feel better, simply exhausted. Gradually, however, as I went deeper and deeper into the grief, I surfaced feeling better each time. I was fifty-seven. I had both my parents for over five decades—certainly a blessing. At the same time, it left me with that many more memories and feelings of my bond with them to grieve than someone who suffered such losses at an earlier age.

I know there are some who believe that it’s not helpful to engage in deep emotional grieving, particularly over childhood issues. They apparently think that there is a bottomless pit of grief in which we will drown. Perhaps they fear we will become addicted to misery. Notwithstanding the fact that there are some people with specific emotional injuries who cry hysterically to no good, and who may, in fact, be addicted to misery, the general truth in my experience and study is that there is indeed a bottom to grief, and I believe the science (and logic) supports this. Wounds have specific dimensions. They are not endless. I know firsthand the experience, “I’ll never stop crying.” But I did…and we do. Those words are a way of expressing what it’s like being in the full force of the hurt. A person sobbing over a specific loss or set of losses is grieving towards health and away from addiction or compulsion. She is releasing dark energy whose structural origin may be the limbic system in the brain but whose life has made a home in every cell in the body. The bottom of a given wound certainly may be a lot deeper than many people want to think—which may be why it scares some when they experience this intensity first hand or witness a family member, friend or client surrender to it. Practice bears out that it is best to trust the body. The body generally knows how to be sad once we peel away the defenses. That sadness can, indeed, be deep and wide. But the body will allow us to experience only as much as we can digest at one time. We will stop crying. We will cry again, perhaps. However, when we are closer to the end than the beginning—when the chalice of a particular sorrow is more empty than full—there is a significant and positive shift in the energy state, disposition, clarity and power to act in our own behalf.

So we feel distressing sadness and we cry, to shed the pain. What other reasons might there be? We have the longest childhood of any creature. We can’t walk for roughly our first year. We can’t talk for roughly our first two years. During that time, we must be able to communicate when our needs are not being met and Nature has given us crying for that purpose. Interestingly, newborn infants cry without tears because the neural network (the seventh facial nerve) that enables them is not fully mature until roughly two to four months after birth. Nonetheless, their little bodies can readily engage in wailing as a key signal that something critical needs addressing. It is a potent form of shorthand before language develops.

But there is another function that is built onto the signaling one and it proves to be enormously important in human life. The capacity for sadness—including crying--is part of our over-all bonding endowment as a species. Because of our long childhood vulnerability, we need our caregivers to attach to us so they will protect and care for us. We attach to them to foster that process. This is a virtuous cycle that reinforces itself. Without such a bond and the protection, nurturance and stimulation it brings, it is unlikely we would survive into adulthood, given how long it takes for our bodies and brains to mature. Building on the work of Allan Schore and many others, Sue Gerhardt (Why Love Matters) clearly establishes that the very quality of our brains’ development is directly dependent on the quality of that attachment. How our brains become wired is “experience dependent” and the specific experience on which that dependency rests is, first and foremost, our interactions with primary caregivers. These are further enhanced by other family members, friends and agents of the culture such as teachers, coaches and parents of friends. Emotional bonds are the magnetic force of human society. One of the consequences and proofs of that truth is how bad we feel when bonds are broken. When a parent withdraws or is angry with us, or when a parent is lost, we are profoundly sad. But the value of sadness extends further as we grow. Decades ago, anthropologist Ashley Montagu pointed out that crying underscores the importance of social bonds and helps to build them. Losing a family member, a friend, a teacher, an ally, a leader all hurt and often deeply enough to move us to tears. When love is lost, when friendships are broken, when dreams to which we have become attached are shattered, when we move from a cherished place or lose a cherished keepsake we experience emotional pain that is physically palpable. Why? Those people matter. We are bound to them. Those dreams and places and keepsakes matter. We are bound to them. The sundering of a bond is one of the most important human experiences because the maintenance of bonds is one of our most important survival strategies. We are set up throughout our physiology for it. So we cry not only to shed pain from our systems, but in affirmation of what matters and to learn the lessons and experience the appreciations that come with completely feeling the sadness of loss. Those lessons and appreciations will help us make better choices and better choices serve our survival. Being emptied of that pain, we are at rest and wiser.

We sometimes ask, “Why do we have to suffer so?” If we were blasé about such things, there would be no society, just constantly shifting alliances between people who were all expendable and replaceable in each other’s eyes. Nature has given us all sorts of ways of feeling the importance of attachments to be sure that we who are born in high vulnerability can survive to perpetuate our species. Experiencing deep sadness when one has lost is one of those ways. Consequently a society that suppresses sadness and the tears that are integral to it is a society whose bonds are in danger. In such a society, the capacity for being curious about other people’s realities--whether they are infants, children, people of different political persuasions, different races, creeds, people from different parts of the country or just people who dress or cut their hair differently—that capacity is diminished. The same is true for the capacity to know oneself, to trust oneself and others, the capacity for kindness, for truly living the “innocent until proving guilty” principle and, perhaps most importantly, the capacity for empathy and self-compassion. As Martin Prechtel writes, in Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, “If done passionately, grief strengthens the World House…”

Consider what happens to the World House—the community of mankind and the planet on which we dwell—when we do not grieve. In my first book, The Superman Syndrome, I pointed out that Kal-El may be a man of steel, but steel does not feel. This is the result of an ungrieved catastrophe from early in his infancy. Notice how all superheroes have back-stories of catastrophe (the new X-Men movie, First Class, affirms this theme yet again). Their “super” powers are in fact nothing more than a grandiose fantasy serving to deny the helplessness experienced in that early victimhood. A society that raises its boys to be superheroes, emulating the warrior archetype, being tough, avoiding a show of “weakness” that might actually be real sensitivity, a society that raises its boys to mask sadness and by all means, tears, because “big boys don’t cry”—such a society is at risk because its men have a damaged capacity to feel what really matters—our bonds with each other. In such a society, bonds are highly selective. They do not expand through empathy and understanding. They are reduced to “us against them” thinking. The marketplace and politics of such a society are more likely to be dominated by predatory personalities, more likely to have a Darwinian social philosophy that believes the rich are rich because they deserve to be and the poor are poor because they deserve to be. This us/them dichotomy is more likely to lead a country to spend huge amounts of its treasure and blood on repression and war. We see this in societies on every continent and throughout history…and that certainly includes the present and past of North America.

Feelings serve our survival—all of our core feelings. They are equally valuable when they are serving their original functions. Giving primacy to some feelings over others is dangerous—whether it is vaunting happiness, as in a consumer society, or vaunting anger and fear as in a totalitarian society. It is at our own risk that we ignore or negate any important aspect of our humanity. In these difficult days, sadness has much to teach us about need, belonging, love, community and what is truly possible. We would be wise to sit at its feet and listen.

C2011 Bob Kamm