In the 1990s a series of books about how "men" were supposedly interested in the facts of a situation, while "women" were only interested in their emotional feelings about it, was madly popular. I found the popularity of those books hard to believe. I picked one of them up, read the writer's explanation of how he won a typical argument with his wife, and expected to read that his wife had moved across the continent and taken out a restraining order to keep him from ever speaking to her again.
From time to time it surprises me when I talk to a woman who does like to blather about her emotional moods, regularly, even when what she's emotional about isn't even Romantic Love. I know a few men like that and I know a few women like that but it's obvious to me that this interest in naming emotions is not an attribute of "women." It is not produced by sex hormones. It is a learned social behavior.
For an honest discussion of the possibilities, in a large group of educated people (mostly but not all women), I've found none better than the one that started on Live Journal at https://ozarque.livejournal.com/532409.html?view=comments#comments and went on for several days thereafter.
The blogger known as Ozarque posted a link to an article in Oprah Winfrey's O magazine in which a young woman, describing how she'd learned not to talk about her own emotions, self-identified as "suffering from empathy deficit disorder" and described herself consciously practicing asking her friends about their emotions after having made a flippant, insensitive reply to a dear friend.
It would interest me very much to read my readers' reactions to Amanda Robb's article and/or any of the comments on it at ozarque.livejournal.com.
Though it's obviously correlated less with actual sex than with society's gender stereotypes, the question of how we typically respond to friends' expressions of emotions is part of the Myers-Briggs personality descriptions. "You should be grateful for an offer like that!" is the extreme TJ reaction to the friend who's having mixed feelings about being offered a high-salaried job the friend doesn't want. "But I sense that you're not completely happy with that offer?" is the extreme FP reaction.
For whatever reason--I suspect it's because one of the "dimensions of personality" Myers and Briggs measured is physically predetermined, and the other three are learned--I've only been able to claim one letter on the Myers-Briggs personality chart. I am at least a solid Introvert. I alternate between Sensing and iNtuitive, Thinking and Feeling, Judging and Perceiving, in different situations, enough that I've never been able to identify with one side of those distinctions more than the other.
One preference I do have, though, is for not wasting any time blathering about what people are "feeling" about situations that call for changes or responses in the real objective world.
Part of the reason for this probably has something to do with the way, obviously an oldfashioned way, I primarily understand and use the words "sympathy" and "empathy." Any recent dictionary will tell you that empathy is the ability to understand that other people have feelings, even sensations of pain when their fingers are bitten, which babies don't have but children gradually develop around age ten or twelve. (People want to believe their children are developing empathy earlier than that; most people are wrong.) But when I was learning to read, "empathy" was a bit of a neologism, an awkward new coinage used mostly by psychologists in clumsy explanations of how they didn't feel any sympathy for the convicted criminal, etc., etc., but they were able to wield the professional skill (or tool) they called "empathy," which allowed them to believe that he felt some sort of thing and thus understand him better than the people screaming that the criminal had no feelings. You didn't want people feeling "empathy" for you. If you noticed someone seeming to be exercising "empathy" in a conversation with you, that was proof that he was an enemy, and justification for anything you did to block his manipulative plans.
"Empathy" is a much nicer word than it used to be.
"Sympathy," on the other hand, never really changed but it seems to be less favorably perceived than it used to be. Sympathy is feeling someone else's pain, at least in a theoretical way, whether because you really have a sentimental belief that you will (or ought to) bleed if your friend is cut, or because you have an interest in your political ally's success, or anything between those extremes. This used to be considered mostly a good thing, even when "sympathy" was used in figurative ways like the Luscher Color Test's instructions to "choose the color you feel the most sympathy with." It seems to be more cynically perceived now.
Like most Highly Sensory-Perceptive people I feel sympathy, easily and often. I think of the pena ajena I felt while my husband was watching for news of his friends in New York in September, 2001. I tried watching the news with him for about an hour, but during the fifth replay of the footage on which the person in the orange jacket ran out choking and collapsed on the pavement I said, "If we can't do anything to help those people, we can at least not look!" I think that's probably a diagnostic example of how HSP introverts express sympathy.
Though being HSP introverts does not absolutely guarantee that people will be nice; the flip side of the capacity to feel pena ajena, pain of others, is the capacity to feel Schadenfreude and enjoy the thought of other people's suffering. I don't remember positively relishing the idea of Saddam Hussein being hanged or Osama bin Laden being shot, but I have always chortled at the joke where bin Laden wakes up in the afterlife and finds himself in the custody of seventy large, indignant Virginians.
As a middle-sized child, beginning to develop empathy, I remember verbalizing the sympathy I really felt for a visiting relative. "Poor Aunt A, it's too bad that after waiting all year to go on that hike she sprained her ankle in the first hundred yards." I remember being told by my Drill Sergeant Dad, "Yes, it is too bad, but don't keep talking about it the way Aunt B and stupid people like her do--it only makes things worse!" I remember thinking about that. I don't remember feeling moved to repeat words about the reasons why other people were obviously not happy, again.
In the psychological jargon of my youth this kind of experience was puffed up into WOUNDedness, and efforts were made to get everybody emoting about how HORribly that SENsitive INNOCENT CHILD they used to be had been HUUUURT by those COLD, unCARing...and at that point I used to have reactions like "Oh, sit on it." I was not the one who was wounded on the day Aunt A sprained her ankle. Aunt A was. Aunt A was another cheerful practical adult who focussed on the facts rather than wailing about her feelings. My father was the way the Army used to want sergeants to be, which wasn't always the way anyone else wanted anybody to be; he could be verbally abusive but on that day he was helpfully explaining how I could avoid aggravating Aunt A's distress. As a young woman I didn't like Dad, but I hadn't noticed any of the people who were so judgmental about his ways of thinking and talking loading up bundles of clothes and furniture for the family whose house had burned down, either.
This kind of impasse was neither scientific nor therapeutic so, in the 1990s, Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence offered a great improvement in our collective understanding of how people process their emotional reactions. When we cry or rage or do little happy dances, different neurons in our brains are firing than when we sit down calmly and plan our response to a situation. Different emotional reactions activate different neurological circuits, which are probably not exactly the same for any two people, but generally the left frontal lobe of the brain is involved in calm planning, while the right side of the brain is more involved in emoting.
So we have the phenomenon of people not actually feeling an emotion at all, even when they react to things that seem as if they would cause some sort of emotional reaction. There may even be a low-grade physical stress reaction, but, on a brain scan, the part of the brain that "feels angry" or "feels afraid" is not activated by the thing the person denies feeling angry or frightened about. Sometimes this ability not to feel inconvenient emotions is positively desired, and conditioned by systematic desensitization.
Being a child of the 1960s, I grew up feeling, all right, and fully in touch with my feelings, no inhibitions about crying or swearing or doing happy dances, but also understanding that "maturity" and "intelligence" had a lot to do with the ability to think through situations rather than wallow in mere feelings about them.
Some situations have no solutions, like bereavement. When loved ones die I think nature intended us to cry. Daily, if that feels appropriate. Real tears, bellowing and howling, if those feel appropriate.
Other situations do have solutions and, although it's hard to blame people who feel sad or scared or angry or frustrated or whatever when they find that a door is locked, it's also hard to see any benefit in acting out or talking about such emotions when we can just insert the key.
Drill Sergeant Dad was more vocal about it than Mother was, but actually both of my parents had nice healthy Thinking, Judging, and Acting reactions to many of the situations that left other people their age bogged down in Feeling. All the older people I wanted to be like seemed to have such reactions, when I was growing up. Babies cried outside doors. Adults found keys.
I don't remember being hurt or wounded or punished for having been a baby. I do remember that, like all healthy children, I wanted to be more like an adult and less like a baby every day. My experience thus consisted of positive rewards, from myself and others, for strategizing rather than agonizing. If nothing else, when I thought rather than emoted, I had the pleasure of feeling more mature, which is always a nice reward for a child.
It was heartening to see the comments in the Live Journal discussion from other women who are as old as I am or older, were exposed to more sexist stereotyping, and still had never been taught whatever it is that allegedly allows some women to feel "validated" when people sit down and talk about their little emotional feelings.
I can't imagine what that would even feel like. "I was offered a job I don't really want." "I was fired from a job I don't really need." "I've been awarded a trip to Europe." If I were the one saying each of those things, I'd want a sympathetic friend to ask, "So what are you going to do?" I'd probably be talking to this friend because person had some sort of relevant experience, or could give me more information to use in deciding what to do. I might say "What would you do?" I might say, "I don't know--it depends partly on whether X is still required for..." I do not want to waste a single minute repeating words like "sad, glad, mad."
In a large number of situations where people have wanted to deflect a more useful conversation to a useless exchange about emotional feelings, what I was feeling was fully justified dissatisfaction with them and their work. Attention all employees: if someone is dissatisfied with your work, you should not say "I know you're feeling..." It is not your place to think about what the customer might be feeling! Bleep you think you are?! You work for a company that packs two different right shoes in different sizes in a box where a matched pair ought to be! Stop distracting yourself with presumptuous fantasies about being some kind of psychotherapist and put your mind, such as it is, on your job!
Then there's the situation where the person--stereotypically this person would be Japanese--is pretending to feel such terror of disturbing my feelings that person really does disturb my feelings. I do not really mind being told that the table that seats eight has already been reserved for lunch today. I would obviously prefer that it be available, but if it's not, so what? We eat somewhere else today; we visit your restaurant some other time. I find it very annoying when someone backs and fills and stalls as if I were the Lord High Executioner. I start to wish I really could order that person's head cut off. The table is already reserved or it isn't, but trying to "soften" the news that it is reserved comes across as "I'm really ashamed of my dishonesty but I don't think you're 'important' enough to deserve a reservation." Even in Japan, all cultures have unhelpful aspects, and evasiveness is one of them.
C.S. Lewis knew people, presumably in the philosophy department at the university, who sat around scrutinizing their own happiness until they realized they weren't feeling happy any more. This is possible, if we are foolish enough to sit down and scrutinize happiness.
Self-consciousness, obsession with me-me-me and my little feelings, is never a very pleasant thing to feel. Self-consciousness takes away enough of a really pleasant feeling to spoil it, but adds enough to an unpleasant feeling to make the unpleasantness spill over. Suppose I'm waiting for a bus; say, a Metrobus in Prince Georges County, Maryland. This is moderately unpleasant because the bus routes in Prince Georges County cross railroad tracks; since the trains no longer run on schedules, no more can the buses, and so nobody in Prince Georges County can be assured of making a connection or getting to work on time. This unpleasantness has annoyed people, not enough to make them build bridges over the railroad tracks, but enough to make them look for places to live other than Prince Georges County, for many years. To think that two and two are four, and neither five nor three, the heart of man has long been sore and long 'tis like to be. I must have some reason for being in Prince Georges County; nobody would be there without some reason. Dissatisfaction with a fundamental aspect of Prince Georges County is the sort of thing that might produce some subliminal level of irritation, for me. My blood pressure is not hypertensive but it might be a few points higher than usual. I'm not howling and gnashing my teeth but a wrinkle in my forehead might be more conspicuous than usual. Or it might not. I don't really mind this level of dissatisfaction because, if left alone, it will soon pass. But suppose you are the kind of horrible person who never leaves these things alone, and you plop down on the bench beside me gushing, "Smi-yul! What's wroooong? You look so unhappy." Presto! I'm unhappy all right--about people who let their idiot relatives roam in public. I'm not even wasting a glance on you. "Police? A person is harassing me at the bus stop..."
Here are some tips that might help people who feel tempted to tell other people that they look a certain way:
1. The body cannot give a false message. The body does not, however, stick to one topic. If it looks to you as if someone is feeling something they're not verbally expressing to you, it can be healthy to assume that what they're feeling is some sort of physical reaction or process you don't want to know about. It may even have something to do with the literal meanings of the S-word or the F-word. You need to understand that most of the things other people feel are Not About You.
2. If you keep probing lower levels of the human mind, as Freud told us long ago, you get to a repressed unconscious desire to kill everyone of the same sex and make babies with everyone of the opposite sex. Many think it's possible to probe even lower than that and get to an unarticulated desire to kill everyone, though some think the mind, at this level, does not think beyond the person immediately in front of the face. Do not probe for hidden motives. Probing may lead you to the urge-to-kill level faster than you expected, especially if you were hoping for the urge-to-make-babies. Surface-level communication is good. Accept the answers you get on the surface level.
3. If you find the way you think people look interfering with your ability to hear what they say, try doing your talking by phone. You get more relevant nonverbal cues from listening to the voice than you get from looking at the face.
4. When people worry about the emotional moods of other people (who are not actively venting emotional moods on them, not bellowing that it's all their fault, e.g.), the bottom line is selfish. It is "I want to feel more reassurance that this person liiikes me." Some people claim to find this endearing, although some of those people also enjoy being sadistic about it, making the insecure person work for crumbs of reassurance. Personally, I find it tedious. If your own internal sense of your relationship with your Maker does not give you a solid sense that you have a right to exist in this world, possibly you do not have one, though more likely you only feel that way because you're feeling guilty about something you did, possibly manipulating and cheating someone. Whatever. Work out your own sense of self-worth somewhere else.
"But I want to be closer to people, to get to know them on a deeper level. I don't feel satisfied by just doing a job and getting paid, just passively and negatively not being a bad neighbor. I want intimacy in my life." The only way to get intimacy in your life is to build close long-term intimate relationships with specific, selected people. These relationships are not based on "You're so attractive" or "You're single, so you ought to feel as lonely as I do" or "You're not in my social clique, so I feel sorry for you." They are based on the trust you've built up by doing things together for years. The fact that you're pushing for more intimacy is off-putting and likely to prevent that intimacy from ever developing in a relationship with me. Possibly you can, however, deepen your relationship with a family member or an old friend who has already found some reason to care about you.
Some of the examples the Live Journal bloggers offered seem especially counterproductive. One commenter mentioned "'Are you upset?' when I'm visibly upset." Ick. In my vocabulary, emotions can be irked, annoyed, peeved, miffed, irritated, aggravated, and other things that stop short of real anger; although, in my vocabulary, anger is a natural emotion more often than it's a Deadly Sin. People might just be angry if they've missed the bus.
For some people, I know, it's the other way round. Some people have been taught that we should only say "angry" when the natural emotion has been encouraged to grow into the Deadly Sin. I was taught that the people who only ever admit feeling annoyed when the bus is late, because if they were angry they'd be running for office on a platform that left room for the introduction of laws requiring that bus drivers who don't comply with schedules must be shot, are practicing dishonesty. I suppose they might be considered honest within a social group where everybody used words that way, and hypothetically such a group might exist, somewhere.
Anyway, in my vocabulary, what are upset are apple carts, stacks of cans in stores' displays, houses of cards, sometimes tables, often plans, and quite often stomachs. A person might be described as "upset" after a collision, or an earthquake. People standing on their own feet are not "upset" except, by extension, when their stomachs are. So "upset" doesn't mean "annoyed"; it means "nauseated." I can picture the blogger waiting for a bus in Prince Georges County, Maryland, and feeling annoyed because the blogger has lived in places where buses ran on schedules. Up comes the blogger's tiresome friend asking "Are you upset?" and I think of a certain early Stephen King movie...I've never actually felt able to answer "Are you upset?" properly, but I'd cheer if the blogger could. People who say things like "Are you upset?" deserve to have other people's breakfasts dripping down their shirts.
Supposing we can set aside "upset" as strictly a linguistic concern, another serious reason why we should never, never, never poke at people's unstated "feelings" is that most rational adults feel quite a number of emotions on which we don't act. We feel that the animal that attacked the smaller animal deserves to be roasted alive over a slow fire; we think that the more aggressive animal might do better as someone else's only pet, and put it up for adoption. We feel that it might be fun to drive away in that car that doesn't belong to us, eat that high-calorie food, sleep all day and worry about the job we were supposed to do today some other time, and all kinds of things that we think would not actually be fun in real life. The only purpose of poking at such "feelings" is to aggravate them. The person who aggravates the anger, envy, avarice, lust, sloth, gluttony, or arrogance into which these "feelings" might lead us is our own personal Satan, our spiritual enemy, and needs to be firmly rebuked and cast out.
The question then becomes whether we should, or whether I believe we should, give people opportunities to talk about the emotions they do want to talk about. Some feelings do deserve to be shared and communicated. Feelings of annoyance and dissatisfaction are less likely to grow into a Deadly Sin when they can be quickly communicated, acted on, and resolved, when the cause of dissatisfaction is removed. Among people whose grief is neither overwhelming nor unbearable, sharing memories of a departed friend seems to help us feel that we have "said goodbye." Reminiscing, generally, is informative and entertaining. It might be beneficial if more of us talked more about feelings of admiration, affection, topophilia, gratitude, or public spirit than we do. The case for talking about feelings seems hardest to make with regard to feelings of worry and anxiety, but even then, at some times, for some people, talking about really silly fears and worries can help people see how groundless their fears are, and overcome them.
Personally, I'm not so firmly committed to the TJ side of things that I'm not willing to listen when people want to talk about their feelings. I just don't want to poke. If people really want to talk about the mix of emotions they feel for their loved ones, Romantic Love or the love of grandchildren, few people have been made artificially ashamed of feeling that sort of thing, and most people will talk about that kind of feelings if they're not firmly discouraged. This can hardly be the kind of feelings Amanda Robb thinks she ought to encourage her friends to talk about. No; what she found herself feeling relieved when a therapist encouraged her to talk about were feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, confusion, childishness--the sort of thing that may offer some sense of relief to the person talking about them, but rarely if ever offer any effective solution to any problem.
Sometimes I indulge people who want to blather about that sort of feelings. Usually I prefer to help them move through that state of mind as quickly as possible, because it is not a useful state of mind.
Highly Sensitive People are, of course, emotional, by definition. We feel intense, rich, complicated emotions. We do not, however, share the curious belief that emotions need to be "validated" by anyone other than the person feeling them. Really interesting emotions might deserve some solitary reflection. Emotions about behavior someone else needs to change might be worth expressing to that person. Otherwise, an interesting conversation might include expressions of emotion, but would not be about the emotion.
I can, however, understand why some bloggers had harsh things to say about Amanda Robb's un-empathetic reactions, as described by her. "I've been fired."--"Wow, you'll have a great story to tell at the party..." ???
I can understand the Totally Unsympathetic Response or Lack of One as a way to create more emotional distance from a person one really doesn't consider a friend. "I'm in love with you! I'll die of a broken heart!"--"That's nice."
I think I would at least check the facts before assuming that a friend worth keeping thought losing a job would make a good story. That's empathy, as defined in modern dictionaries: the ability to imagine that the friend might be feeling pain, using my mirror neurons. But I can also imagine that, if this person is someone I really enjoy having as a friend, person might want some time for quiet reflection before going to the silly party. What's hard for me to imagine is whether, or how, person might want to be "therapized" with what I'd consider idle and tedious questions like "How do you feeeel about that?"
For me, empathy at least begins with catching myself starting to say something like, "So, I heard you were shipwrecked and had to paddle a lifeboat with two young children in it for thirty-eight hours before you were rescued!" and toning it down to, "So, do you have stories to tell about your year in the South Sea Islands?" Person may want to spend time saying things like "...and then I felt thrilled because we'd been rescued, and eager to get back home, and tired like I've never been before, but also I felt sort of embarrassed when they gave me an official island name that means 'Captain'..." Then again, person may not.
It's only in Writing and Editing Mode, when I see the "She looked out the window and felt..." kind of thing, that I suggest replacing all the descriptions of "feelings" with concrete actions that communicate the "feelings" to the reader.
Non-HSPs tend to like to believe that our mirror neurons are reliably mirroring the same thing other people are feeling. The mirror neurons exist; there are apparently some people for whom they don't work efficiently, but for HSPs they do. We can hardly watch an actor pretending to have an injured knee without feeling some stiffness in our own legs, or else some harsh judgment of the actor. Learning to lower the intensity of the emotional signals, work through those left frontal lobes, is one way we cope with what some "total empaths" claim is an overwhelming burden of emotional input from other people.
What we, as well as they, often need to learn is that in spite of the general patterns our mirror neurons recognize, we really don't and can't know what other people feel. Everybody has a reasonably similar set of muscles in the back, for example, and everybody feels great inconvenience if one of those muscles is damaged. Everybody does not, however, feel that inconvenience through the same kind and number of sensory neurons. If you touch a non-HSP's back and ask the person how many of your fingertips are touching per skin, most non-HSPs have almost no idea at all. HSPs feel each fingertip separately even when two fingers are close together. HSPs have more nerve endings, in the back and everywhere else.
This "extra" sensitivity helps HSPs work through and around some kinds of difficulties that disable non-HSPs and can produce a certain insensitivity... "She's never known any kind of pain worse than childbirth," wails the HSP blogger as a friend prepares for surgery. "It's only thirty-five miles!" growls the HSP employer whose employee's car can't be driven home. "My knee hurt, but I wanted to stay in the game," recalls the HSP athlete, "and now they tell me the kneecap's broken." Non-HSPs literally have no idea how it feels to be able to breathe their way through childbirth or play the last quarter of the game on an injured leg. They're missing some of the nerves we use to control muscles and blood flow, to reduce our perception of pain, which is still intense. When non-HSPs recover from illnesses and injuries they're not able to participate consciously in their own healing process. Even when we tell them about meditating to get our blood pressure down or breath control to work through pain, they do not and probably cannot understand.
We do not, in fact, feel the same things. When non-HSPs and HSPs are exposed to the same stimulus, one feel "pressure on the back" and the other feels "three fingers pressing into the flesh around the inner angle of the left scapula." One sees "a line of fine print" or "a grey blur at the bottom of the page," and the other sees "Copyright Brand X Inc. 1992."
Now about that terribly important "feeling" non-HSPs are probably really thinking about no matter how many other feelings they have to talk about to get there: I, personally, don't liiike them. Never have, never will. They shouldn't have wasted their time. There. I may care about them, wish them well, do what I can to help them, but I do not like the behavior of blathering about "feelings" nor has it ever led to a feeling that the people who do it are like me in any way. Fellow HSPs' perceptions are different one from another's, too, but for me it's been easier to live or work with blind HSPs than with non-HSPs.
And in some cases it's been easier to communicate with a dog. The proportion of experiences or of "feelings" dogs and humans can share is a small one. Still, at least dogs accept that humans are not dogs, and were never meant to be dogs. This makes dogs much more lovable than the sort of non-HSPs who can only bond with friends by "sharing all the same feelings."
The myth that all humans have the same feelings and can bond by sharing them was very important to some religious groups (and substitute-for-religious groups, especially in psychotherapy) in the late twentieth century. It is not, however, supported by facts. What it's led to has been the neurological research that has determined that we do not, in fact, feel the same things. So not only does "talking about feelings" not unify humankind, but it can become a trigger for envy and resentment.
Which is why most of my Zazzle designs feature the motto that's been the most helpful single saying I've used in my lifetime:
FIX FACTS FIRST: FEELINGS FOLLOW.
Whether or not people are able to share or understand each other's emotional feelings, most of the really uncomfortable ones have to do with facts in the real world that almost everyone can agree that we perceive. This means that, when the facts of the situation have been changed so that everyone is satisfied, the unpleasant feelings just disappear.
Google and Zazzle aren't getting along too well at the moment so I'm not even going to try to upload any of the official Zazzle images of my "Fix Facts First" Collection. Click here:
These designs weren't meant to be beautiful; they were meant to help remind the people around us not to bog down in unhelpful discussions of the feelings people have about the facts they want to change.
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1/3/21 10:57 AM
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