My feelings don't fit into your taxonomy...
As children, we're taught that a smiley face means happy, a frowny face means sad, and eyebrows that point in and down in the center mean angry. We're showed one version of scared, with the big eyes, but nobody ever talks about flat affect or people who hide their feelings out of fear or malice. We don't learn about secondary emotions, like when we feel angry because we're feeling scared. Maybe some people learn these things from their family? Sounds fake to me.
Growing up I learned emotional repression and emotional obedience as a survival skill. I didn't get co-regulation, I got ordered to comply behaviorally and learned to isolate my feelings and hide them away (until they caused an unsightly meltdown of some sort, but even that was usually turned inward against myself rather than outward at others.)
A couple of years ago my therapists started introducing me to somatic connection and feeling my feelings. Let me tell you, after 45 years of repressing feelings and performing feelings as I've learned people respond to the performances, trying to get in touch with my own feelings was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. If I had to do it again I would delve way more deeply into emotional regulation and co-regulation before I started unpacking feelings. That shit is like an Acme Jack In The Box with a boxing glove on the spring.
What I did was break out the old Feelings Wheel. It is free to use at feelingswheel dot com and is a great resource. Once I learned the symptoms of having a feeling and began to notice that I was having a feeling (these are huge steps, very praiseworthy, I am so proud of myself for getting to that point) I could look at the Feelings Wheel and find words that helped me describe what I was feeling.
It helped. But I found that the words weren't completely accurate. My feelings were nuanced in ways that felt important to me. They were all way more complicated than terms like “Excluded”, “Confident” or “Creative” could describe. I could feel the tendrils of how what I was feeling was connected to past experiences and those words didn't make sense outside of the full context.
There's a big difference for me between saying, “I felt excluded.” and “I felt excluded because I offered my vulnerability and work but people reacted like they were afraid that I wanted to take over or gain clout in their group and in the past I've been socially ostracized by people who feared my influence over others. This is scary and makes me feel like I might be a bad person.”
There is a big difference for me between saying, “I feel confident that I can do this.” and “I feel confident that I can do this because I have done similar things like this in the past and my skillset seems adequate and I know at least three people I can call on for advice if things go wrong.”
There is a big difference for me between saying, “I'm feeling creative.” and “I feel creative and I have a deep desire to use my skills and knowledge to try something new with my bread recipe. It could turn out terrible, but I think that risking adding some Einkorn flour in the sponge and doing a second slow rise in the fridge could make for a really rich texture and flavor.”
Each of those feelings are intimately connected to social and personal experiences. Those feelings are not isolated from the whole of my being and my reality tunnel.
When I did make an effort to respond to, “How are you feeling?” in therapy with a few approved words from the Feelings Wheel, the therapist would invariably start to delve into the exact elements that I'd wanted to communicate when asked how I was feeling. When I asked why I had to offer the simplified answer first if we were only going to end up in the same place, I was always told that I have to get away from my Intellectualizing.
Like, dude, seriously? Intellectualizing is my primary survival skill. Between it and my ventral vagal nerve smacking me into Freeze shut down, I have successfully survived 100% of my days on this planet thus far. Would you blindfold a sighted person and then send them to walk across a busy 8 land highway? Would you make a monolinguist figure out the instruction manual for their life-saving medical equipment written in a different language? Would you let a baby cry until they gave up crying rather than answering the only survival mechanism they have and offering comfort?
Why can we not employ my strongest survival skill in this work and include it with its strengths to find ways that I can succeed in connecting with my somatic being and my emotions?
They didn't.
I did.
They can't stop me from working on my own shit between therapy sessions. I found a copy of How Emotions Are Made by Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett. I do not recommend this book. It's got some great science, but it is written more like a grant proposal than an academic book, and the author's examples are limited to upper class academic cis het white married people with children between the ages of 8-17. She also completely avoids the topic of emotions in people with trauma and instead dedicates a chapter to “do pets have feelings?” That said, her premise is fucking brilliant.
If you're familiar with neuroscience, you may have come across the idea that the brain is really complicated and really fast. So complicated and fast that our nervous system will respond to stimuli and then fabricate a justification or explanation after the fact, but this will seem to us as though we have made a choice and then done an action. Our brains are attenuating our senses to avoid overload, cross referencing everything we perceive with our memories, running everything through a poorly programmed risk analysis system, and then churning out a thought or an opinion that feels completely reasonable and sensible. Should be obvious to everyone. We're all just guessing our way through life.
LFB suggests that feelings are processed in very much the same way, but include somatic input. You know how we don't want to go hungry to the grocery store, or how we make bad decisions when sleepless, hungry, or drunk? Feelings, because they include complex memories and physical state in the present and physical state in the past, are a neuro-somatic construct and not an absolute state of the being.
Now, when I cross-reference that concept with Ekman's study of facial expressions (another scientist whose work is deeply problematic, but has been very helpful for my learning about emotions), we can consider how a micro-expression is not an absolute sign of deceit, but a signal that tells us that something is going on and we Do Not Know What, but we have the Opportunity to stay curious and open to find out.
Anything that I am feeling is a super complicated conglomeration of my somatic state, my mental state, my past experiences, my trauma, and my cognitive understanding of the situation.
Earlier today I got really frustrated with Spouse because I am sick with Covid and, although she keeps testing negative, she has a head cold. When she whines to me about her symptoms, I feel frustrated and angry and excluded and minimized and violent. Because I can make the time to approach those feelings as signals that something else is going on, I can use my intellect to consider the past events that contribute to that feeling, the somatic state of my being which is super grumpy and needy, and stay curious to reexamine my understanding of the situation.
I was snarky, but then I went in (masked) where she was getting into her bed. I apologized and said that I'd forgotten that people complain about symptoms to share pain and lessen it, and not always because they expect me to do something about it or actively work to comfort them. What I'd interpreted as a demand for attention and physical care was intended as a request for companionship in suffering and commiseration.
Without the willingness to make time to focus on that, the ability to compartmentalize those feelings away from actions while I considered them, and the curiosity to use my intellect to explore concepts outside of my immediate experience and past experience, I would not have been able to act in a way that I respect. I would not have been able to apologize, I would not have been able to shift my attitude moving forward. I would have increased my own suffering, her suffering, and probably extended our recoveries.
My feelings do not fit in any taxonomy, and that's okay. I can still use the tools of taxonomy along with my other tools to live a more skillful life and be kinder to myself and others. I don't like it, but I don't have to like it.
I just have to remember to stay away from gatherings of academics whose books have pissed me off even as they've helped me learn to thrive.