On Human Emotion

How are you feeling? We have feelings, and they come to us in two forms: physical sensations, and the more complicated blend we call emotions. Our sensory system is remarkably effective at prompting us toward action, usually around our physical needs. You are thirsty, and your body tells you so — parched lips, a dry throat, even a headache. Hunger works in a similar way. So does our need for sleep, or the quiet signal that it's time to find a bathroom. More direct pain does this too: it lets you know to pull back from whatever is causing it. It's a feedback system. You act, the signal has done its job, and the discomfort resolves. When sensations are milder — numb, tingly, too hot or too cold, tired, hungry — there's often room to simply notice and wait before doing anything at all. Sometimes, if a disturbance persists, the natural next step is a visit to the medical doctor, whether that's your primary care physician, urgent care, or the emergency room, depending on the intensity over time.

Emotions run on this same basic architecture — signal, discomfort, action, relief — but they're built up with something sensation alone doesn't carry: memory, story, and meaning. A dry throat only ever means one thing. A wave of anger rarely does. That's the heart of what I want to explore here: emotions are more complicated than sensory feelings, but they are built on the same underlying framework of human functioning. And that system, complicated as it is, is a good one — with real potential for helping us flourish in this life, and for living toward higher and greater goals.

Many people seek out psychotherapy because they are not feeling well — and by that, I mean the emotional kind. When we're not feeling well emotionally, it's often hard to say exactly what the feeling is, or why we're having it. Relationship dynamics, external circumstances, choices whose consequences we're now living with — or sometimes it's more hidden, harder to name any single explanation for. Some might say it's for no reason at all. Though we therapists do like to seek explanation and understanding as best we can, to better help those who come to us for aid.

Anger, sadness, fear, disgust (I'd include guilt and shame within this one), along with joy and surprise, tend to be cited scientifically — Paul Ekman's work is a well-known example — as the basic building blocks of emotion. We have plenty of sophisticated words for the nuances and blends of these basic experiences, but this is a good list to start with. Some, hearing this list, will say we have one good emotion and the rest are bad. I don't think that's a fair assessment, if we're looking at these "bad" emotions in terms of what they're actually for — because they can, and often do, lead somewhere good.

That said, bad can also lead to bad. Terrence Real, in his 1997 book aptly titled I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, described a provocative dilemma for men in our culture: emotional pain that goes unspoken and undealt-with leads too many men to death, jail, or rehab. He traced this back to how men are trained, or acculturated, away from talking about their feelings at all — which leaves denial or acting-out as the default modes of expression. I've heard therapists who work with teenagers describe something similar: their clients are often expressing pain at the top of their behavior. They might be yelling at the top of their voices too, but the words to explain what's happening frequently lag far behind.

The word "emotion" itself carries this idea of behavior built into its roots. It comes to us through the French émotion, from the Latin ēmovēre — "to move out," "to move away," "to disturb," "to agitate." Quite literally: emotion, e-motion, movement outward. The same Latin root, movere, gives us motion, motive, motivation, and motor — all of them, in one way or another, about being moved, or about producing movement. I don't think we need to lean too hard on etymology for scientific proof of anything, but it does set the stage nicely for an idea worth taking seriously: emotion drives behavior, often much faster than our slower, more thoughtful decision-making can keep up with. This is close to what Daniel Kahneman, whom I mentioned in the last reflection, calls our fast and slow systems — and emotion is very much a fast-system operator.

This shows up constantly in the counseling room. People come in frustrated by behaviors they, or the people they live with, don't want — yet those behaviors show up remarkably consistently and efficiently. And the behaviors they'd prefer instead seem strangely difficult to produce on demand. Emotion is usually the reason why. Compared to sensory feeling alone, emotion is a complex blend: sensory data, memory, the story we tell ourselves about what's happening, an appraisal of risk, an action tendency — some of it hardwired, some of it learned — and then behavior, spoken or otherwise, automatic or chosen, followed by outcomes that feed back into the whole system again.

Our emotional systems are remarkably good at storing and calling up past experience and linking it to whatever's happening right now. That "fast" system processes all of this at remarkable speed, often outrunning the slower filter that would otherwise ask, "Do I really want to do this? Say this?" The result can be a slight miss, or a tremendous one, in how we respond to the present moment.

Brené Brown, in her book Rising Strong, describes a moment from her own marriage when she caught herself doing exactly this — turning a comment from her husband into a story about her own inadequacy. The line she reached for instead has become a tool she still uses: "The story I'm making up is that you were blaming me for not having groceries, that I was screwing up." Naming the story as a story, rather than treating it as fact, is often the first move toward untangling it.

I think if we can approach these moments with curiosity rather than judgment — toward ourselves and toward each other — we have a real chance of sorting through the complex package of emotional content and finding greater clarity about which pathway forward is worth taking.

None of this complexity is a design flaw. Emotion, like the body it's built on, is a gift — one capable, as St. John Paul II wrote, of "making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine." Shannon Whitmore, writing on JPII's Theology of the Body, puts the practical version of this simply: when you choose to treat your body — and, I'd add, your emotional life — with respect, you are choosing to love and respect the One who gave it to you. It isn't something to be managed away or muted into flatness. It's a good and powerful system, given to help you flourish in this life — and, rightly ordered, to move you toward the goals of God's kingdom rather than away from them.