A feeling walks into the room, and, while I have no idea what the punch-line here is supposed to be, everyone stands at attention. That’s the whole problem. Feelings have amazing marketing. There are numerous films where the plot centers on emotions having their own voice, and we are inundated by the false story that feelings and thinking are somehow two separate processes, rather than woven threads of a biologically-based evaluation system.
This special attention we give to feelings, particularly in this age of the centrality of a person’s ‘lived experience,’ combined with the partisan quality that one’s relationship to feelings has taken — from ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ to ‘fuck your feelings’ to ‘my feelings matter’ — has only exacerbated our predilection for thinking the varieties of consciousness that we label as reason and emotion, are the most important thing about us, divorced from the natural order of our biology. This centrality of our experience has made the jump to — culturally, therapeutically, in the particular self-help dialect so many of my clients arrive speaking — deciding that the intensity of an emotion is evidence of its accuracy. Feel it strongly enough, and it must be true. Or, to bring attention to the central point of the current reflection: Feel unsafe enough, and you must be unsafe.
I want to take that apart, not only because it’s wrong, but because believing it is quietly making people more fragile, and more afraid, rather than resilient. Fragility feeds itself: treat the feeling as proof, and the next move is to avoid whatever triggered it — the conversation, the room, the person — shrinking the world a little more every time and handing the interpretive feeling label more authority the next time it shows up. What started as a single reaction becomes a habit of retreat, and the retreat becomes isolation, which then produces more of exactly the feeling it was meant to escape.
Here’s the plain point before I complicate it: feelings are not verdicts. They are not facts about the world, and they are not facts about you. They are, like thoughts, events that arise, carry information, and pass along. They are not, contrary to how this discussion usually goes, something that is or is capable of being suppressed or requiring obedience in any particular behavioral expression. The skill to apply is learning to hold them long enough to ask questions before engaging in the actions that will express them.
What Happens in the Second Before You Believe It
Lets start with the body, because that’s where the myth of emotional infallibility gets its authority. In 2007, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues at UCLA ran people through an fMRI scanner while showing them photographs of faces twisted into fear or anger. One condition asked subjects to simply look. Another asked them to pick the word that named what they were seeing — “angry,” “afraid” — and attach it to the image.
Labeling the emotion, compared to just absorbing the image, was seen to have calmed the amygdala and other limbic regions down, while lighting up one specific region: the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, an area tied to symbolic, top-down processing of emotional information. The two effects moved together — the more that word-using region was activated, the quieter the alarm circuitry became.
This neurological relationship is key to understanding the findings here. As Reisberg notes: “The amygdala is also important for detecting positive stimuli—indicators of safety or available rewards.” (Reisberg, Daniel. Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind (p. 92)). Assessment is never a single-region affair, but a whole-body — and by this is meant the brain as well — process.
Naming the feeling didn’t erase it. It didn’t require the subject to decide the feeling was wrong, unjustified, or shameful. It just interrupted the automatic hand-off from raw, pre-conscious, appraisal to full-bodied reaction. Joseph LeDoux has spent considerable time mapping the “low road” that lets a threat cue bypass deliberate cognition entirely, because a genuine predator doesn’t wait for you to finish thinking. This is why threat identification needs to be fast, our survival in the original evolutionary environment required it. But a threat-detection system built for speed is, by definition, a system built to be wrong sometimes. Fast and accurate are different design goals, and the amygdala was built for the first. What Lieberman’s study shows is that the ancient circuitry issuing the verdict is not the only voice in the room — and a slower, symbolic, word-using part of you can turn its volume down without turning its message off.
The Feeling Is Data. It Is Not the Conclusion.
I want to be careful, because there’s a lazy version of this argument that goes to the absurd conclusion of “just don’t feel things.” It’s often more positively put forward by those who think of themselves as purely “rational” creatures, typically to distance themselves from someone they don’t agree with, or to misogynistically dismiss the entirety of the female sex. Let me be clear: that version is both cruel and clinically illiterate. Feelings are not noise to be filtered out. Feelings, or, better, feeling states, are one input among several, arriving from a system optimized for speed over precision. Treating any particular feeling state, given an emotional label, as the final input — the one that gets to skip deliberation and go straight to the conclusion — is as the error. This is the same error that the person dismissing feelings is making, except that they amusingly and to the same degree of clinical illiteracy, are declaring a conscious thought as automatically correct because they have it.
Steven Hayes and colleagues built an entire clinical model around the distinction between mental data points, whether feelings or thoughts, and conclusions. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) names the failure “cognitive fusion” — the collapse of the space between having a thought or feeling and being fused to it, so that, for example, “I feel unsafe” stops being an observation and becomes an identity, a fact, a closed loop. The intervention Hayes proposes isn’t argumentation. You don’t out-debate a feeling. Rather, it’s defusion: noticing the feeling as a feeling — I am having the sensation of unsafety rather than I am unsafe — which is functionally the same move Lieberman’s subjects were making when they reached for a word instead of just absorbing the image. Naming is not the same as agreeing. That gap between the two is where the active space of flexibility lives. Just as we can have fun with finding shapes in clouds, it doesn’t mean there’s a real elephant there. We have connected disparate pieces to project a whole, and where we go awry is when we mistake the conclusion as inevitable and singular.
Flexibility, not calm, is the actual target. To live a mentally healthy life is not to have distress be absent, any more than training for a sport or an event means you won’t feel discomfort. A person who has trained themselves to interrogate a feeling — where did this come from, what is it actually telling me, has this exact shape of alarm been wrong before — is not someone who feels less. They’re someone who no longer lets a single, however strongly “felt,” interpretation override the variety of possibility in the next moment, day, or life.
The Client Who Left Before I Could Say Anything
A few years ago, I was working with a man — a name doesn’t matter as this is a meshing of multiple stories — who worked in a warehouse and had spent two decades certain that any flicker of anger meant he was becoming his father. He’d feel his jaw tighten in a disagreement with a coworker, and the interpretation arrived instantaneously: it’s happening again, I am him, get out. He’d leave the room. Sometimes he’d leave the shift. The feeling wasn’t wrong to have — how his father expressed his anger had genuinely hurt him, and his nervous system had every reason to be alert to the shape of it. What was wrong was the next step, the one that happened so fast it didn’t feel like a step at all: treating the jaw-tightening as proof of an identity, rather than as one data point that needed a second look before he acted on it.
As with all the clients I work with on their relationship to anger, we didn’t work on eliminating the anger. We worked on the consequences. Notice the jaw. Name it — tension, not fury. Ask what’s actually in front of you right now, this conversation, this coworker, not the one from thirty years ago. Slow, undramatic, repeated work. By the end, he wasn’t calmer, not exactly. Rather, he was more willing to stay in the room long enough to find out whether the alarm was pointing at something real. That willingness — not the absence of the jolt, but the presence of the resiliency — is what changed his life.
The Steelman: Isn’t This Just Another Way to Dismiss Yourself?
An objection can rise here concerning “don’t automatically believe your feelings,” where it can sound like the invalidating message so many people have received from a parent, a partner, a church — you’re too sensitive, calm down, it’s not that big a deal? There’s a risk of handing people a sophisticated-sounding excuse to behaviorally suppress, minimize, or spiritually bypass legitimate distress. Emotional invalidation can definitely be harmful. I’m not interested in giving it a shiny new intellectual cover with neuroscience.
The distinction is where the interrogation is aimed. Invalidation says your feeling is wrong, stop having it. Defusion says your feeling is real, now let’s find out what it’s actually telling you before we let it drive. One shuts the inquiry down before it starts; the other opens it. A person practicing this well doesn’t arrive at “I shouldn’t feel scared.” They arrive at “I feel scared — is that because something here is actually dangerous, or because this situation is experienced as an echo of an old one?” Sometimes the honest answer is yes, this is dangerous, leave. The point was never to override the feeling. It was to stop being ruled by it before you’d asked the question.
Safety Was Never the Absence of Hurt
Now we arrive at what I actually think safety means — and it’s not a fantasy of the absence of distress. Far too often, typically by people who are trying to sell us on the idea that obedience to authority or subjection to a rigid ideology, we take on the idea that a safe life is a life with the hurt filtered out: no jolt of shame, no flash of fear, no unwanted feeling allowed to land. The thing is, that version of safety is not just unavailable, it’s a bad target even in principle, because it defines the entire project as controlling an environment you don’t actually have the power to effect at the scale required.
The alternative is older and far more durable: safety as the capacity to be disturbed and still function. To have the feeling, hold it, ask it a question, and choose your next move instead of having the move chosen for you by a circuit built for speed thirty million years before anyone needed to survive a disagreement with a coworker. That’s resilience. Not an absence of feeling, but the presence of deliberateness. It doesn’t require the storm to pass you by. It asks that you still be standing, still deciding, when it does.
A passing thought or feeling, which is what they always are, is allowed to be loud. It is not allowed to be the director, no matter how “strong” it is felt to be. That’s the discipline leading to a mentally healthy life — not silence, not suppression, just the half-second of daylight between the feeling and the verdict, held open on purpose, every time. The result is a flexibility to not be tossed about by every wind of consciousness, and instead step into the best version of who you want to be.
Sources:
Matthew D. Lieberman, Naomi I. Eisenberger, Molly J. Crockett, Sabrina M. Tom, Jennifer H. Pfeifer, and Baldwin M. Way, “Putting Feelings Into Words,”Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 421–428.
Steven C. Hayes, Jason B. Luoma, Frank W. Bond, Akihiko Masuda, and Jason Lillis, “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, Processes and Outcomes,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 44, no. 1 (2006): 1–25.
Joseph LeDoux’s work on the amygdala’s rapid, low-road threat-appraisal pathway is discussed throughout The Emotional Brain (Simon & Schuster, 1996).
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