Emotion and Their Physical Responses

A FEEL reader writes:

Thank you very much for the book, Feel. It is a terrific help to me in my journey to personal freedom in Christ.

One issue I was looking to understand better is how emotions are tagged to physical responses. You wrote how that's why the Church and rationalists suppress emotions. I have observed how certain emotions relate to physical responses both good and bad and the opposite is true too. I think it conditions us to gratify or repress certain emotions or seek to gratify or repress certain physical responses.

Don

Great Questions Don, here are some thoughts.

This is something we all wrestle with, what feelings in our bodies are tied to our emotions, and what feelings are just because we are bodies are reacting to something directly?  On a basic level, emotions are not necessarily linked to a particular feeling in our body. In early psychology, William James and others, wanted to find a permanent link for every emotion to a particular sensation so they could study emotions by looking at how the body felt.  But nobody could do that successfully.  In fact, researchers were so unsuccessful that they had to move on – there is no sure way to measure or quantify an emotion by how your body is feeling. 

If we look at philosophy, we also find very strong arguments for the fact that emotions are only necessarily linked to our thoughts, values and judgments and require no corresponding feeling in our body.  They are independent from bodily sensation.  For more on this, you need to read the early sections of Faithful Feelings.

That is good to know, because it means we need to be careful in figuring out one to one correlations with what we are feeling emotionally and what our body feels physically.  Our body relates to our emotions, but it relates to all manner of other things as well, so the signals it is giving us can be based on a combination of all kinds of things. 

On a  practical level, our emotions very often find expression in our bodies.  How our bodies feel can be used as one indicator of the intensity and nature of an emotion we are experiencing.  We can cry in sorrow or we can cry for joy  or we can cry because we just hit our thumb with a hammer – a person on the outside may interpret our tears as sorrow when in fact they are for happiness.  Only us, who know why we are crying, can correctly interpret the tears.  But even we need to be careful.  Are we crying over “spilled milk” (something minor) because it is really that upsetting, or is it because our bodies are stressed and exhausted?  Each situation requires its own unique analysis.  As we mature, we get better and better at figuring these things out quickly and correctly.

We need to recognize that we are complex, that we are so integrated that each part of us is so deeply interrelated – the rational, the physical, the emotional – that they are all always reacting to each other.  Sometimes, it is easy to tell how our emotions are affecting us physically.  Other times we need to do a little digging, even getting some help to unravel our feelings and emotions and learn how to be more mature emotionally and spiritually.  I believe that as we do that, we can undo some of the unhelpful links our mind has created between our bodies and our emotions – like we get sick to our stomach building toward an ulcer when we increase in anxiety -  while learning healthy emotional expressions in our body.  We need to learn to face hard emotions as emotions, not allowing them to destroy and harm our bodies as they have to leak out somewhere.  We can also learn healthy physical expressions for our love, joy as we let them out to bless our families and friends in laughter, hugs, or other forms of expression and affection.