I strongly believed that being aware of my thoughts and expressing my feelings were important keys to a life well lived. "Know thyself" was a maxim which I believed could be achieved through self-expression and honest reflection on how I felt.
In Recovery there are a lot of subtle ideas. One of the most powerful tools in my opinion is "feelings are not facts", which would seem to contradict the idea that self-expression is good. As a student I had many conversations with people who were having trouble with their relationships, or struggling with difficult family dynamics where I advised them to "...take seriously how they felt", and "...not let others tell you how you feel", and that "...your feelings are real and important, do not ignore them".
I think these are popular ideas today, likely more popular than they were when Dr. Abraham Low wrote his books. We live in the age of the video blogger, where it seems everyone has a personal story to tell and will report with much detail exactly what they think and feel about a wide variety of things. While I still believe that there is value in self-expression I'm less convinced that this is the best route to self-knowledge. There is a very good book "Generation Me" written by Dr. Jean Twenge where she talks about behavioural trends and how they have changed in the last 50 years. She comments on the YouTube video blogger phenomena and is ultimately asking questions about whether it is healthy to focus so much on the self.
Generation Me is a very interesting book. One of the main things I got out of reading it was discovering the root of my belief that self-expression and introspection were healthy and good, whereas emotional suppression was clearly bad. These messages have been embedded in popular culture and media for many decades and I think are even more prevalent today than they were when I first attended university. In this decade we have a new Mr. Spock presented in the most recent Star Trek films who still represents this strange archetype of the intellectual / mystic and warns us about the dangers of emotional suppression, something that no mere human should attempt.
Dr. Low writes:
I want you to know that your feelings are not facts. They merely pretend to reveal facts. Your feelings deceive you. They tell you of danger when there is no hazard, of wakefulness when sleep was adequate, of exhaustion when the body is merely weary and the mind discouraged. In speaking of your symptoms your feelings lie to you. If you trust them you are certain to be betrayed into panics and vicious cycles. I said that your feelings lie to you, that they deceive and betray you. How can that be? How can feelings be true or false? If you are sad what has that to do with truth, deception or treachery? Feelings are either experienced or they are not. They are present or absent but never true or false. Thoughts alone possess the quality of truth and falseness. And if the patient's feelings tell lies they do so because an incorrect and deceptive thought is attached to them. The deception is accomplished by the thought, not by the feeling.
In learning about Dr. Low's ideas this particular one took some time to sink in for me. In Recovery meetings we are careful to balance the tool "feelings are not facts" with complementary tools like "you are entitled to your initial response" and "express your feelings not your temper". What these tools do in combination is acknowledge that your responses are yours and they are real responses, they remind you to express in a civilized way how you feel, and that the only thing you should consider repressing are your crudest and cruelest thoughts, your angry and fearful tempers.
The tool "feelings are not facts" is meant to remind you that just because you feel something that doesn't mean that this feeling is giving you accurate information about your experiences. As humans we have a complex nervous system where some input comes from the world, and some input is internal, and our mind blends the two into a seamless experience. We think we always have a clear handle on which is which, but the world is not easy to understand and our experience of it will always be filtered through our ideas.
In Recovery we don't ask you to ignore your feelings or to suppress them, but we do ask that you be skeptical of your feelings. We try to realize that feelings often arise due to our thoughts, and that our thoughts and beliefs may not be 100% correct, although they will seem to be. This is a little bit like the riddle where you ask whether a fish can explain what water is, despite being surrounded by it. The fish having never been out of the water has no idea that it is even in water or what water might be. Many people have a similar relationship with some of their ideas and beliefs. Some beliefs seem self evident. Nobody would keep hold of a belief that they thought wasn't true, but it doesn't then follow that all beliefs are true just because someone holds them.
Consider that maybe some of your beliefs may not be true, and that your feelings are tightly connected to these beliefs, and so while it is true that you feel certain things, those feelings may not be providing factual information about the world.
In a recent blog article I mentioned a book called "Feeling Good" by Dr. David Burns, he writes:
Even though your depressing thoughts may be distorted, they nevertheless create a powerful illusion of truth. Let me expose the basis for the deception in blunt terms- your feelings are not facts! In fact, your feelings per-se, don't event count- except as a mirror of the way you are thinking. If your perceptions make no sense, the feelings they create will be as absurd as the images reflected in the trick mirrors at an amusement park. But these abnormal emotions feel just as valid and realistic as the genuine feelings created by undistorted thoughts, so you automatically attribute truth to them. This is why depression is such a powerful form of mental black magic.
Once you invite depression though an "automatic" series of cognitive distortions, your feelings and actions will reinforce each other in a self-perpetuating vicious cycle. Because you believe whatever your depressed brain tells you, you find yourself feeling negative about almost everything. This reaction occurs in milliseconds, too quickly for you to be aware of it. The negative emotion feels realistic and in turn lends an aura of credibility to the distorted thought which created it. The cycle goes on and on, and you are eventually trapped. The mental prison is an illusion, a hoax you have inadvertently created, but is seems real because it feels real.
The key concept here is that your mind and your beliefs play a role in your interpretation of the world and how you experience events. The feelings you have in response to the world will always seem true and correct, but may not be. The world can be a difficult place to understand, and when we misunderstand the world our distorted ideas can create distorted feelings. This doesn't mean that our feelings have no validity, quite the contrary, our feelings are undeniably a huge part of our experience. Our feelings can also become a part of our illness. Keeping in mind that our feelings are not facts should give those of us with emotional difficulties hope. Much of what we feel is a reflection of reality, some is not. Figuring this difference out helps us to live healthier lives.
Leonard Nimoy, the first actor to play Mr. Spock, passed away in 2015 at the age of 83. Despite the role he played, an alien who worked to purge all emotion from his being, his departure from this world left his fans with a bittersweet sadness as they reflected on his work and life. That response, while paradoxical given the reserved and stoic character Nimoy developed, is in every way a genuine one and the sort of feeling we should take seriously and express.
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