Giving Emotions a World

A couple of years ago, when the girls were younger, I was driving them to school and Harper was crying. Wren had blown up over a goldfish snack, and Harper was clutching it securely in her arms. I remember telling them that in every moment there’s an opportunity to speak from your heart and act from your heart, and that we can hop off of these clouds of anger, these clouds of frustration, that we don’t have to stay on them. There was a deep silence, like a space big enough had opened for the words to be heard and felt. And they listened.

I’ve been thinking about what emotions are. The first thought is that they’re information, they tell us about the world around us. But they also act for us, they help us survive. A baby’s cry is supposed to move the world. It’s the only language she has, the feeling and the action are the same thing, and the world is supposed to answer it. The burst that gets us out of danger and the cry that feeds a baby are the same mode, and in those moments it’s right. But as our kids get older and the cry keeps working, the feelings begin to run the house. Or sadly sometimes it’s the opposite, when our cries are met with silence or anger, we learn to hide them first from the world, and sometimes even from ourselves.

Either way, the feeling never gets asked why it’s there.

It’s a shift, from feelings as actions to feelings as words. A tantrum is the infant’s strategy still working. And it only runs in one direction. An emotion in a tantrum isn’t seeing why the no came. And if the emotion keeps moving the world, why would it ever learn to speak?

There’s research on this. In a UCLA study, people looked at photos of faces, angry, fearful, while their brains were scanned. When they put a name to the emotion they were seeing, the alarm centers of their brains quieted down. The name created a little distance between the feeling and the person feeling it. I didn’t know that when I told the girls about the clouds. But I think that’s why the story made sense to them. The clouds let them picture the feeling as something that’s momentary, something they’re on, something they can hop off of. The name turned the feeling into something they could see instead of something they were.

So it matters how we answer. A feeling met with silence or anger learns to hide. A feeling that always moves the world just keeps moving it, it never gets asked why it’s there. It feels like the answer is that the feeling is welcome, but the space it gets only grows when it’s met with words. The welcome is how the feeling learns it’s safe to speak. And the words are what make the space grow. When the cry stops moving the world, the feeling has to find its words, and a feeling with words is something we can both see, feel, and share in a way that creates a conversation.

Maybe that’s what emotions are for. Connection. When I finally find the words to share a feeling with someone, it gets to live within someone else too. And when they find theirs, their feeling gets to live in me. I want my girls to feel their emotions more, not less. I want their feelings to have words.

And this isn’t just about our kids. We all learned what our emotions are for from how the world answered them. Some of us are still moving the world with them. Some of us still hiding them.

So the question isn’t how do I keep their feelings from moving the world. Push that too far and they learn their feelings aren’t for this world.

Maybe it’s how do I help their feelings find words and then the world.

The study: Matthew Lieberman and colleagues, “Putting Feelings Into Words,” Psychological Science (2007).