Wait. What? Emotions Are Not Feelings?
I recently experienced a week of synchronicity so thick, it may as well have been supernatural. First, a friend said casually, “I don’t believe emotions and feelings are the same thing.” When asked what that meant, she wasn’t sure why she’d even said it.
A couple days later I attended a webinar titled Weaving Emotion Into Your Story given by the amazing instructor, agent, and podcast host Cecilia Lyra (the podcast is The Shit They Don’t Tell You About Writing—check it out). In her gloriously generous style, Lyra explained to us the full scope of how emotions inform feelings. Plus, she showed us how to write both simultaneously in ways that enrich the characters’ lives and the readers’ engagement.
The very next afternoon, I listened to a therapist (okay, my therapist) explain why emotions are not the same as feelings. Three times in one week? To quote Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, “What I tell you three times is true.”
It wouldn’t be right to visit Lyra’s teachings here. This is limited to what my therapist said. Here is her explanation:
Emotions happen in the body. They are the physical sensations with which we respond to our movement through life. (Search the web for “body map of emotions” and you will be directed to images that show painted depictions for where and how different emotions locate—quite a helpful tool for writing.) Before we can have “feelings” we must have these physical experiences.
This alchemy makes for the resonance we call unity of body, mind, and soul. With that paper people become flesh and blood.
In a flash, the brain then goes to work assessing the source of the sensation. That’s the brain’s job. At a fundamental level, emotion is a form of discomfort, and our overly self-important brains just live to get us out of pain any way they can. That may require changing our environment. Other people are part of our environment. How do we change other people?
We strive to communicate in sound what is happening to us in physical emotion. The hope being the other person will alter their behavior to alleviate or increase our physical state. We attempt to do this by shaping words to represent the sensation. Those words are what we call feelings.
Feelings can range from nonsensical sounds—“Ouch!”—to deep dives into the physical sensation—“You’re breaking my heart.”— to complex analysis of the layers in the body’s discomfort—“I’m so happy to see everyone but I hate surprise parties, though I’m deeply grateful to have friends who would plan all this for me.”
Language is the brain’s echo of our body’s being alive. That makes feelings echoes of our bodily realities. However, those realities can be quite different from what we actually say. The body can’t lie to us, but the brain can. Trouble begins when we don’t translate the message the body is sending and pretend, in words, to feel differently—to bring about a desired outcome or to stay safe. What happens then distills down to an essence of conflict, the rudimentary foundations of drama. And we have story.
Physical emotion into thoughtful analysis into named feeling. The process might take a second. It might take a decade. This alchemy makes for the resonance we call unity of body, mind, and soul. With that paper people become flesh and blood.
Now, go write something. How do you feel?
Writing exercise
Here is a body image map of emotions from NPR. Consider the different places and ways emotions are experienced by the body. Write a small scene inspired by the photograph above. What is this person experiencing? Carry it through from physical emotion to the point they can name their feelings in language. Bonus Points: Create dialogue where the character tries to explain how they feel without using the name of the emotion.
Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash