Simple Experiment

I am reading a new book. This is nothing new, I am reading a new book all the time. I’ve lost track of how much I read, I read a lot. I would be willing to read less in the future, when I find Mr. Right. I think I’m ready to spend nights at the orchestra, or in a jazz club, but for now, I go to bed early and read. (I know, I know, I’ve been told I will never find someone if I never go out, bad odds, eh?)

The past couple of years I have been reading about emotions. I guess this interest started more than a couple of years ago when I read a book by Paul Ekman, called Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. The first line of the introduction in this book says, “Emotions determine the quality of our lives.” This, I want to understand, how? How do emotions determine the quality of our lives?

By the time this book came out, I was ready to understand emotions. My youngest daughter, Megan, had finally been diagnosed with hypothyroid disease. For years, our family doctor, and the therapist I was taking her to were trying to understand why she was depressed. Depression is a common symptom of thyroid disease. A person with hypo-thyroid has depression due to a lack of hormones manufactured by the thyroid.

In 2001 we are seeing this therapist who suggested that my daughter is perhaps on the Asperger’s syndrome spectrum. In looking into what this is, I realize my daughter is the last person in the world to be on this spectrum. My daughter in fact, can read people like I’ve never seen. Honestly, I just thought my daughter had some amazing gift. I kinda thought she was magic. I could not read people the way she could, and she would talk to me about it. So, here’s this diagnosis thrown out there, which actually fits me more than my daughter. The therapist, after some discussion, had to agree. This was still before her thyroid disease was discovered.

So, then I wonder, “Is my daughter magic, how does she do it, and so I ask her about it. I ask her, “How do you do it? How do you know what people are thinking and feeling with just looking at them?” And she replies, “It’s easy mom, you look at their faces, at their eyes, at their body language.” I came away from these conversations with her wanting to learn how “emotions determine the quality of our lives.”

If my daughter knew more about emotions than I did, how was I to learn? And so I find Ekman’s book, and I see how this works, and realize my daughter is not magic, but extremely bright, and she is also able to articulate how she thinks. Why is this kid too tired to go to school and do her homework? The folks at school think I’m wonked, when I tell them how amazing she is, they are like, “Yeah, right.”

Ekman’s book was like a light bulb going on for me, I realized I was not taught to recognize emotions. This brought me to understand that I didn’t have a good grasp of emotions in myself and others. I realized that really, I wasn’t in touch with my emotions. So, how do I reconnect? How do I integrate this new emotional understanding into my life? Slowly, I guess.

Fast forward to this morning, reading The One Thing Holding You Back: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Connection by Raphael Cushnir. In this book, Cushnir walks you through feeling your feelings. Not judging yourself or your feelings, and not being afraid to feel feelings that you are afraid to feel. I am trying to do this; and it is work. I think I spent the first half of my life trying not to feel my feelings, ignoring them, trying to actually care about everyone else’s feelings. Being manipulated by this.

I was trying to think my way through life, trying to read every book I could find that might show me how life works, cerebrally. Now I am trying really hard to become a more integrated person, and it is like the pieces are not quite in place, but moving towards a more complete picture. I really do want to spend evenings at the orchestra, I really do want to see an opera, I really do want to have a wider range of emotions and experiences, but I am afraid. I have to work through not being afraid of being afraid.

I still haven’t finished reading Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear and Despair, by Miriam Greenspan. This is an amazing and spiritual book I bought last year. I have Emotional Freedom, by Judith Orloff out from the library, (probably will have to take it back before I finish-so it’s added to my wish list). Add to the mix, neuroscience, The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development & Clinical Practice (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology), by Diana Foshe, et al.; which is showing me that the things I knew intuitively have been pretty sound. (Not as wonked as all the those school folks thought.) I’m also working my way through The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion: How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense by Michael A. Jawer. These last two books I bought myself with birthday money-yoohoo; so I can take my time.

Perhaps this is not a simple experiment, perhaps integrating my learning into my own understanding of my emotions and feelings; and being able to use this in the practice of therapy is a complex experiment after all. I might just need some time to understand and integrate all this. I continued this conversation with Megan just today, and she explained to me, “Reading facial expressions is not necessarily about emotions. It is about what wants to be expressed. The thought, or the idea that the person wants to act on. The things or thoughts that are being held back.” I thought about this and said, “Maybe right now our understanding of emotions is so basic, that there are things we have no words for yet. Maybe facial expressions are about emotions, and intellect and words and communication, and maybe they intersect to produce something even more complex.” Hmm, maybe we’re on to something.