As Vickie Gray has noted, "Holding back your feelings doesn’t keep them hidden, it just makes your behavior incoherent." [1] Which reminds me of something I first heard from either David Bradford or Mary Ann Huckabay at Stanford many years ago: "We're leaky."
When we try to suppress our feelings, we "leak" in all sorts of ways that send powerful signals to those around us. Our body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, eye contact (or lack thereof) and countless other non-verbal cues shout to the world "SOMETHING'S UP!!!" even as we insist, "Everything's fine."
And when it comes to sensing others' emotional signals, we're like one of those remarkable pigs that can smell a truffle three feet underground. [2] As a species we've evolved an exquisitely sensitive set of receptors tuned to the emotions of those around us. So not only do we convey emotions quite readily no matter what's actually said (even when we say nothing at all), but other people are much more perceptive than we typically realize. We're leaking, and we're fooling no one.
But just because we can apprehend others' feelings doesn't mean we can comprehend them. As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has written, the pathways through which we experience emotions are a "quick and dirty processing system." [3] We sense something, but we can't quite make sense of it. We feel, but we don't understand.
And this is where things can get incoherent very quickly. Nature abhors a vacuum, and we can't stand the cognitive dissonance that results when we sense another person's emotional state, but we don't understand the rationale for their behavior. So we fill in the gap and invent an explanation that removes the dissonance. Sometimes we're right, and sometimes we're very, very wrong.
The key is simple in theory but sometimes very difficult to put into practice: Acknowledging and disclosing our emotions fills in the cognitive gaps and allows others to clearly understand what we're feeling. Of course, this is harder when we're tired, stressed, vulnerable, threatened, or experiencing emotions that we're reluctant to share, such as embarrassment or shame. So it's essential to practice. Talking about feelings doesn't come naturally to many of us, but like any learned skill, it gets easier with repetition.
Footnotes
[1] @AdaptiveCoach
[2] Truffle hunting demonstration with a pig [0:20 video] (11hblog, YouTube, 2009)
[3] The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, page 163 (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)
Photo © 2011 J. Ronald Lee via Flickr.
