Emotions, Feelings, and Adoption
(Note: this essay is even more all over the place than is typical for me. I was trying to say too much with too few words, but at least I tried.)
If you’re interested in understanding yourself and others better and don’t know who Joe Hudson is, check out his Art of Accomplishment YouTube videos, and you are welcome.
I am in the process of taking his Connection Course, and after two meetings I have the sense my life could forever be changed for the better if I keep up with the experiments he leads us though. I’m not going to explain them here because 1. it feels like too much work and 2. you can take the course yourself.
His basic premise is the way to connection is through vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder. He argues that the feelings we are afraid to experience are the things that run our lives as we do anything we can to avoid them. (I think he argues this—that at least is my takeway.)
What I want to tell you is I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions, feelings, and embodiment ever since the first weeks of Martha Beck’s Wayfinder life coach training program where I learned embodiment means you have access to your internal compass which responds to emotions and leads you towards things that are good for you and away from things that are not. It’s a yes/no meter. One way to understand your body compass is to think of something or someone you love and pay attention to the physical sensations in your body—that is the body compass—you—saying yes. Then think of something unpleasant and feel how your body responds to that—now you know what no feels like. Take note that we aren’t talking about what you think about these things—but what you feel instead (tight abdomen, constricted throat, open heart, warmth spreading down arms, etc). It sounds so basic, and it is, but how many of us really take the time to listen to our bodies?
My question was, as someone who learned from an early age to bypass her emotions and body compass in order to fit into my life, how can I trust my body compass when I broke my trusting relationship with it long ago? It seems to me if you take a baby from its mother and give it to new people, that baby's body compass is going to say no, while in order to stay alive, at some point the body has to learn to read a no as a yes. If anxiety and stress feel like home to me and safety can feel like danger, how can I trust my emotions to lead me to a truly authentic life?
I started checking in many times a day to see how I was feeling. Again and again, if I wasn’t angry or happy, my feeling state was…unreadable. More often than not my feeling felt like waiting or on hold. Are those even feelings? They seemed more like states of being. I’m waiting to feel something. I’m on hold until I know how I should feel.
I bought a feeling wheel to learn more about the whole situation, and what I found is there are so many feelings! Do I even recognize them when I feel them? Do I know the difference between inspired, open, playful, sensitive, loving, provocative, courageous, fulfilled, respected, confident, important, inquisitive, amused, ecstatic, liberated, energetic, eager, awe, astonished and on and on and on? As I type each word, my answer is yes. It just takes some attention for me to experience the body sensations so I can name the feeling. When you live mostly in the fight or flight of the sympathetic nervous system there generally isn’t time or much interest in checking in how the body feels. All the energy is spent on keeping the head above water.
As I was doing some research, I came across the fact that feelings and emotions are not the same thing. According to an article in Psychology Today, “Despite the words being used interchangeably, emotions and feelings are actually two different but connected phenomena. Emotions originate as sensations in the body. Feelings are influenced by our emotions but are generated from our mental thoughts.” So the very center of the feeling wheel are the basic emotions we have: happy, sad, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. I had not heard surprise listed as a basic emotion before, but since it’s on the wheel I bought, I’ll include it here. From these emotions, feelings arise. If you look at the wheel like a sun, the center of the wheel is the hot core, while the outer rings are the expression of this core.
Our bodies are so incredible. They take a physical stimulus and then have the wherewithal to take the resulting feelings and create a story around this sensation. You poke me and I’m going to feel anger and fear and go around for the rest of my life telling people the story of the day you bullied me and made me feel like shit and wrecked my life.
I think part of coming out of the fog for many adopted people is reckoning with the realization they have little or no idea who they are, what they like, and what they truly want to do with their lives. It’s like we go from a supposed blank slate to a slate with a story written on it to blank slate again as we question the entire story. What helps us build ourselves from the ground up?
Our body compass.
I wish there was a Body Compass College for adopted people—for those who feel they need it. We could learn how to pay attention to and understand our emotions and feelings so we could build a sense of self and a life that feels authentic and vital.
This is one reason I’m spending the winter in Provincetown, a place nicknamed Helltown because of how desolate it is off-season. I need to much space and quiet in order to feel myself feel. I’m so used to spinning stories around emotions and feelings to explain things that confused me. (Why does my stomach always hurt? It must be because…) (Why do I feel confused so much of the time? It must be because…) (Why do I cry so easily? It must be because…)
Having feelings and emotions that seem out of place or are not understood by ourselves or those around us is such an isolating experience. It would be amazing to know when my body said yes and when my body said no and to develop a trusting relationship with myself that I would respond appropriately, supportively when my body compass communicated with me.
When we don’t know what calls to our body and soul, how can we flourish?
If children who were adopted had parents, doctors, teachers, therapists, parents of friends who understood the physical and mental side effects of relinquishment and adoption, fewer stories might have to be spun out of thin air because we would know why the tantrums happened out of nowhere. We would understand stomachaches, headaches, crying jags. We would be able to see the emotions and feelings for what they were and address the ground level of grieving that was (still) going on five, ten, thirty years after the actual act of relinquishment took place.
If the world took a beat to really contemplate what might happen to a child’s ability to feel safety and love in their own system after losing the mother, we might fight Trump’s actions with ICE with even more understanding and determination.
