Interpreting Emotions

There is a difference between emotions and feelings, even though we often use the terms interchangeably. Feelings are the conscious processing of our emotional state – they are the “words” we use to describe our emotions. Sometimes, we don’t even have the words to describe our emotions e.g., people suffering from depression often can’t describe or explain why they “feel” the way they do i.e., their emotional state. Emotions are, our physiological responses, to thoughts and experiences, whereas our feelings are our understanding of these. This is of course an over-simplification of the relationship between the two, as our conscious and subconscious processing of information and events don’t occur in isolation e.g., we can create emotions from feelings – if we think about something that makes us sad, we can experience a physiological response to this thought. We can also experience/feel the same emotion in different ways. It may be that sometimes we experience fear i.e., becoming adrenalized, as being frightened, such as when we hear footsteps behind us, as we are walking home at night, and other times we experience the same emotional state, as exhilaration e.g., when we do a bungee jump, parachute out of a plane, or ride a rollercoaster etc. We have, to some extent, an ability to interpret our emotional state in different ways, due to the fact that feelings are produced and altered consciously. In this article I want to look at several ways, in which we “deliberately” alter and change our emotional state, for a number of different reasons, so that we can better understand ourselves and others.

The first “change” I want to look at is one that many people suffering from trauma go through, which is changing shame to guilt. A good working definition of trauma is an experience – or number of experiences – where an individual is exposed to a stress – or a number of stressors – over which they have little or no control. If we consider cases of sexual assault and abuse, these are events where an individual experienced/was exposed to a highly stressful incident/event which they were unable to prevent from happening, which could be down to any number of reasons, none of which they were to blame for. Most people feel ashamed that they weren’t able to prevent the assault from happening.

There is a big difference between shame and embarrassment. Embarrassment is fleeting, and rarely lasts long – if it does it usually develops into shame. Shame is a state, that affects identity, and an individual’s self-awareness. Shame is social; it is about how individuals perceive other people’s perceptions of them. It doesn’t matter if those around them are aware of the high stress “event(s)” they were unable to control or not, there is an understanding that this is who they are in relation to others. This can become an overwhelming burden to deal with and the mind looks to find ways to cope and reduce the turmoil that it is experiencing, and so it rewrites the incident, in an attempt to reduce the stress that it is experiencing. It is unable to re-write the emotional distress that was experienced, but it can change the level/degree of “control” that the individual had over the event in order to lessen the degree of trauma felt. It does this by changing “shame” into “guilt”, by looking for reasons as to why the victimized individual was to blame for what happened to them e.g., perhaps they led their assailants on, perhaps they were dressed too provocatively, perhaps they had too much to drink etc. If they are responsible in some way, then they had a degree of control over what happened to them, and this lessens the trauma. Shame is social, guilt is personal, and therefore an easier state to deal with.

People will also turn humiliation into rage. Humiliation is also a socially derived feeling, that the mind wants to turn into something private. The path from humiliation to rage, involves justification e.g., a person in a bar who has a drink spilt over them, may feel a degree of humiliation; this was a situation in which they had no control, and now everyone is looking at them (and perhaps in their eyes laughing at them). In that moment they may simply feel a bit embarrassed but by accepting an apology, are able to acknowledge to the onlooking crowd that this was not their fault, and they shouldn’t be thought of as anything less etc. However, they may also be someone who has little control of the events that happen to them in day-to-day life and interpret this embarrassing incident as a humiliating one. Using justification as a bridge, they may take their humiliation and turn it into righteous anger. Individuals who use violence have to in some way justify it to themselves, whether they are involved in a bar fight or a mass killing. Sometimes we can understand their reasoning/justifications, other times they are completely baffling to us. Whatever they are they make sense to the violent individual and allow humiliation to experience and manifest itself as rage instead. Human beings are capable of changing one feeling and/or emotional state into another through a variety of cognitive processes.

When we talk about fight or flight, we are talking about a different feeling/response to the same emotional state – the emotion, not the feeling, comes first. When we find ourselves experiencing a physiological change in response to a threat, we can cognitively intervene and “decide” how we experience it. Fear is an emotion, that doesn’t have to be interpreted as such e.g., it can be positively transformed into righteous anger, through justification; nobody has the right to make me feel scared etc. We are unique creatures in our ability to do this, and we must be aware of when we do it to the detriment of our mental health, as well as when we can do it to increase our survival chances. We must also be aware that others also can and do go through these shifts, and what may seem a minor incident to us, may create a righteous anger in others.