Emotional Deconstruction

Exclusive Writing Lab on how to define your feelings

Welcome and we continue our study of Cherish This Ecstasy by David James Duncan, and you’ve read the work, sat with how it made you feel and posted comments. Other comments came in the “back door” meaning they were emailed directly to me.

So…we are on our way. 🪶

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

―Maya Angelou

There is “something” in a piece of writing, any writing, that generates an element of emotion. Even a letter from the IRS or a lawyer will do this…that’s the core power of writing. If you look around, you are inundated by it in the form of texts, emails, regular mail, and all that you read on the internet, as well as books, magazines, and other publications around your home. You read…all the time. And everything you read makes you feel something: Fear. Worry. A thrill. Inspiration. Hope. Confusion. But often we don’t realize we’re having those feelings, or why.

Herein lies the problem.

We are not at a time in our evolution as a species where “feelings” get a lot of play. We’d rather believe that we are more rational than emotional, that what we feel is of lesser stuff than what we think. 🧐 We worry that if we indulge in those pesky “feelings” we’ll be lost or reduced to the instinctual animal-self of yesteryear. We tell ourselves we are better than our feelings. We are above them.

When I come along with this lesson and say, “Hey. How does this make you feel?” you might notice your first tendency is to burst right past feeling and hop into judgment, assessment, and analysis.

The Well-Practiced Art of Burying Feelings

Years ago, when starting personal work in earnest, I saw a woman who specialized in analyzing my dreams and parsing the symbols' underlying meaning. In our early days, she told me something shocking. Human beings have something like two hundred and fifty+ emotions generated by the fulfillment (or lack thereof) of basic human needs (safety and security, approval and affection, and power and control). There are other needs, she explained, as varied, plentiful, and nuanced as our emotional responses.

At the time, I shook my head in complete dismissal. Bull@#$%, I thought. I have about two or three emotions, on a bad day. The rest of the time, I’m fine.

She would explain that “fine” is not an emotion (again and again…I’m a slow learner). Being “fine” is a way of life for some and a mantra for others, but it’s not a feeling. And so the learning began.

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