Pattern #70
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Working Through Feelings
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Denying or shutting down feelings—emotions, pains, etc.—usually blocks people’s energy or blinds them to important warnings. “Working through feelings” has two seemingly opposite meanings: continuing despite feelings and addressing feelings directly and productively. So promote conscious use of both approaches, as needed, to support people’s clear energy and attention.
Related: 25 Feeling Heard, 32 Integrity and Authenticity, 33 Iteration, 44 Power of Listening, 46 Privacy Guarantees, 48 Prudent Use of Power-Over, 57 Story Sharing
Going deeper …
This is an edited version of the video on this page.
Lots of stuff has been written and done with this idea of working through feelings. Feelings are a source of richness in life, they are also a source of problems in life. To the extent we are trying to create orderly environments in organizational settings and communities we tend to want people to keep their feelings under control. Very often that means suppressing them and blocking them.
One issue that particularly arises between men and women is that women are trained and inclined to be more open with their feelings and men are trained and inclined to be more closed down about their feelings, sometimes to the point of not even knowing what they’re feeling or how to talk about their feelings. That shutting down or denying feelings blocks their energy. There is no longer a flow of energy through their lives.
“Emotion” derives from “motion”. The “e” is a Latin prefix meaning “out”. So we can say that “emotion” is what the motions and motivations of life come out of. Emotions and feelings are a primary source of the activities of life. So when you suppress or close down emotions, pains and other feelings – which are often there to communicate that something is very right or very wrong – it blocks the flow of energy and motion.
Since emotions and pains and other forms of feeling are usually telling us something, there is information in them. They contain demands on our attention; it’s like they are saying “pay attention and find out what’s going on!” When we shut them down, when we cut off the symptom, we never a chance to find out what the cause is. Sometimes feelings can be intuitions, too, just like a hunch, a gut feeling. It’s like these things are calls to pay attention and gather our energies in particular ways and to move differently in life.
Video Introduction (14 min)
Examples and Resources
- Active Listening Link
- Nonviolent Communication (addressing needs that generate emotions)
Link-CII Link - Radical Honesty
Link-Radicalhonesty - Support groups
Link-Ncadd
Link-Psychcentral - Psychotherapy
Link-Mayoclinic - Coming of Age Rituals
Link-Wikipedia - Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects Link
- Arnold Mindell’s World Work Link
- Feeling emotions and acting anyway
Link-Huffingtonpost
Link-Psychcentral - Emotional Intelligence
Link-Wikipedia - Controlling emotions
Link-Psychologytoday - Anger Management
Link-APA - “Anger: A Powerful Force for Empathy and Change”
Link - Despair and empowerment work
Link-CII - Lists of feelings
Link-Guide To Psychology
Link-CNVC - Constellations work – Link Link (video)
- Social Presence Theater – Link (videos)
- Focusing (Gendlin) – Link
One obvious discipline relevant here is emotional and anger management. Very often people celebrated as being brave – people who went into some disaster area and did something or were soldiers in battle – when asked about their courage, say they were terrified but they went ahead and acted anyway. They acted on a very different level than where their fear was happening.
Constellations work, Social Presence Theater and Focusing remind us that “feelings” aren’t only emotions. They can be intuitions, “gut feelings”, bodily sensations or “a felt sense” – all of which offer potentially vital information for us to take into account.
I think vulnerability has a role here, too. Being open and vulnerable is a very emotion-laden process. And it can under many circumstances be a powerful process, evoking support or action, as embodied in the public vulnerability of nonviolent demonstrators, whose pain in the face of obvious injustice moves bystanders to action. I also experienced in during the 1986 Great Peace March when its hierachical nonprofit support organization ProPeace went bankrupt after 2 weeks and hundreds of us marchers were abandoned in the Mojave Desert. We discovered that our collective vulnerability inspired many churches and peace groups to come rushing to our aid and we relaunched and made it all the way to Washington DC, supported along the way by thousands of people.
I’d like to change a word: From “continue _despite_ feelings” to “continue _alongside_ feelings”. I suggest this because the word “despite” has an oppositional flavour to it which tends to support the Anglo cultural bias towards suppressing feeling and emotional expression. For me that first sense of “working through feelings” is about acknowledging that I’m feeling e.g. anger/fear, and to continue interacting in the process while allowing that emotion to be present in me and to shape my motions/actions until it shifts into something else. Hence I’m working by continuing to act through or alongside an emotional state.
This is ah excellent suggestion, Arian. We’ll take it seriously for Version 2.0! – Tom
It could be that “Safety First, then Challenge” should be featured as one of the main related patterns, no? – Tom and Andy