What am I feeling anyway?

There is a term in the art world that describes a rich layering of light and dark to get a three-dimensional effect: chiaroscuro. It takes all the light and the dark and the shades in between to create the image. Yet in American culture there is a current bias towards happiness. If you are feeling sad, you must be depressed and need to be cured. If you are feeling concerned, you must be anxious and need to be cured. If you get angry, well there is an anger management course you need to take. The problem as I see it is that happiness is a fleeting emotion, it creates the highlights in your picture of life. And yet this is the only gauge that so many people measure themselves against.

“Am I happy?”

"If I'm not feeling happy ALL the time, there must be something wrong with me."

To me someone who is happy ALL the time is either lying or out of touch with reality. I see this as one of the unintended consequences of the positive psychology and self-help movements: the cult of happiness. It tends to leave out the richness of a full emotional life. Sometimes we feel comfortable emotions when our needs have been met, such as delight, relief, or fascination. Sometimes we feel uncomfortable emotions when we have lacking needs, such as suspicion, dismay, or exhaustion. Comfortable emotions signal our brains that things are working, do more of those things. Uncomfortable emotions signal that something isn’t working, do something different. Notice one of the comfortable emotions is “relief” which we tend to experience when we move out of an uncomfortable emotion.

We have a base range of emotions. There are seven universal facial expressions which display emotions: Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Anger, Contempt, and Surprise. Universal. These expressions show up all over the world, our system is wired to display these emotions (and respond when we see others showing them.) These emotions have a purpose. The purpose of happiness is straightforward, we are enjoying what is happening. The purpose of sadness is to slow us down, to notice that something unpleasant has happened. Fear is to protect us from things that are dangerous. Disgust protects us from things that might be dangerous and helps us maintain values. Anger lets us know that a boundary has been crossed and something needs to change. Contempt is related to power and often signals a power imbalance. Surprise alerts us to something unexpected but not dangerous and leads us towards exploration.

We spend a lot of time in school and elsewhere expanding our verbal vocabularies. We worry about how many words a baby hears in the first few years of life. And yet we don’t work on our emotional vocabularies. When we expand our emotional vocabulary, we start painting our world in more depth. We get a sense of the world being deeper, in more “relief.” Relief is also an art term that means a sculpture that is attached to the background. The elements have been raised up. But not all the levels are raised, there is a difference in the levels. We need these differences. We need to see our lives as a whole picture, brilliant, debilitating, complete.

If you want to learn some more emotional words check out this list: https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/feelings-inventory

If you want to learn more about universal facial expressions go here There are photo examples of each: https://www.paulekman.com/universal-emotions/