On feelings

Us humans are not educated on feelings. There’s no emotional curriculum on elementary schools, so our repertoire of feelings and emotions is acquired from our surroundings, from what we observe in our social circles. And what we observe in these social circles is what our parents and family learned with their parents and families, which they learned from their parents and families and so on. Pure replication.

And this is important, because since feelings and emotions are invisible and inaudible, they are expressed with words and actions. But these almost never match the actual feelings a person is trying to demonstrate.

For example, a parent who struggles with money and scolds the child when he or she complains about a broken toy. Child cries and parent feels bad, but this parent doesn’t know exactly how to put in words that is actually feeling sad or frustrated for not having the money to buy a new toy.

This parent didn’t learn how to properly express frustration and this child won’t learn either, because when his or her frustration was expressed, the parent reacted as it was something kinda wrong.

So, as we get older, we get to choose to keep replicating the responses we learned from our families to express feelings, or purposefully enhance our emotional dictionary, to learn new words and new ways to understand our and others’ feelings and emotions. Learning how to use things other than anger to demonstrate things like sadness, frustration and disappointment.

Feelings and emotions will always be something very particular and unique. I don’t believe there will ever be such thing as consciousness transfer so that two people can experience the exact same emotion.

The only tools we have are words and gestures, and the larger this repertoire is, the better we comprehend our feelings and assure the accuracy between them and the words and actions we choose to express them.