PREFACE
When people fail to fully feel and express their feelings, their physical bodies become tense and rigid. From a mechanical point of view alone, an inflexible body won’t operate smoothly. If your muscles are tight, your lymph system won’t flow correctly. The lymph releases toxins, and if these waste products aren’t passed out of the body, they’ll be stored where you least want them. For women, this might be in the breast tissue, thereby creating the conditions for breast cancer. For men, the repositories could include the stomach, hence the heavy gut that increases the chance of heart disease. Before further analyzing the role of feelings—and emotions—in disease, I want to define a few terms. I’ll be continuing this exploration in several later chapters, but first I want to lay the groundwork. At a baseline, emotions are different from feelings, although an emotion technically includes at least one feeling. A feeling is an internal reaction to an event or a need. Psychologically, feelings are sometimes called “affects,” indicating that in infancy, our feelings start as biological responses to getting our basic needs met. As we mature, we figure out that others can meet our needs beyond the instinctual ones, such as food or warmth, and feelings evolve into ways to exchange communication with others. This evolution occurs even when we’re babies. If we’re unhappy and show that we’re sad, Mom will hug us. If we’re happy and smile, Dad will toss us up in the air again. Overall, we learn that those around us can respond to our basic feeling expressions—fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and happiness—and we can also react to their feelings. Now we can have relationships. An emotion isn’t based only on feelings. Emotions exist when we partner a belief with a feeling. There are other factors that can combine, which I’ll discus at several points in this book, but basically an emotion allows us to respond intellectually and organically to keep ourselves safe and to meet our higher needs, such as to be loved, accepted, and seen. The mature person understands that what we desire to receive, such as affection, also feels good to give. Beliefs are simply ideas or opinions. For instance, I might believe I’m a nice person or a mean one. Even though I might take such a judgment as a fact, it’s actually only a perception. Same with beliefs like “bees are dangerous” or “all women are foolish.” Why do we formulate an emotion? Emotions are coping mechanisms. The proverbial example centers on an emotion encoded to dealing with hot stoves. The first time we touch a hot stove, we feel pain and fear. In reaction to witnessing it, our mother scolds us, even while she runs our finger under the cold water. “Hot stoves are dangerous,” she advises. Our internal self has now combined the feeling of fear with the belief of hot stoves as dangerous. Voilà! We have an emotion. If we keep those two reactions bonded and xxx
