We overcome rather than resolve

Sometimes it takes years to catch up with our own subconscious feelings. We may have a glimpse of it, a peak over the shelf, but we don’t quite understand. Or, the notion may be swimming around in our heads and we just can’t quite put it into words.

It is the ability to put something onto paper or explain it to someone else that helps us to understand how we feel. Movies butcher this idea. We see psychologists helping patients to reach some final and ultimate realization about themselves. They quickly go through the therapy and then voila! they realize that it wasn’t their fault they were abused. Now it’s all sunny skies and chirping birds.

Life does not work this way. Understanding how you feel takes work. This work may be the process of talking things through, or writing or building houses. But we are better off if we avoid envisioning some final realization, and instead, think of it as a gradual process of understanding ourselves. There may be some final realization, but there may not be. The best we can hope for in working out our problems is management, not resolution.

Short ideas are mistakenly simple

The great ideas look simple and sleek. E=mc2. Do unto others as you’d like done unto yourself. Time is money. But when you peer under the hood, you see incredible complexity.

These statements are the final design. You see their beauty and simplicity when you glance at them. But as soon as you try to take them apart – to understand them - you are led into a maze of confusion.

We learn to feel on our own

When babies learn to speak, they have to learn a variety of words for common objects. Of course they have to learn “mom” and “dad”, and maybe they also learn “doggie” and “blanket” and “house.” Somewhere along the way we stop teaching word by word and children just start to pick them up. We never question how children learn to name their feelings and articulate them the same way we do.

We know they learn to identify the feeling of hunger at any early age. Thirst too. And it is essential that they recognize the feeling of having to go to the bathroom! At some point they learn the feeling of sexual desire. They learn frustration, joy, regret, disgust. They learn the feeling of being overwhelmed. They learn anger. Hopefully they learn confidence. They learn haste, relaxation, fear, loss and on and on.

Children learn these labels for these emotions over the course of their lifetime. No one points these things out. No one says to the child, what you are feeling right now is called “frustration”, just like they might say, that animal over there is a “FROG”. This is why, when we ask a child how they are feeling about something, they have no idea. We might as well ask them to name an object they’ve never seen before.