A Psychology and an Ontology of Feelings

A sound psychology directs us to accept, acknowledge, own and experience our feelings. To deny, repress, ignore or flee an unwelcome feeling is ultimately destructive since it will re-emerge in a covert and dysfunctional manner. However, to "accept a feeling" is a deceptively subtle, mature, dense and difficult act. To say "I am angry" or "I am sad" is already to have a degree of interior peace so as to distance oneself, at least partially, from the feeling; it is to achieve an intellectual clarity and confidence about what is happening; it is to remain engaged and at the same time transcend the emotion. A profound and paradoxical relationship is established when I say "I am angry": the Self or the Soul is at once saying "I am angry; I am my anger; anger defines me" even as he is saying "I am able to distance myself from my anger; I am more than my anger; I can consider and understand my anger and make decisions about what to do with it." So: I am my anger even as I am more than my anger! This paradoxical relationship is rooted in the body-and-soul nature of the human person. I like to ask: Which is true: "I have a body" or "I am a body." Both are true to a degree; but neither are entirely true. The two mutually infuse each other and must be held in tension:  I am my body but I am greater than my body. I do not live in my body the way I wear a summer suit; but there is an indefinable, mysterious way in which I am more than my body. A similar dynamic is at work in the 12 steps of AA. By saying "I am Joe and I am an alcoholic" I am defining myself as an addict, as one afflicted with a condition impervious to acts of my will. But implicitly I am also confessing that I am more than this condition; that in acknowledging it, publicly, I am already starting to escape or transcend it. Implicitly, I am believing that "I" am more than this condition; that there is hope for deliverance even as my own will, on its own, is not able to free me. Similarly, in confession we say "Bless me Father, for I have sinned!" When the sinner says with the repentant thief "You Lord are innocent but I am guilty; remember me when you come into your kingdom," he identifies as a sinner but he is hoping that there is a Soul or a Self that is able, miraculously, to be separated from sin (if not by his own agency) and so he is confessing "I am more than my sin if you will have Mercy upon me." And so we see that the path to liberation from feelings, from addiction, from sin and even from death is Confession of the truth: "I am sad; and I am addicted; and I am sinful; and I am terrified of death! But I sense that I am more than that and I hope in your Mercy O Lord!"  (The next blog will be on the spirituality of feelings.)