Emotions vs. Feelings vs. Heart: A Study

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Leticia Aracil. She has spent the last several years as an anthropology lecturer and academic mentor, specifically aiding students understand the value of their emotional structures. I found her observations on emotions, feelings, and the heart to be hugely helpful and informational. It might be a little more difficult to follow than you’re used to, but buckle down and dig through it! It’s worth it. For you academic readers, this should be cake. Enjoy! – Lauren

The Bible uses the term “heart” not to refer to the emotional part of ourselves, but to the most intimate part of us as a whole. We wrongly use “heart” to refer to emotions only, but that mistake is based on how the more important an emotion is, the more deeply it relates to us. Emotions have become a very confusing topic to talk about.

The general feeling about emotions is that no “objective truth” can be said about them, as they are “subjective”. On one side, they are said to be somehow arbitrary, inconstant, and changing, even animal, and opposed to thought and reason; yet, they are believed to be one of the nuclear parts of our self.  Over-simplifying this can lead to really troublesome and heart-breaking conclusions, such as the reduction of love to either simply romanticism or hormones.

But things are not like that.

Emotions, as every other constitutive human reality, are a complex topic and require some distinctions to be thought of straight. You need to understand the way your emotions work to see the logic and deep sense behind them. With this post I wanted to share with the Good Women some structural tips that are useful to understanding and dealing with emotions. This, however, is just a little guideline and doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive.

1^st: Emotions are not opposed to reason.

Feelings and thoughts are different things, but they exist in essential unity in our lives.

Every thought is permeated by rationality, and everything known is affected by our emotions: we feel our thoughts and we think our emotions. Just think closely about something that excites you and how much of that passion also has to do with what you know and think about it.

This is because it’s not the eye that sees, the brain that thinks, or the hand that touches. It’s that we carry, in every aspect of ourselves, the whole of our human significance. It’s true that emotions are individual and we are all different in a way, but we all share the human condition and we feel according to it. So, even when we can’t experience someone else’s thoughts, we can talk about emotions with rigour.

2^nd: Emotions are important.

They are an intrinsic part of our humanity. The way in which people feel is as singular and peculiar to us as the “rational mind”: they are both signs and consequences of our interiority.

Your feelings as a woman are important and reasonable, because “woman” is the way you are a human being. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I strongly recommend reading Yashar Ali’s “Why Women Aren’t Crazy”.

3^rd: It is not only about self-expression.

Emotions don’t sprout in the middle of nothing. They are related to your reality. Emotions make the bond of your inner self with the world more obvious.

Every emotion is a response to something; they have an object (a reason to be) and content (the way they happen). We might not see or understand where they come from every time, but they are related to how we experience things. The value of an emotion is the value of its object.

It is not the same, the anger you might feel if you accidentally break a glass, compared to the anger you feel when you see someone being abused; it is anger in both cases, but obviously you should not give the same space in your life to both of them. Understanding the value of the broken glass, you might decide not be angry about it, but you certainly should not let yourself not be angry about someone being abused. When you feel angry without knowing where it comes from, be careful what you do with it; feeling and expressing are not the same things.

Your feelings express you, but you could also say emotions are the way the world expresses itself within you.

4^th: Emotions are not all the same.

Emotions and feelings are different from one another. A helpful classification could be:

– Physical feelings. The ones that find their origin in states and relations of our body. Pleasure from a good massage, pain from illness. These are the voice of our bodies. Physical feelings are the consequence of a stimulus, of which we might be aware or not. We experience them passively.

– Psychic feelings. These are the subjective feelings or moods. They affect us depending of our character traits and personal experiences. The general sadness you may feel days after a fight, the good mood someone has after a good night of sleep, the side effects of a medicine on your mood, etc. While the physical feelings have a cause, these feelings have a motive. They are not experienced passively, but they come somehow one-sidedly on us.

– Spiritual feelings. They are the emotional response to truth, beauty, and value recognized by our intelligence: the emotional aspect of our heart responding to something of worth. These feelings are the emotional aspect of an act of freedom that involves our whole self, they cannot possibly arise in our hearts unless we’re conscious of the object we are responding to; therefore, they are active and creative feelings. These kinds of feelings are not random or irrational at all, but the opposite, feelings true passion is made of!

For more on this distinction, I recommend the reading Alice von Hildebrand, “In Defense of Feelings”.

What are these distinctions for? They help us find the right place for emotion in our lives.

When I get anemic, I get very depressed. The first time it happened, I didn’t know it could be a feeling caused by my physical body, so I took it for a real state of my heart. I got very worried because I had no reason to feel that way. Nothing I did to cheer myself up worked. A single aspect of my body took control over me in a way that, to all effects, seemed random and irrational – and that isolated me. Only when I became aware it was physical and not psychic was I able to deal with it properly: the angst was gone, and I just had to put my sadness in parentheses and take my vitamins.

It might sound silly to some of you, but think about the horrible torture it might become for a person to believe their pain is coming from the state of their heart, instead of knowing it has physical origin. And the opposite too! Think, for example, about someone trying to fix physically a problem that comes from the soul, like trying to fill emptiness in one’s heart through antidepressants. They will distract this person from the pain, but nothing is remedied.

5^th:  There can be wrong emotions.

Believing that our feelings are always “right” is to seriously underestimate our skill to mess ourselves up.

We have to give them credit, but they can be partial, incomplete, corrupted, unfair, inadequate, sick, confused, irrational, poorly managed, misunderstood, etc. We need to be aware of that.

6^th: Emotions need education.

Against the general opinion, spontaneous feelings can be unauthentic. Not only they are likely to be superficial or incomplete, but also might be more of a reaction than an expression of ourselves as a whole. Acting on spontaneous feelings can be an involuntary lie, they might take only immediate situations into consideration and fail to recognize consequences.

Along with our intelligence, talents, and manners, it is crucial that we learn about our emotional dimension, to become more authentic.

How do we do this?

Educating our emotional selves is not restraining. It helps us experience our emotions fully and more clearly, and also gives us access to subtler levels of emotions we might be missing or experiencing without knowing it.

1. Realize that your emotions are not you but an aspect of you. Strive to know yourself, but keep yourself open to surprises.

2. Take responsibility of your feelings because they come from you.

3. Strengthen the connection your feelings have with other dimensions of your self (like intelligence and will).

4. Deal with your emotions knowing how they relate to the world. If you know what makes you angry, you can avoid it if necessary, or prepare yourself for it so it won’t hurt your balance. We need to know which things deserve which kind of emotions, learn how to handle them, and correct their deviations.

Our hearts are vulnerable, meaningful, and strong. Don’t allow yourself to give your heart to what doesn’t deserve it, or keep it from what does deserve it – that’s confusing and painful. We must take care of our hearts.

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