"Don’t listen to your feelings. Feelings lie to you.”
I’ve had this message peppered throughout my life. From pulpits and classrooms to coffee shops and private conversations, there's been an overwhelming sense that emotions were evil, untrustworthy, and malicious, and the best course of action was to not only ignore them but demonize them. Block out feelings because they will lie to you. Hold them prisoner because they are wrong.
But it’s a dangerous message to declare that feelings lie to us. It indirectly (or even directly) shames us for experiencing something beyond our control and leaves us in a powerless state for how to move forward. If someone is experiencing dissatisfaction and sadness in her life, telling her that her feelings are lying to her leaves her in quite the dilemma. For one, how does she make sense of her unhappiness if she’s being told that her feelings are untrue? And two, how does she begin to address and unpack her feelings if all that’s there to uncover are lies? This gives her no traction to address her experience, only more dissatisfaction and sadness than she had before.
The sweeping generalization that feelings lie to us keeps us a prisoner in an already overwhelming and confusing position, especially when emotions are supposed to be the ones held prisoner in the first place. Without accepting and working with these emotions, we are left in the thick of them, with shame added on top for not being able to control them. The sad part about spreading the message that feelings lie is that it has the opposite effect of its intention: the more we shame emotions or negatively interpret their existence, the more deeply we experience the difficult emotions we were already feeling. We get caught in a loop of pain all while being told they aren’t true and then end up blaming ourselves for the entire experience. What a tragedy.
We’d do better to work with our emotions and find new ways to respond to them rather than holding on to the assumption that they are inherently bad and working against us; emotions are our bodies’ best attempts at communicating how we are experiencing the world and at finding the greatest ways to protect us. Sometimes that protective response is more exaggerated than we would like, but it is certainly not a lie. Emotions are the most accurate barometer of truth. Sue Johnson, her book Love Sense, states, “The simple act of naming an emotion calms the emotional center of the brain... Naming an emotion begins the process of regulating it and reflecting on it… What we name, we can tame; when we give meaning to something, we can tolerate it and even change its impact.” It seems counterintuitive, especially in a culture where avoiding emotion is so highly valued, but listening to emotions, trusting that they are there for good reasons, and responding to them with compassion can provide us with a less overwhelming emotional experience and the relief we so desperately crave.
Emotions make sense in the context of the world we are experiencing at any given time. To tell someone that feelings are liars would be the same as saying that fevers are imposters, reflexes are deceivers, and heartbeats are frauds. Emotions are our bodies’ ultimate truth tellers. Let’s honor them and accept them, working with instead of against them. When we do, we create a more securely connected and shameless world. That’s a world I want to live in.