Finking and Theeling

Can you sort out your thoughts from your feelings?

If palmistry is your thing, it’s simple: there’s a heart line and a mind line, and whichever is longer makes you more of a feeling or a thinking person, respectively. For what it's worth, my mind lines are much longer on both hands, an interesting coincidence since all of my life I've been criticized for thinking too much and not feeling enough. Back when encounter groups were “in,” I could not have been more “out.” Like someone needing remedial training, I endured embarrassingly futile efforts to make my anger more angry, my sorrow more sad, before giving up on the whole thing. Flipping the coin over, even as a child I often was the only person in the room not laughing, or not feeling the happy vibe.

Since I am every bit as dull a person as the above description indicates, I will not spend much more time talking about myself. Suffice to say that I actually have spent a great deal of my life laughing, but what tickles my funny bone is a bit off the beaten path. For example, stand-up comics or comedy films seldom make me laugh or even want to smile. But animals make me laugh, as do harmless mishaps or odd events, along with sarcasm at its most sardonic. And people who know me know I am no stranger to tragedy, and obviously these events have left their mark.

I do believe though that people who find it easy to “feel their feelings” often are people who have never had to deal with much. Because if you’ve been through something truly awful you probably prefer not to dwell on it. And it would seem that only certain feelings count as feelings. Being happy or sad over things that do not directly affect the self tend not to be considered part of one’s emotional landscape. Reactions to a news story, an election, a sports event, or who won the Oscar tend not be counted as feelings, even when powerful emotions are present.

Also, less than sunshiny feelings tend to be considered false. You didn’t mean what you said when you were angry—or so you say. But by what criteria is that angry self somehow less an authentic part of you than your non-angry self? Maybe when you were angry you said what you really meant, while your “nice” self is an act. On the TV show, House, the curmudgeony, drug-addled title character was advised to get in touch with his pain over a broken relationship, so he drove his car into his ex’s house. Not an action I recommend, but surely he was feeling his feelings. They were sentiments intended to cause harm to another and had many negative consequences, but that does not make them any less real. Scholars such as Peter N. Stearns have noted that for all the ways our society seems increasingly permissive, we allow ourselves fewer emotional expressions than in the past. Even when no one is harmed, a particular emotional display may be labeled inappropriate for its deviation from the rigid status quo norm.

Something happens to trigger an emotional reaction, but how much of it gets expressed, the way it gets expressed, and how it is labeled is relative to time and place. In the omnipresent debate over healthcare, I heard a political figure accused of not truly caring about the issue because this person seemed angry when talking about it. Another instance of anger being denied a seat at the table of emotions. But even within ourselves, we might think in the moment we are expressing love but then look back and decide we were expressing fear—or jealousy or any number of other things.

Also, we often confuse feeling with thinking, and vice-versa. Our government and criminal justice system frequently are criticized for behaving in a rational way that does not take into account people’s emotions. We forget that justice is supposed to be blind, or that the government doesn’t exist to be “nice.” How a jury feels about a defendant is not supposed to impact its deliberations. Nowhere is it written in the Constitution that the government has no choice but to be charitable.

Much of the confusion about thinking versus feeling stems from the erroneous assumption that these two experiences are polar opposites. In truth, studies have shown that there is an emotional component in what we believe to be true, and likewise our thoughts can prefigure our emotional responses. We do not really think and feel. It is more that we fink and theel. Finking, newly defined herein, is when we believe we have made a wholly rational assessment but in fact reached this conclusion from a place of emotionally-driven assumptions. For example, if you don’t like someone, ever notice a tendency to disagree with what that person says, even if you have to cherry pick to disagree? (Or for that matter to agree, if you like the person.) Theeling is when our thoughts have made us feel certain ways. If you assume certain types of people are good or bad, you will experience warmth or disdain for such a person should you meet.

Yet somehow it is easier for us not to go there. We prefer to keep things simple, and unquestioningly assume our emotional responses are a gut-level truth uncolored by our often limited or biased thoughts. And likewise, that our opinions are wholly rational and have nothing to do with our emotional needs.

I feel—or rather, I theel worried that this is a major problem in the world today. It isn’t always the decisions or verdicts themselves, but the erroneous conviction that we have arrived at this point through a simple and pure process, uncluttered by our many intellectual and emotional inconsistencies. 

Before you say I’m wrong, fink about it for awhile.