Fine is Not a Feeling
The importance of growing in our own emotional awareness
How are you doing?
I’m fine.
This is a conversation we have repeatedly, multiple times a day. It is a brief interaction that is routine and inauthentic. It is an understood part of our social contract that we are not going too deep when we answer this question. We remain at a surface level conversation to keep things moving.
This is appropriate - we don’t want to be vulnerable with everyone we interact with throughout our day. Could you imagine telling your barista when she asks how you are that you didn’t sleep last night, have low grade depression and think your marriage is falling apart? We should not “go deep” with everyone.
The problem comes when we don’t go deep with anyone. Even ourselves.
We live in a society that discounts feelings. Emotional Intelligence is considered a “soft skill” that many view as secondary to cognition. Feelings are not valued or spoken about openly. Social norms like these can easily be internalized to mean that we shouldn’t have feelings, or deny their existence.
This can lead to an emotional numbness. Even when invited, many people cannot name what they are actually feeling. The perfect example is our overreliance on “fine”. In my classes, I have outlawed the word fine. My students roll their eyes at me as I tell them “Fine is not a feeling.” In my class, it stands for Feelings I’m Not Expressing.
I teach adults, but I use a kindergarten-level curriculum when I educate them about their feelings. I need to be pedagogically elementary in my approach, because it is hard to learn about feelings for the first time. I am meeting my students where they are from an emotional awareness perspective. There is certainly a generational divide here, as most of us were raised in families and situations where emotional vocabulary was not a fluent dialect. My elementary school-aged kids are learning about feelings in health class, but that was not part of many of our curriculums growing up. We came of age before TikTok1 therapists were holding master classes in emotions. (Although we did have Mr. Rogers!)
My remedial lesson begins with the assertion that all emotions can be boiled down to Mad, Sad, Glad, ‘Frad.
(Frad is shortened from “Afraid” because at the elementary level we need it to rhyme to stick!)
There are emotion wheels, with great, descriptive feeling words (see below) and other categorizations of feelings. But sometimes too many choices can be overwhelming when we are trying to truly get in touch with what we feel. All emotions can essentially be reduced to Anger, Sadness, Happiness and Fear. (In future posts I’ll go on a deeper dive for each one)
When I ask (and I ask often) my students struggle to name what they are feeling in the moment. They don’t have much practice in emotional identification for themselves, let alone talking about them in front of other people. Additionally many of my students (and patients) are afraid of being construed as weak if they acknowledge an emotion. They may have gotten these messages from their families of origin, their culture, their religious institutions, and society at large.
This is where Mr. Rogers can help.2 He taught us that naming feelings takes strength. Rather than a sign of weakness, acknowledging them is a sign of bravery. That paradox puts everything in a new perspective. It is courageous to do this work! Our childhood pastoral educator wrote:
“Confronting our feelings and giving them appropriate expression always takes strength, not weakness. It takes strength to acknowledge our anger. It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to. It takes strength to talk about our feelings...” 3
Naming your feelings can be hard, due to all the aforementioned reasons. But I encourage you to practice it. Not just if you are interested in being a professional caregiver, but I promise it will help you in other areas of your life too. People worry about becoming overwhelmed by their feelings if they acknowledge them, however the opposite is true. Naming it can mean taming it.
Research shows that naming a feeling can make the experience of having it less painful. UCLA professor of psychology, Matthew Liberman writes,
"When you put feelings into words, you're activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala. In the same way you hit the brake when you're driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses...Putting our feelings into words helps us heal better.” 4
Contrary to popular opinion there are no good or bad feelings. “Glad” is not a good feeling to be highlighted at the exclusion of all else. “Mad” is not a bad feeling to be avoided at all costs. Feelings are neutral. It is the expression or denial of our feelings that can be problematic.
Being aware of our emotional state helps us be attuned to ourselves, which is the only way we can learn to attune to others.For us to journey alongside others, we must become well versed in our own emotions first. The theory behind this is simple– if we cannot sit with ourselves in that emotion, we will not be comfortable sitting with someone else in it. Similarly, if we cannot recognize an emotional state in ourselves, we will not pick up on the subtle clues that someone else is experiencing the same one.
Getting to know our own feelings is a building block toward empathy. Brene Brown posits,
“Empathy doesn't require that we have the exact same experiences as the person sharing their story with us...Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event or the circumstance.” 5
A question I ask in almost all my CPE Interviews is
“Of Mad/Sad/Glad/Fraid - Which feeling do you try to avoid feeling for yourself the most?”
Let’s get curious about that for ourselves so we can be better listeners of other’s emotions.
What “Feelings are you not Expressing” right now?
Which feeling do you have difficulty identifying in yourself and others?
Some practical tips and hints as you wrestle with what you might be feeling:
Starting a sentence with “I feel like….” means a thought is coming, not a feeling.
If your eyes are looking up when you answer the question - you are going to cognition. If you are looking down - you are entering more squarely into emotional territory.
If you are having trouble naming a feeling, use your “phone a friend” and ask someone else to help you name it.
Close your eyes and sense where in your body you are holding tension. For some, that can be a helpful clue. Anytime their stomach is churning, they might be angry. A tightness in their chest might be fear. It differs for everyone, but your body can help guide your emotional awareness as you get to know it.
Process of elimination. My students will hold up four fingers and say, “Ok, I’m not glad, I’m not sad, I’m not afraid, I guess I’m mad!”
At least I hear that’s what they are doing. I’m too old for Tik Tok, so someone tell me if this is true!
Did you know that Mr. Rogers was a Presbyterian Minister? And I met him and he was every bit as lovely as you would imagine?!
Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember.
Speaking of driving imagery, a few years ago, when the movie Inside Out debuted, my summer chaplaincy students and I had a field trip to watch it in the theater. Pixar animation helped them with metaphors for which emotion was “in the driver’s seat” at any given time. (Inside Out has one more feeling added to the 4 basic ones I comment on – Disgust). If you’ve not seen it, consider that a movie to watch in 2024!
Brene Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection & the Language of Human Experience. A helpful read if you want to delve more into feelings - it is like an encylopdia of emotions!
Thank you for this post. After naming many emotions, including the shameful ones, I realized that emotions have their own narratives, too. Grief, for example, has not only accompanied me and my loss but has also been a companion to many others. I believe grief is as deeply ancient as altruism or our sense of belonging—perhaps even older. Our grief holds the collective memories of lost loves, and acknowledging grief’s visitation onto my heart has allowed me to partake in the powerful narrative of love. Like grief, I believe emotions want to be seen and understood. When I name them, it feels as though I have properly met them. And when we meet and converse, we become friends, and I no longer need to carry them. I am new to writing on Substack, and I hope to write about how I met my emotions because they are very powerful and yet esoteric stories. Thank you, thank you!
Thanks for pointing me to this! So helpful to think about a glance upward pointing to a move toward cognition, and a glance down as a move inward.