DISTINGUISHING FEELINGS & EMOTIONS

The difference between feelings and emotions is a tricky one and a confusion that everybody falls into. That arises mostly due to the English language. These words (feelings and emotions) are used so synonymously, and so often, as if synonyms that you hear it everywhere. It is in the way we talk; it is in the books and articles that we read. It is everywhere! So while I don’t see a change in this, we can change our understandings so that we are not confused about the difference.

Now NLP does indeed make this distinction. Feelings refer to the sensory sensations that you experience with touch, smell, and taste. It is the internal or proprioception, also known as kinesthetic sense, and your vestibular system. The kinesthetics which are deep in your body are the sensations (that is, feelings) and those that focus on the outward senses (temperature, texture, etc.). NLP has popularized the use of kinesthetics to talk about feelings. These feelings are not emotions.

An emotion is made up of feelings and cognitions. This, in fact, is what turns a kinesthetic sensation into a full-fledged emotion. This also explains why so many “emotions” feel so similar. The kinesthetic sensations are the same or very similar. What differentiates the feeling from the emotion are the cognitive understandings that you hold about something. This frequently comes up in trainings, so I often explain that there are five emotions which are pretty much made up of the same kinesthetics, the same hormones, and the same activity in the neuro-pathways. They are fear, anger, stress, excitement, and lust.

All of these emotions involve the activation of the lower parts of the brain (i.e., hippocampus, thalamus, amygdala) and the activation of the “general arousal syndrome.” If you cognitively find something unpleasant—you may experience stress in the form of fear and/or anger. If you interpret the event as desirable—then you may experience the same stress as excitement or lust. The differentiating factor are your thoughts—which arise from how you interpret things, your semantic schema.

This means that feelings are not emotions and do not contain emotions, but emotions involve and contain feelings. Emotions is the higher logical level and, in fact, are meta-states. To create any emotion, you have to answer a question like, “What do you think-or-feel about X?” X could be an event, a person, an idea, etc. “What do you think-or-feel about a roller coaster?” Whatever the person’s answer, it will determine whether she will experience fear or excitement. “What do you think-and-feel about an action movie with lots of car chases?” Does it evoke excitement, fear, anger, or even lust? It could. It all depends on the way a person interprets that object of the state;

Now when a person says “I feel X,” you really don’t know if the person is talking about kinesthetic sensations or emotions. So ask, “Are you speaking about sensations in your body, some kinesthetic

sensations, or are you referring to an emotion?” Sometimes this can be very confusing because we humans often use the wrong word. “I feel angry” could mean stress, upset, frustrated, bothered, out- of-sorts, etc. “I feel happy” could mean contentment, satisfied, excited, pleased, healthy, and on and on. In this our emotional language is full of ambiguities and confusions which is why it is always worth the trouble to dig a bit deeper to understand what a person is actually saying.

To make the distinction, you can also ask, “Where in your body do you feel X-feeling?” As a general rule, if the person cannot point to where in the body he feels it, it is probably a mixture of feelings (secondary, tertiary, feelings), an emotion, or a judgment. “Where do you feel self-esteem?” That’s a mental judgment that comes from your concepts about self worth. “Where do you feel forgiveness?” Again, a judgment about how to treat an ethical violation and how to think about the one who did it.

True feelings are kinesthetic sensations and out of them we create our “emotions.” Inside of every emotion there is the kinesthetic component. This is what gives the emotion its motion so that we are moved to go forward or away from something. The “e” (originally “ex”) speaks about the motion now moving us from where we were to somewhere else. It comes from an evaluation in your mind.; And together these are key facets of emotional intelligence, emotional well-being, and emotional energy and vitality.