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Interpreting Feeling

The Meaning of Feeling

BY: T. Franklin Murphy | January 2018 (edited September 13, 2021)

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Our bodies react biologically to experience. We feel first. Cognition then joins to give the feeling meaning.

We experience emotions. Living is a feeling experience; we are constantly attracted and repelled, feelings pushing and pulling. These emotional reactions—initial feelings—are followed with an interpretation authored by the "story-telling" brain. Our brain automatically answers the posed question, “Why am I feeling this?” The brain retrieves memories, evaluates context and then creates a coherent explanation—at least coherent to the person involved in the construction.

Our feelings buzz through our bodies directing action. They move us towards opportunity and away from danger. They shift body resources to match predictions of external challenges. Lisa Feldman Barrett, A professor of psychology at Northeastern University and director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, explains, "your brain must figure out the meaning of those flashes and vibrations, and its main clues are your past experiences, which it constructs as simulations within its vast network of neural connections" (2018, p. 58).

Our body signals friendly or unfriendly along with varying levels of arousal while our brain examines context, draws from experience and interprets the meaning of the signals, giving life to the feeling.

Relationships and Feelings

Intimate relationships—essential to well-being—stir strong emotions; these emotions have the kindest and harshest interpretations. Relationships easily are filled with unneeded drama that disrupts the bonding and security. While the past and triggers are beyond immediate control, the following interpretations can be examined and challenged.

Key Definition:

Feeling (short for affective feeling): The body biological flashes and vibrations signaling pleasantness and unpleasantness and state of arousal.

Mindful Awareness of Feeling

We need vigilance, guarding against faulty interpretations, creating meaning is not perfect. The story-creating mechanism creates a framework from the past to organize new experience but is not relegated to serve reality. Creating meaning is a subjective process tainted by bias. When childhood fears intrude on adulthood, the slightest event prompts anxiety. Unrealistic fears can be intense, requiring creative interpretations.

Often the cause of the emotion is embedded in the psychological past. The psychological programming operating beneath awareness, full of hurt and sensitivities is often the cause for the strong emotional waves but seldom identified as a factor by our story-telling mind. The emotions still rage demanding explanation; the mind assuages the demands by blaming elements in the present.

Key Definition:

Emotions: A construct of cognition giving affective feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness and arousal meaning. Our brain integrates internal feelings, external contexts, and experience to create a more complex meaning such as frustrated, pleased, or down.

With the underlying causes from our past untreated, the emotion continues disrupting our relationships, waiting for a trigger to erupt. Inside the broken soul the events that trigger high arousal hide behind shadows of protective interpretation. The meanings accredited to false causes are adopted, accepted and protected. A partner’s benign actions seen through brightly colored and biased lenses are easily interpreted wrong, citing a partner's character flaws that need to be fixed.

"Creating meaning is a subjective process tainted by bias."

Books of Interest

Trauma and Emotion

Many insecurities established in childhood or from traumatic past relationships, live on—thinly covered, and pleasantly decorated. Excessive dissatisfactions in the present points to the past, new actions trigger past fears, and we then we wrongfully project emotions onto the current partner. The obnoxious fears disrupt opportunities for the new relationship to grow. Partners tire of being blamed and defensively react. A cycle begins, we react to their reaction and they react to ours. The fear of aloneness and abandonment becomes a destructive agent, constantly disrupting as we blame the partner.

Our experience of emotion may lead us off track. Instead of wisely guiding, the feeling experience of living frightens and demands retreat. Mindfully examine these erroneous pushes to act, seek help and begin the process of improvement.

Feelings, cognitions and emotions are inherent parts of our human experience. We should warmly accept these clumsy and coarse characters into our life stories. They give experience novelty and excitement. Instead of smoothly existing in greyness, we dabble in the bright colors of feeling and emotion. We feel life.

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T. Franklin Murphy

Wellness. Writer. Researcher.
T. Franklin Murphy has a degree in psychology. He tirelessly researches scientific findings that contribute to wellness. In 2010, he began publishing his findings.