by Gary Borjesson
Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. —Henry David Thoreau
What does being true to ourselves feel like? The question goes to the heart of authenticity. Rousseau viewed our innermost feelings—the feeling of our existence (“le sentiment de l’existence”)—as a guide to authenticity and contentment. Nowadays we’re familiar with the notion that to find our way in love and work, we need to get in touch with our true feelings. Authenticity has even been equated with feelings, as if our felt sense were the only trustworthy guide to our lives.
In fact, authenticity is not a feeling, but an active way of being defined by conscious attention to the fit between who we are and the situation(s) in which we find ourselves. (See my previous essays in 3QD, here and here, for more on the meaning and practice of authenticity as an ethical ideal.) That said, our feelings do crucially guide our (ongoing) discovery of what it means to be true to ourselves.
But in order to be good guides, we need to know a few things about them. Here’s a big one: feelings are not as much “our own” as we might think. Our brain and the rest of our body evolved for engaging with our surroundings, meaning that our feelings are shaped and prompted partly by external factors. We’ll see that we cannot even know where our feelings are coming from unless we examine them.
To do that, and to start exploring how feelings inform authenticity, let me ask you to notice what you’re feeling right now. What word or words best describe this feeling? I’ll come back to why I ask.
As a child I remember a hot summer afternoon creek-walking with a friend, talking and hunting for crawdads; also, lying on my bed for hours on end, absorbed in Tolkien’s middle earth or listening to music. In these times, I felt alive, concentrated in the present, happy in that pure way that comes when all the usual resistance and distractions fall away. All the baggage of the self—its anxiety and fear and judgment—had graciously (if only briefly!) stepped out of the way. I felt fully myself.
As adults, we have more baggage, and distractions, so that it can be harder to get in the flow. Still, most of us have places and times where we feel fully, happily engaged. Imagine being a surgeon or sailor operating in heavy weather, as it were, the circumstances challenging enough that they require our complete attention, but not so challenging as to be beyond our ability to succeed. This is how psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the flow state.
The flow state casts light on authenticity. Both concern an aligning of self and situation. And we are always in a situation, in a world—thrown, in Heidegger’s terms. While feelings help us discover the situation and the fit, they alone are not sufficient. By the way, this suggests what’s mistaken about the very common, and narcissistic, view of authenticity: that our felt experience is all that matters. To the contrary, our surgeon or sailor can think and feel whatever they like in their “inmost self;” whether they are authentic will be determined by how they are meeting their situation.
Fortunately, being authentic is not equivalent to being in a flow state; otherwise even the best of us would rarely be authentic! In fact we can run the gamut of feelings—anxiously preoccupied and feeling stuck (as I happen to be right now) or happily absorbed in a flow state (as I was this morning)—and remain authentically ourselves the whole time. Because even when we’re stuck, we can maintain a rough sense of being aligned with our (difficult) situation.
So let’s liken the experience of authenticity to a mood, which is a more enduring feeling. Call it the mood of being in the grand flow of our lives. Socrates or the Buddha might call this mood equanimity; D.W. Winnicott called it “going on being;” contemporary researchers call it a growth mindset; and one of my patients recently called it “giving just enough fucks.” But whatever we call it, the experience is one of relating to our feelings, including the difficult ones, in such a way that they don’t impede our ability to stay open and true to the situation—even when the situation sucks.
What about our specific, time-bound feelings? What role do they play in authenticity? Are some right and others wrong? To speak to this, let’s first distinguish feelings from emotions. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio defines emotions as bodily dispositions, while feelings are the mental experience of those emotions. In other words, you could have had the emotion of being curious (or bored) at the prospect of a philosophic essay about feelings. But it’s another matter whether you would have noticed, and therefore had any feelings about it…unless you were prompted to notice, either by me or by some urgent message from your body—which is continuously streaming sense information about your situation and informing your reaction to it.
With this distinction in mind, all feelings are the right kind, even murderous rage—so long as we’re not enacting it. Thus when we go wrong, it’s because of how we’re relating to our feelings, for example, avoiding them or being too impatient to bother noticing them. (Speaking of which, when I asked what you were feeling, was it hard to give yourself the time to notice?)
The Buddhist emphasis (shared by psychotherapy) on treating our feelings with openness and curiosity is best, if we can manage it. This is easier when we can cultivate a little space, so that we’re not identifying with our feelings. Then our murderous rage, as unpleasant as it may be to feel it, becomes more informative than scary: ‘Wow, I’m having a shockingly strong reaction to my colleague’s need to reschedule our meeting. I wonder where that’s coming from.’ In this case, our self is not identified with the feeling (or the thought), but is our awareness of both.
Feelings interfere with authenticity when we’re not quite aware of them, or when our awareness is habitually distorted—as in mood and thought disorders. However, as we become more aware of what we’re feeling, we have some choice about how we respond to them, making us more free. In this way, the ethics of authenticity embraces the Socratic dictum to know ourselves, including our feelings. Otherwise, emotions will exercise their profound influence on our beliefs, opinions, values and behavior, without any intervention from our conscious mind.
One further point about feelings as guides. Feelings can seem to be an authentic response to our situation, whereas often they are a reaction to it, triggered more by our past than by the present. Like a child who was viciously bit by a dog, formative early experiences can lead to reflexive emotions (arousal, vigilance) and feelings (fear) that are wildly out of proportion to the current situation, say, of a cheerful Chihuahua running to greet us.
Or take this whole business of feeling talk. Perhaps you respond to it by feeling open and curious, or perhaps you’re triggered into a reactive posture. My own early experiences of being exposed to a lot of unattuned feeling-talk led me to feel confused and vulnerable in the face of it. As a result, for many years I tended to react dismissively, labeling most such talk as “psychobabble.” Needless to say, I had to work through my reactivity in order to get to know myself—and to become a credible psychotherapist. In my case, one value of psychotherapy (or good friends, should we be so lucky) is to have regular prompting to notice my feelings, and get to know where they’re coming from. When we do this, we reduce our reactive (unconscious, inauthentic) behavior, and are more able to respond to the actual situation, or Chihuahua, facing us.
Dwelling near the channel in which our life flows, to return to Thoreau’s image, isn’t just a matter of following our feelings downstream. Authenticity concerns becoming aware of our emotional currents—both the fresh springs rising in present experience and the old tributary patterns carved by our past. When we pause and let the waters settle, we begin to see which is which. We notice that our feelings aren’t simply “our own” to be blindly trusted or dismissed. Rather, they are signals about how we’re engaging with our situation. When we can hold this awareness—neither drowning in our feelings nor damming them up—we’re better able to navigate the actual waters we’re in. This is what makes feelings such powerful guides to authentic living: not their mere presence, but our capacity to know them, question them, and let them inform rather than dictate the channels into which our life will flow most fully.
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