Feeling, the Orphan in American Life

Feeling is the orphan or unlived faculty in our society.

Ours is a thinking-oriented culture that grades and tests and honors and rewards people on the basis of their thinking capacities. Every culture has its hierarchy of values, Thinking is our primary one, with sensation coming in a close second.

Whenever you specialize you do it by robbing energy from its opposite. We have robbed from our feeling function to achieve this thinking dominance.

In considering feeling, I would prefer to abandon the term feeling and substitute the word meaning or value. We don’t regard this faculty highly enough of it to even give it a name of its own, so we use feeling, which also determines if something is hard or soft, rought or smooth.

In general, feeling is more important to women, and so the degradation of feeling in Western culture is even more painful for them. We must define some terms: Feeling is not emotion. Emotion simply means movement of energy. There is no proper or adequate word in the English language for feeling in the sense of valuing. Nobody knows what a feeling is. If someone has hurt my feelings they have challenged or damaged my valuing system, the meaning of myself.

Every faculty has its language. A thinker will tell you reasonably why something is important but generally is not capable of bestowing value. Sensation types will say that a new job pays $20,000 more per year than the old job. There is no adequate language to talk about the meaning of the job. Feeling is closer to saying, "It will serve my relationships better, or I will be much happier there." If you get a man talking about his profession you will get meaningful things in his language.

It’s often the woman who carries feeling in a marriage and who will talk about meaningful aspects of the relationship. In this culture men so often depend upon a woman for the meaning of their lives. Many men at the age of 60 are about 15 years old psychologically when it comes to their feeling function. Conversely, the wife may be a 15 year old in her reasoning facuty (but of course this is not always the case -- either partner may carry the feeling side). So the two trade insults back and forth and both feel terribly misunderstood by their partner.

What can you do with a faculty that doesn’t even have a proper name? We could start by trying to develop some language. To make a list of what you value in your life is already in the thinking manner. Thinking dominates our very language. The man in couples therapy so often says, "The only feeling she brings is to burst into tears.” Quite justifiably. People with opposite typology are often attracted to one another in an unconscious attempt to balance out the faculties. Sensation has a vocabulary: She can be an artist and work with things, or he can begin a woodworking shop.

Articulation is the desire of thinking. Feeling transmits through subtle things, such as tone of voice, the direction of the eyebrows, and other body language. I had an Italian woman in analysis who had married a proper English gentleman when they were both in their 20s. She was presently despairing of his ever understanding her volatile feeling nature. One day in the consulting room I announced: "The hit play of the season in London ends with the man standing on one side of the stage and the woman on the other side 20 feet away. There is a long and tense interval, finally she says, 'John I love you,' and after a pause the man responds, 'Mary I love you.' Now that is what you married. That is the English version of feeling!" This helped them to reflect on their inherent differrences of typology.

The noted author C.S. Lewis married into just such a situation. He was a proper Oxford don who fell in love with a fiery American.

Therapy, unfortunately, is confined mostly to talk-- a very serious shortcoming. Getting a person to paint or sculpt or draw or write music is the best hope for addressing feeling issues. The impersonal structure is like working with one arm tied behind your back.

Just being fully present can sometimes pull someone out of a dark mood, not by theory but by feeling. You must become related to something if your feeling side is in trouble.