The Definition of Feelings
One of the things I'm noting of late--for the most part living quite the opposite way--is that some people do not know when they're depressed.
Or rather, there seems to be a psychological assumption that psychologists must diagnose patients rather than have patients diagnose themselves.
Now before you get bent out of shape by this seemingly blasphemously counterlocutional theory, you must understand where I'm coming from.
I come from an acting background, or to be a little more general, an arts background rather than a science background. In the arts, particularly acting, there is an overall prioritizing of feelings rather than non-feelings. That is, in science, while scientists certainly have inklings and suspicions about the workings of the universe, they uphold themselves to the standards of the scientific method. Scientists demand of themselves testability for their hypotheses; they do not sleep with their hypotheses without "proper" experimentation.
While artists and actors don't necessarily sleep very soundly either, they don't demand of themselves the same standards of testability. The actor, for example, cares not whether his hypothesis is right or wrong, he just cares that he has a hypothesis to begin with, and whether he likes it or not.
The actor will feel things out, whereas the scientist has to go so far as to test things. You can see how by this comparison the actor, who uses his feelings for understanding dynamics, can more quickly come to an accurate conclusion about the universe than the scientist, who discounts his feelings and relies on experimentation cleft of feeling.
To say this does not mean the actor is more accurate than the scientist all the time, or even most of the time. This is to say that the actor sometimes can "have it right faster" because the scientist is slowed down by having to test accuracy or by the inability to construct an experiment.
Back to what I was saying.
When you're being schooled, particularly in higher education, you're likely going to learn more about jobs and protocols than you are going to learn about your own feelings. You're going to learn about things outside you, extrinsic information, others' feelings, rather than things inside you, intrinsic information, your feelings. There is even a sense, as with scientists, that YOUR FEELINGS DON'T MATTER, that YOUR FEELINGS ARE IRRELEVANT and YOUR FEELINGS GET IN THE WAY.
It is from this rationale that people tend to dissociate from their own feelings, not knowing their emotional states and/or not knowing that their emotional states affect how they see the world. Indeed, they effect how they see the world.
Take for instance a scientist with high (positive) self-esteem and a scientist with low (negative) self-esteem. The scientist who walks into a banquet hall of other scientists to give a speech will likely perceive the clapping audience, with whom he has had no contact, as supporting him, cooperating with him, working with him. The other scientist in walking into the hall may likely perceive the clapping audience strikingly differently, potentially as a gathering of people falsely supporting him, secretly working against him, even competing with him. It is his own poor regard for himself that leads him to see others in the world as regarding him poorly, even though they are making a supportive, cooperative gesture like clapping for him upon his entrance to speak.
The scientist, thus, who has low self-esteem but with a disregard for his feelings may unknowingly taint his own experimental results by seeing subjects in his research as working against each other rather than obviously cooperating with each other. He may see competition where there's more accurately cooperation. He may see living systems as conflict-based rather than compromise-based.
What's shocked me of late was meeting people who are of my age and only now just learning about their feelings. They say that they are down in such a way that they have no idea "really" what's going on inside them, but it's their therapists that tell them they're "depressed" so that must be what it is they're experiencing. That's probably the most surprising, backwards experience to me: That it's a therapist telling them they're depressed, not themselves.
I've long readily and easily described myself as depressed when I've been depressed. It's nothing I've been ashamed of for feeling. It's nothing I've needed anyone else to label. I've always labeled it myself. I remember back in the day, when my past therapist many sessions in in looking back at my emotional state said to me "you were depressed" as if she was unloading her professional opinion on me, I was like, "No duh." I later saw some prescription notations with a DSM-IV code on them from my original meetings with her, and I found that they correlated to the condition "dysthymia." Her original suspicions: dysthymia. I found it all retarded, actually. At the time I started seeing her, I was depressed, I knew this, that's why I was there. I was not going into therapy to figure out what I was feeling (depression), I went into therapy to figure out how to fix my depression, to change my emotional state. I eventually changed it on my own, rather independent of my therapist, though she did help and my time spent with her was relatively positive and memorable.
The thing is, I knew what I felt, but I'm coming up against people who don't know how they feel. Furthermore, they're confused by therpists and especially psychiatrists who are telling them that there is no known root to their depression, that their depression is mysterious and unknowable and chemical with genetic connections so powerful they have no ability other than by medication to counteract its effects. Such conclusions I constantly argue against. Usually, with the psychiatric mindset so firmly entrenched in the social psyche of late, the most I can get is an agreement to disagree. But that agreement to disagree usually comes after the other person's or the psychiatrist's or therapist's resistance to go beyond their ways of seeing emotional states, which to me seem rather limited because they insist emotions are mysterious. I agree to disagree, but I usually can argue and discuss for much longer than many of these people can tolerate. It's an endurance game others have trouble playing with me.
As an actor, you can't play a character chemically. You can't pour yourself a beer and play a character. In fact, you'll have a harder time playing a drunken character should you do that. Instead, you have to figure out what a character wants. And when that character, in his pursuit of what he wants, bumps up against cooperative information like clapping, he will feel, and that feeling will be good. And when that character bumps up against competitive information like booing, he will feel, and that feeling will be bad. Unless the self-esteem is low, which yields stranger, more irrational, potentially even opposite reactions.
The want is the most critical piece of information. You start with that. You experience feelings as a result of the pursuit of what you want. You can't conjure up feelings else they be one-dimensional and flat--it takes some kind of pursuit of a want to have feelings. It takes another person, a goal you're going toward, something else, something you're directed to.
That people get depressed, it is their bodies or their minds communicating to them, telling them they want something else than what they're currently pursuing. The mission in life is to determine what those things are that they want, that they're now pursuing in errorum.
I'm hard on people when they do not express their feelings. But as any of my current friends know, I have a cooperative player-game, that I'm not out to get them, I'm out to help them feel better than they do, to call attention to those ways they limit themselves, disempower themselves, short-circuit themselves, make themselves feel worse rather than feel better.
How you feel about something is a choice of yours when it happens. There is a strong tendency, especially in a capitalist society, to feel bad about something negative that happens to you. That comes from thinking that life is a win-lose game and you have lost when something bad happens. Almost as if you should punish yourself or feel ashamed for losing--"you don't belong unless you win." It's irrational to punish yourself--it makes your living harder.
Living is not a win-lose game. It's a win-win game. You only make those people feel bad who intentionally and outright play with you as if it's a win-lose game and you should lose.
If something bad happens to you, that something may have been unintentional, and if it was, it was not someone trying to compete with you. Instead, it just happened. It's one thing to feel bad; it's another thing to make yourself feel worse because something bad happened to you. The distinction is slight but extremely important: You can say "I feel bad," but it's another thing to say afterwards "I'm a horrible person," "I'm a fuck-up," etc., etc., onward down the spiral.
I like to apply the competitive mindset toward those who are outright competing with you to mental health: You make war with those attitudes you and others hold that try to make you feel bad. You listen to those attitudes and others who refuse to make you feel bad, who as a matter of policy would not stoop to such levels.
The defintion of feelings: exhaust given off, either positive, negative, or in between, from the pursuit of what you want.
