Can you understand other people’s experiences?

Our Pomeranian Bublik got sick. He sneezed and coughed loudly, and Petya’s three-year-old grandson, for some reason, laughed and ran around the house. This surprised and revolted: the native dog with which he grew up, ate and slept together, suffers, and the child rejoices. In fact, the grandson expressed his anxiety and anxiety in such an absurd way.

This happens when the feeling experienced is new, unfamiliar, there are still no ways to express it in the inner arsenal of a person. Many times I observed such a strange manifestation of difficult experiences, the very presence of which additionally traumatized a person. Emotional experiences, feelings are an inner reality that can neither be expressed accurately nor directly understood.

Lost in Translation

They exist in a form that has no verbal counterpart: in order to express feelings in words, you need to make a special translation into the language of words. As with any translation from language to language, part of the content is lost and distorted. Many people feel this discrepancy very keenly, they know for sure that their experiences are unknowable.

When emotional excitement is great, such people absolutely cannot talk about it. I had one family in therapy – a mother and a sixteen-year-old daughter. They asked about the daughter’s bad relationship with her classmates. Mom believed that her daughter trusted her and did not hide anything. The girl studied for four and five, never complained about anything. Suddenly, by the age of sixteen, it turned out that the child hates to get up early, that relations with girls at school have been bad for several years … Mom could not understand why her daughter did not tell anything, why she endured for so long.

There were two reasons. First, the girl did not know what was going on inside her. She felt only general discomfort and the firm conviction that she was unable to explain anything. In addition, the daughter’s negative experiences in some cunning way very quickly transformed into fantasies about how the bad is corrected for the good.

Like how she becomes popular in class. It is as if an adoring and very enviable guy comes to school after her. Beautiful things appear in her, everyone sees it and whispers behind her back, they begin to seek her attention, they call everywhere with them, and so on and so on. These fantasy dreams wandered in her head for hours, and the troubles that these compensatory dreams gave rise to were simply “forgotten.” It is clear that the girl was embarrassed to talk about her fantasies.

Dream of the merging of souls

The girl turned out to be locked inside herself: so often introverts are isolated – people “turned inside themselves.” In order for the inner content of an introvert to become the subject of communication with another person, he needs to decide, firstly, what to tell, and secondly, how. In addition, he is afraid that he will do everything wrong, that he will not talk about that, in incomprehensible words. He is afraid to seem ridiculous and ridiculous. The process of spiritual communication for an introvert is therefore a risky and difficult business. It is easier for him to communicate formally.

An extrovert – a person “directed outward” – is arranged differently. He thinks, feels and communicates at the same time. An introvert does not seem to feel anything during communication. He comes into contact with his feelings later, when he “looks through” the events of the day. An extrovert, on the contrary, can easily report online from the field of spiritual life.

But, no matter how open and transparent an extrovert is, it is no easier to understand his experiences than to understand the experiences of an introvert. Indeed, how can one person say with certainty that he feels joy or anger in the same way as someone else?

We can’t even claim that we see colors in the same way, we just know what color is called, and the actual vision of color is an intimate, incomprehensible matter. What about the taste of the food? I feel sour and salty just like you? It’s impossible to check.

Interestingly, people are literally obsessed with the dream of such understanding-penetration. “Happiness is when you are understood” – this is not about understanding ideas, but about the right sympathy, empathy, compassion. I really want to change souls. There is a myth in culture that those who truly love each other understand each other like that: without explaining anything, they simply read each other in transparent heads and hearts, as if it is such a fashionable watch now, where the entire clock mechanism is visible to the last wheel.

Thought language

In the experience of human communication there is understanding – real, tested, discussed. It is the understanding of thoughts and ideas. In the rational zone of our existence there is a language that is perfectly adequate to what we want to express. These are words, speech. “Thought is accomplished in the word” – this phrase of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky seems absolutely indisputable. “I forgot the word that I wanted to say, and the disembodied thought will return to the hall of shadows,” Osip Mandelstam is talking about this.

At the beginning of proper human existence was the word. Your thoughts, unlike feelings and emotions, can be expressed in words accurately. Another person who hears them can understand almost without loss, pick up the logic of reasoning, think out, develop the idea. Thoughts and ideas are fixed, developed, many people can share the same thoughts.

The connection between generations is based on the understanding of ideas. Someone wrote a book 200 years ago, and today a descendant read it – he also began to think about it. This is not the case with emotions and feelings. A person cannot begin to feel the same love that Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet experienced.

Join the feelings

However, there is some learning going on. You cannot feel the same feelings that other people experienced, but you can join them. Feelings can get infected, just like you can get the flu. Everyone is “sick” in their own way, but with one “disease”. This is called empathy.

A person expresses his feelings as he can, practically in any way: directly – by shouting, laughing, tears; indirectly – by a story, a mean naming; with the help of art – in a piece of music, tragedy or comedy … And another person can become infected, begin to experience some, I emphasize, some feelings that he has inside him the same name that he attributed to the feelings of another person.

A few years ago, two girls in Balashikha committed suicide. A wave of suicides among teenagers began. The feelings of these first two girls were expressed by their act. Many teenagers learned about it from the media. This was enough to infect. An ordinary teenager has a lot of sorrows – such an age. And then he also found out that others were suffering, probably very, very much. And the epidemic began … This is an example of a simple emotional connection.

Forbidden emotions

A frequent story in the life of emotions: they seem to be there, but it is difficult to feel them – for many reasons. For example, because it seems to a person: if you start to feel them, they will break out of control. The emotions we refuse to feel take their revenge.

An example of such an emotion is anger. A woman who was in therapy with me told me that she terribly dislikes sick and frail people. Along the way, it turned out that her younger sister was always in poor health, her mother treated her very diligently and generally took care of her more than my client. I suggested that this must have been insulting, and received an indignant disagreement in response: they say that in childhood she loved and pitied her sister.

At the very least, we slowly moved on, at some point the discussion of anger at the sister and mother became possible in our conversations, and the client had a vivid image of a fire that destroys everything around, but mainly people, like an atomic bomb. This is how her anger looked in her inner world – a wild element that was not subject to anything.

Fear of her own anger led the client to not communicate with either her mother or her sister for many years. No reasonable reasons were given. “It just so happened,” she said sparsely. It turned out that both mother and sister made many attempts to restore contact, but then stopped, offended by the constant refusal from my client. I realized that she did her best to protect her family from her anger. She stopped communicating and stopped feeling not only anger, but also love.

ancient experiences

Understanding is the lot of the intellect. From an evolutionary point of view, this is very understandable. Those parts of the brain that are responsible for the emotional sphere of life are the most ancient. For example, many people seem to get angry when they are hungry. They often say about men: until you eat, it’s better not to come.

This special negative arousal associated with hunger is common to humans and all mammals, and further down the evolutionary ladder, to the reptile. The experiences associated with hunger, or the excitement from the pursuit of game, are the same for us and for lizards, and the part of the brain that is responsible for these experiences and behavior is structurally and morphologically the same for us. Now imagine a lizard talking about his experiences. Ridiculous and absurd – primarily because there is no biological expediency in this. A lizard does not need for her life that other lizards know about her emotions.

All other emotions, with the exception of the so-called higher ones – irony and patriotism, are already present in all mammals. In the brain, they are represented by the limbic system. All the experiences associated with reproduction and parental behavior, apparently, are in the kangaroo, and in the wolf, and in us sinners. At least the brain substrate is the same for all of us.

Animals do not talk about experiences, they have nothing, they have no speech. They show emotion through their behavior. Their behavioral repertoire is simpler and more unambiguous than human behavior, so emotions are easier to read. In humans, the whole thing was “spoiled” by the cerebral cortex. She gave us speech and intelligence. The ability to think and talk about it arose simultaneously. It is possible to use speech to describe experiences, but there will be no understanding similar to understanding thoughts.

So, in the rational sphere, understanding is possible; in the emotional sphere, only contagion. This is important to know – useful in love and friendship. Do not demand understanding of your experiences from people close and dear to you, and remember: you are also unable to understand their experiences.

Neither love, nor passion, nor hatred will help to feel the feelings of another – loved or hated. I’m not talking about a person who doesn’t care about us at all. Do not rely on special emotional understanding. He is not in the world. The most that a mature and responsible person can do is to be attentive to the emotional manifestations of other people, to make allowance for the inevitable emotional deafness, to check their understanding and to be as open and sincere as possible.