inner feelings

There is a lot of verbal confusion with feelings. Feelings include both physical sensations (sensation of touch or sensation of cold — the so-called external feelings), and emotional, internal feelings.

A feeling of joy or sadness, a feeling of fear, a feeling of pride or a feeling of love…

Internal feelings in academic psychology have been little studied, while they are extremely popular in the field of practical psychology and even more so in human life, where they are simply called feelings.

If you read about feelings somewhere in the book, you can be sure that the author means internal feelings. If a young man tells a girl about his feelings, he does not tell her about the peculiarities of his perception of the outside world, he reveals to her his hopes and dreams, his fears and his passion. These are his inner feelings, this is what relates to his soul↑.

Here and below, by «just feelings» we will also mean internal, emotional feelings. Speaking about the structure of inner feelings, the following wording would be appropriate in the synton approach:

Option: “Feeling is the unity of the internal image, the internal text and the totality of the calibrated kinesthetic characteristics of the body, caught by the word.”

The first important point is understanding the situation. For example: “When I think about you, my breath is blocked in my chest, there is heaviness between my shoulder blades, I clench my fists, and the thought arises to avoid meeting you. And I still want to feel sorry for you. I interpret it as guilt.» As long as there is no understanding of the situation, you can only feel sensations. The heart is beating, but what is it: fear or love? Feelings do not automatically follow from the situation: if you didn’t get something, it can cause grief, disappointment, resentment, and a feeling of “fun”. A person with standard social patterns will have a familiar set of feelings, a person of a different culture or a different level of development will have different feelings or no feelings at all.

At a minimum, in order to experience any feeling, you need to evaluate what happened as an event, you need to pay attention to this event and highlight this something as an event. If a person was busy with something of his own, more important or interesting for him, then asking him “how do you feel about what happened now” is meaningless: nothing happened for him.

The second important point is spontaneous kinesthetics. If there is no spontaneous kinesthetics, the feeling is not yet alive. The feeling is dreaming, the feeling is transparent, the feeling is cold… If the body turns on, the eyes flash, the arms reach out and the breath stops for a second — yes, this is a living feeling.

And the last point that makes a feeling a feeling is the turning of attention inward. This is what marks what is happening in the body not as a complex of physiological disorders or settings, but as a feeling.

If you look at your body from the outside, like a doctor, you state physiological changes. If you let your attention from the inside (for this it is enough to put your hand on your chest, as they do when they speak from the heart) — and you felt from the inside what you feel.

Understanding a situation can (and can be useful) be decomposed into several elements — into the image of the situation, the inner text that accompanies it, and into the verbal formulation in which a specific feeling is caught. As for spontaneous kinesthetics, there are even more elements: these are movements, postures and gestures, facial expressions, intonations and breathing, internal clamps and tensions around them, the overall functional state of the body …

To put it briefly, inner feelings are messages that we receive from the sense organs of the soul. Feelings are born in the body, but are understood by the head, prone to metaphors and animation.

“I admire you” — this can be both a feeling and an assessment from the head. And the feeling of admiration as “a feeling of light emanating from your beautiful face” is about feelings. It goes through the body and there is a metaphor here.

So, how can we briefly define feelings? Feelings are a figurative-bodily interpretation of kinesthetics. This is kinesthetics framed in living metaphors. This is a living thing that came to us from our body. It is the language our soul speaks.

In any case, feelings are not something natural, it is a higher mental function mediated by signs of culture, it is a product of culture and social learning. The most interesting story of the emergence of feelings in human life is explained by the cultural-historical theory of the development of feelings.

Inner feelings in human life

Inner feelings can help, inner feelings can hinder. Inner feelings of being loved toys can be a disaster, can be the main meaning of life. Feelings are the main motivation for many people. Often there is a problem of managing feelings. See →

Inner feelings in theoretical psychology

People are not always so attentive to the shades of what is happening in their souls, and more often they simply talk about feelings, about their states, about emotions, using all these terms quite arbitrarily. If internal feelings are differentiated, among them one can distinguish feeling-experience, feeling-perception, feeling-attitude and feeling-desire. How to distinguish between inner feelings and sensations? Feelings and intellectual evaluation? How are feelings and energy related? See →

Inner feelings in practical psychology

Understanding inner feelings. Working with inner feelings. See →