Why I Wrote Learning To Feel

The discussion in our men’s group got around to feelings one night – mostly those of anger and rage – when Colin piped up. Colin is a big strong guy, especially endowed with upper body strength like massive shoulders and arms. But it was what he said that silenced the discussion.

“I learned how to numb myself,” he said rather quietly. “When I was a kid, I was smaller than the rest of the guys and I always was being picked on. Worse yet was that the only way home was on my bike down a street that passed under a railroad bridge, and that’s where all the bullies hung out. They’d block me and shove me around. So to protect myself, I would just shut down. It really pissed them off more that they couldn’t get a reaction from me – but I wasn’t even there. I wasn’t in my body. I just went away.”

The bullies eventually got bored and let him go but the mechanism of numbing out and leaving his body was iced in place. As he grew, Colin put his energies into weight lifting and training, ultimately becoming a bully himself. He goes on to say that because of his lacking of almost all emotions, he ruined nearly every relationship he ever had. Now married with three kids, he had to find a way to reconnect to his emotions. As he puts it, “It just wasn’t working for my wife and kids to have this stoic, rage-filled man in their house.”

Colin’s story is not so unique. Many men, for so many reasons, squelch their true feelings only to replace them with the preferred emotions of anger, assertive power, and numbness. Men learn to channel it into athletics like football, wrestling, rugby and other outlets. But lest you think this is a man’s thing, listen to Mariella. Mariella is a strikingly beautiful woman and mother of four. However her background includes incestuous rape as a young girl. Her father and her uncle were both perpetrators at different times. And when she finally confessed her horror to her mom, she didn’t believe Mariella. In fact she blamed her, calling her a whore and a slut.

Mariella’s coping mechanism was similar to Colin’s – she went away. “I pretended to be an observer. It wasn’t me they were doing that stuff to. It was some other girl who didn’t even look like me. I named her Nancy. Nancy was the tramp. Nancy had her pants off. Nancy was bad and needed to be punished.” Unfortunately, Mariella’s story is not uncommon. Something on the order of 50% or more of girls and women report sexual assault, rape and molestation at some point in their lives. We used to think it was “only” 33% until #Metoo opened our eyes.

As if that were not enough, fast forward to contemporary times. All of us – especially those here in the United States – are assaulted daily with news of war, terrorism, mass shootings and violence so overwhelming that we prefer not to watch the news anymore. It is too painful to hear; too overwhelming and far too emotion-provoking. Last year (2022) in the United States, there were more than 648 mass shootings (that is an event where 4 or more people were either killed or wounded) in 365 days, and all totaled there were more than 20,000 people killed by guns (not counting suicides) and an additional nearly 39,000 wounded. The numbers are just too staggering to comprehend. So we don’t – we just turn and look the other way because the feelings of pain and compassion are overwhelming.

As a result of these and many other factors, many adults have arrived at a state where we no longer can feel the fullness of our emotions because we just cannot handle it all. We just don’t want to feel. We have muted feelings, no longer experiencing the highs and lows of our regular life experiences. We shift everything into our intellect to process and make sense out of it.

Yet we evolved as feeling and emotive creatures. Emotions are a vital part of our survival package. Emotions help us bond with others. But most importantly emotions should be sources of important information. They can provide us with immediate feedback on what is happening and what we believe to be the outcome of that. However, our emotions are not necessarily accurate because of what lies within the process of constructing emotions (which is often preconscious to us when we feel).

I wrote the book, Learning to Feel, specifically for this reason: that in rediscovering our emotions we are able to get a window into our deepest beliefs and thereby understand what among them we might choose to revise or throw out. Many of us have blunted our emotions when they seem to get in the way. But for the true seeker, and for those who wish to live a life by design – their own design – understanding how those beliefs came to be and which of them no longer serve us is an absolute must.

Our emotions are a product of what is happening and our underlying beliefs about what those things mean. The brain is doing this on a non-stop basis twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Our brain is taking in new information, comparing that with the meaning-making beliefs we hold and then projecting that on to the next moment or situation. But many, if not most, of those beliefs were put in place when we were children. And, unfortunately, we will continue doing the same things over and over until or unless we break up those old beliefs from our childhood. Learning to Feel is a book about how to do just that: break up our old beliefs and replace them with new beliefs that produce better and more accurate feelings. By tracing the process I went through to "clean house" and reconnect with the inner gyroscope of emotions, I outline a series of exercises and questions to guide readers on the same journey.

Learning to Feel is now available for pre-release sales at the publisher (Learning to Feel (pre-order) - MSI Press MSI Press), or on Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites.

About the author: Kris Girrell is a retired executive leadership coach, trainer, keynote speaker, and internationally recognized expert on cultural/emotional intelligence. He is the author of several books on a wide variety of self-help topics (A Married Man’s Survival Guide, Wrestling the Angel: The Role of the Dark Night of the Soul in Spiritual Transformation, Stations in the Night, and Typhoon Honey: The Only Way Out is Through all available on Amazon.com). You can also view Kris’ TEDx talk on Emotional Intelligence which has over 400,000 views at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l8yPt8S2gE