“Follow your heart” is easy to say. But a surprising number of people don’t feel that much. Emotional blindness is what this little-known phenomenon is called. Emotion researcher Carlotta Welding explains why it doesn’t just affect men.
Miss Dr. Welding, you did research on emotional blindness and you say it affects ten percent of the western population. What does that mean exactly?
Dr. Carlotta Welding: Emotionally blind means that you cannot perceive and express your own feelings. As an emotionally blind person, you cannot read the feelings of other people very well.
Has the number of these people increased or decreased?
It’s hard to say because there is insufficient research on this. Emotional blindness is a construct that appeared in the 1970s, both in the USA and in Europe, but has since moved back out of focus. It is only recently that we have been dealing with feelings and also with emotional blindness.
In your book you describe a prototypical emotionally blind person from your study: a man who is very rational, taciturn, never talks about what moves him, and now and then his wife has to say something like “Give me a hug” because of her own accord he would never get the idea. A few years ago one would probably have said clichéd: typical man.
In fact, emotional blindness affects men slightly more often than women. However, not as much more often as one might think according to the cliché. Perhaps with our gender role-specific view of men, it seems a bit more familiar: A man doesn’t like to talk about his feelings, that’s clear. But of course there is also emotional blindness in women. Perhaps we perceive her as a pragmatic go-getter who doesn’t do much fuss.
Do these people actually feel less than others? Or are they just having trouble expressing their feelings?
There are both phenomena of emotional blindness: the one in which there is less going on inside and which therefore hardly expresses emotions; and the one who feels the same as a non-emotionally blind person, but cannot express these feelings. In my opinion, the prototypical emotionally blind person is the one who actually has less going on inside. The fact that someone has a normal emotional experience but cannot express their feelings is actually what is fatal. That is a risk factor for mental illness.
Do emotionally blind people themselves know that they have problems with feelings?
They would more likely describe themselves as head people. And emotional blindness does not necessarily have to be a problem: There are also areas, for example the job, in which it can definitely be an advantage not to be irritated by emotional things. And maybe they also have a partner by their side who takes them for who they are. But there are also emotionally blind people who are very often mirrored by their environment: Open yourself up, you are always so head-ridden, so hypothermic. As a result, sooner or later they often notice that they are different – different from the, in their eyes, “drama queens” around them.
Is it even possible to distinguish whether someone is emotionally blind or simply just very rational?
Ultimately, this is only a gradual gradation. Emotional blindness is determined through self-reporting tests. Depending on the number of points, you are slightly, moderately or even highly emotionally blind. Even the most emotionally competent person is therefore a bit emotionally blind, and nobody is 100 percent “emotionally seeing”. It is difficult for all of us to know exactly every second: Why do I feel this way? What am I feeling anyway? Why am I crying when I’m actually angry? Why am I in such a bad mood today, nothing happened?
Quite often we don’t understand our feelings.
We often do not understand what we are feeling?
Quite often we don’t understand our feelings. We are stuck in emotional behavior patterns that come from our past, we superimpose one feeling on another, we react emotionally to things that are on an unconscious level.
An example, please.
Imagine a person who can never accept constructive and factual criticism from their boss. Each time he or she reacts with excessive anger or very hurt, leaves the room angry or starts crying. That person is likely to complain about the boss’s style – “This guy’s so mean”. But the feelings that arise from the criticism will not subside. There is probably another, deeper feeling behind it. Perhaps the boss’s criticism evokes very basic feelings of inadequacy, of worthlessness, which have their origins in childhood. The person does not notice this because it is less accessible to them. Instead, she responds with anger or sadness. Other things are often hidden behind anger.
Namely?
Abandonment, loneliness, sadness, fear, shame and other “quieter” feelings. Anger and anger are often secondary feelings – one feeling that overlaps another that is difficult to get at. This is not at all a reproach, because sometimes you don’t have the capacity and the strength to go to painful points. Only: You can’t get away from the anger if you don’t deal with what’s still hidden beneath it.
It is said that one should not suppress feelings. What if i do?
Feelings always have something to tell us. The image of the alarm clock is often used in emotion research: the alarm clock only stops ringing and becomes silent when I have heard it and then switched it off. If I don’t respond to him, his ringing will get louder. Accordingly, a feeling flattens out as soon as I consciously perceive it and work with it. But if I suppress it, then it remains and breaks out again and again – even if perhaps with different symptoms. It takes a lot of energy to suppress negative feelings. This not only makes you weak, but also less receptive to positive feelings.
But on the other hand, you can’t always live out everything as you might like …
Yes, it’s a tightrope walk. We live in a social togetherness with other people, and the rules of politeness and respect still apply. A colleague who lets me feel her bad mood unfiltered and completely authentically every day – no thanks. But I still don’t have to suppress my anger, for example, but can try to find the right tone and express it in the situation.
There are also feelings that are very immediate: a feeling of discomfort, although everything seems to be okay. Or also: I spontaneously find someone very trustworthy that I don’t even know. Can I always trust that?
The gut feeling is a very important, indispensable guide for us. But sometimes it is also a relic from the past that leads us in the wrong direction today. Maybe we once had a traumatic experience and have been afraid of something actually harmless ever since. It therefore definitely makes sense to question feelings from time to time with the mind and to consider where they come from.
How can I learn to be more aware of my feelings?
If you have no deeper-lying difficulties in dealing with feelings – in which case professional help would usually be needed – it can be worthwhile to train the receptors for your own feelings: Perceiving feelings, locating them in the body, accepting that they are there without judging them and finally watching them pass by. And it is a tremendously useful exercise to find the right word for the feeling I am having right now: Am I really angry? Or am I hurt, agitated, offended, irritated? The more I work to express what is going on in me in language, the clearer it becomes to myself. This is due to the close relationship between language and emotions. When we verbalize our feelings, this has feedback effects on our feelings. The verbal is therefore an important step in regulating emotions.
You could actually live out what you feel physically, for example, when you are angry, hit a pillow with all your strength, when you are sad you can cry loudly and completely uninhibited – at least by yourself.
I also think that makes sense. If we imagine the case of someone who has feelings within them that he has never addressed: Then it is very important that these feelings actually become active. In newer forms of psychotherapy, such as emotion-focused therapy, it is assumed that harmful emotions can only be transformed if they actually arise within the therapeutic setting. Following the physical impulses that a feeling brings with it is a good strategy for truly perceiving the feeling. After all, emotion comes from “movere”, to move. This is an instruction.
Dr. Carlotta Welding After studying linguistics at the Cluster of Excellence at Freie Universität Berlin, she did research on emotions and did her doctorate on the subject of “Emotional blindness”. Today she works in Berlin as a self-employed emotion therapist and coach (carlottawelding.de). Her current book on the subject: “Learning to feel. Why we so often do not understand our feelings and how we can change that” (288 pages, 17 euros, Klett-Cotta).
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