“Follow your heart,” it’s so easy to say. But a surprising number of people don’t feel that much about it. Emotional blindness This is still a little-known phenomenon. Emotion researcher Carlotta Welding explains why it doesn’t just affect men.
Miss Dr. Welding, you have researched emotional blindness and say that ten percent of the Western population is affected by it. What does that mean exactly?
Dr. Carlotta Welding: Emotionally blind means that you cannot perceive and express your own feelings. Accordingly, those affected cannot read other people’s feelings well.
Has the number of these people increased or decreased?
It’s hard to say because there isn’t enough research on it. Emotional blindness is a construct that emerged in the 1970s, both in the USA and Europe, but has since moved out of scientific focus. It is only recently that feelings and emotional blindness have been addressed again.
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 every now and then his wife has to say something like “Give me a hug,” just by herself he would never come up with the idea. A few years ago the cliché would probably have been said: typical man.
In fact, men are somewhat more likely than women to be affected by emotional blindness. However, not as much more common as one might think according to the cliché. Maybe it seems a little more familiar to us with our gender-role-specific view of men: a man doesn’t like to talk about his feelings, of course. But of course emotional blindness also exists in women. We may perceive her as more of a pragmatic, hands-on person who doesn’t make a lot of 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 with less going on inside and therefore hardly expressing any emotions; and the one who feels the same way 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. However, the fact that someone has a normal emotional experience but cannot express their feelings is what is actually disastrous. This is a risk factor for mental illness.
Do people who are emotionally blind know that they have problems with feelings?
You would probably describe yourself as a head person. And emotional blindness doesn’t necessarily have to be a problem: there are also areas, for example at work, where it can be an advantage not to be irritated by emotional things. And maybe they also have a person at their side who accepts them as they are. But there are also emotionally blind people who are often mirrored by their environment: Just open up, you are always so controlled by your head, so cold. As a result, they often realize sooner or later 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 just very rational?
Ultimately, this is just a gradual gradation. Emotional blindness is diagnosed through tests that rely on self-report. Depending on your score, you are slightly, moderately or highly emotionally blind. Even the most emotionally competent person is a little blind to emotions, and no one is 100 percent “emotional.” It’s difficult for all of us to know exactly every second: Why do I feel this way? What do I even feel? Why do I cry when I’m actually angry? Why am I in such a bad mood today when nothing happened?
We often don’t understand our feelings.
We often don’t understand what we feel?
We often don’t understand our feelings. We get stuck in emotional behavior patterns that come from our past, we superimpose one feeling on another, we react emotionally to things that lie on a subconscious level.
An example, please.
Imagine a person who can never accept constructive and objective criticism from their boss. Each time he or she reacts with excessive anger or very hurt, leaves the room angrily or starts crying. This person will probably complain about the boss’s attitude – “That guy is so mean.” But the feelings that arise from criticism will not go away. There is probably another, deeper feeling behind it. Perhaps the boss’s criticism evokes very basic feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness that have their origins in childhood. But the person doesn’t notice this because it is less accessible to them. Instead, she reacts with anger or sadness. Anger often hides other things.
Namely?
Abandonment, loneliness, sadness, fear, shame and other “quieter” feelings. Anger and anger are often secondary feelings – a feeling that overshadows another that we can’t easily access. That’s not a reproach at all, because sometimes you don’t have the capacity or strength to go to painful points. But you can’t get rid of the anger if you don’t deal with what’s underneath.
It is said that one should not repress feelings. What happens if I do it?
Feelings always have something to tell us. In emotion research, the image of the alarm clock is often used: the alarm clock only stops ringing and becomes silent when I have heard it and then turned it off. If I don’t respond to him, his ringing gets louder. Accordingly, a feeling flattens out as soon as I consciously perceive it and work with it. But if I suppress it, then it persists and breaks out again and again – although 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 the way you might want…
Yes, it’s a balancing act. We live in a social environment with other people, and the rules of politeness and respect still apply. Colleagues who let me feel their bad mood every day, unfiltered and completely authentically – 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, even though everything seems fine. Or also: I spontaneously find someone very trustworthy who I don’t even know. Can I always trust that?
Gut feeling is a very important, indispensable guide for us. But sometimes it is 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 your feelings from time to time and think about where they come from.
How can I learn to perceive my feelings better?
If you don’t have underlying difficulties in dealing with feelings – in which case professional help would usually be necessary – it may be worthwhile to train your receptors for your own feelings: perceive feelings, locate them in the body, accept that they are there , without judging them and finally watching them go by. And it’s a hugely useful exercise to find the exact right word for the feeling I’m having right now: Am I really mad? Or am I more hurt, upset, offended, irritated? The more I work on verbally expressing what’s going on inside me, the clearer it becomes to myself. This is due to the close relationship between language and emotions. When we verbalize our feelings, it has feedback effects on our feelings. Verbalizing is therefore an important step in regulating emotions.
You could also live out what you feel physically, for example when you’re angry you can hit a pillow with all your might, or when you’re sad you can cry really loudly and completely uninhibitedly – at least just for yourself.
I also think that makes sense. If we imagine the case of a person who has feelings within them that they have never addressed before: 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 really noticing the feeling. After all, emotion comes from “movere”, to move. This is an instruction for action.
Dr. Carlotta Welding After studying linguistics at the Cluster of Excellence at the Free University of Berlin, she researched feelings and did her doctorate on the topic of “emotional blindness”. Today she works in Berlin as a freelance emotional therapist and coach (carlottawelding.de). Her current book on the topic: “Learning to feel. Why we so often don’t understand our feelings and how we can change that” (288 pages, 17 euros, Klett-Cotta).
Would you like to find out more about the topic? In the current episode PARENTS talk Christine Rickhoff speaks with Dr. Carlotta Welding on how children learn feelings and what it means for the family when a parent is emotionally blind.