Thought, Emotion, and Feelings Part Five: Embarrassment
It is about 1952, and I am nine or ten, an age of increasing independence. The sitter for my younger sister and me is talking with me on the front brick walk of our colonial home when my mother returns, dressed for the meeting she had just attended, including her three-inch high heels. Mrs. Mills laughs when my mother questions her about our behavior—the flute notes of our sitter’s voice rising to her silver-gray permed hair as she offers her response. My mother compliments her on a new hairdo, then turns and asks me, "Barbara, what do you think of Mrs. Mills' new hairdo?" "I don't like it," I promptly answer. My mother halts while opening her purse and looks at me. I hear, "That's not a nice thing to say, Barbara." My name feels pinned to the air I am breathing by the tone of her voice.
In 2020, with an awareness of my lack of self-possession to speak in certain situations, I began writing this series on "Thought, Emotion, and Feelings." I have felt awful, but kept silent too often. In this remembered situation, I become the inner mother of the girl I was that day.* With the intention of speaking to Barbara so that she feels safe, understood, and can learn another way she might have answered on that day, in my mind, I look at her and say, "Barbara, I’ll bet Mrs. Mills might like to hear which hairdo of hers you do like. She likes you. She likes to be your sitter." I rescue a part of my past with the repair of a memory of an incident from my youth.
Dr. Paul Ekman* lists our six basic emotions as sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. I think about how four of them might have been present in that brief conversation with my mother, beginning with my surprise at how my honesty was treated. I might have felt sadness for not understanding why I had acted wrongly. At a subconscious level, I might have felt anger for standing out in the wrong way. Deeper still, in my unconscious, a tiny seed of fear that Barbara was not a good enough person might have been planted right then.
My pursuit of a fuller understanding of thought, emotion, and feelings brought me to Marshall B. Rosenberg’s explanation of “Compassionate Communication.” In his book, Nonviolent Communication, A Language of Life, he offers full-page listings of feelings for when our needs are being met, and when they are not being met.* I'd been embarrassed that day, and in other subsequent situations, and now I knew why I'd felt low. My needs had not been met.
My realization is, "What matters is understanding what our emotions and feelings reveal of whether are needs are, or are not, being met as a starting point for conscious change."
* Lucia Capacchione, Recovery of Your Inner Child: The Highly Acclaimed Method For Liberating Your Inner Self (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991).
* Dr. Paul Ekman pioneered the study of the emotions and how they relate to facial expressions.
Learn more about his life and work https://www.paulekman.com/about/paul-ekman/
Theory on the human’s basic emotions https://online.uwa.edu/infographics/basic-emotions/
* Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life (Encinitas, CA:
PuddleDancer Press, 2003), 44-45.