I think then I feel

Jo Jo is coming up two. Like many children of his age, he can be Mummyfied (and Daddyfied). When Mum went to the loo and locked the door, Jo Jo decided that was not what he wanted. He burst into apparently inconsolable tears.

Every parent will have witnessed such things many times. If we’ve got the wrong head on it can seem frustratingly irrational and more than anything, quite unnecessary. But every child will do it.

The thing about very young children is that they can change their focus in an instant. If you’re not on your phone and you’re alert to the situation you can sometimes help them to do so. It won’t always work but on this occasion two elderly grandparents began vigorously marching and loudly singing The Grand Old Duke of York. We don’t know what Jo Jo made of this strange sight, but he immediately stopped crying. He began to chuckle. Then, raising his arms, he reached up asking to be picked up; mini crisis averted.

What can we learn from Jo Jo? Firstly, that a child’s feelings can change in an instant; something that all parents learn very quickly. But we can go further. Currently as a culture we have become preoccupied by feelings. From the 1960s onward we’ve been encouraged to say how we feel, to express our true feelings etc. Interviewers are always asking, “How did you feel?”, or more often “How did that make you feel?” (This rephrasing carries the added implication that events and circumstances determine how we feel.)  Victims of crime are invited to give victim impact statements about their experience regardless of the risk this could reactivate or prolong their distress. Within mental health self-reported feelings are emphasised and regarded as symptoms.

As a culture we have come to regard feelings as primary, authentic, and as if they are unquestionable. None of what I’m saying suggests we shouldn’t take our feelings seriously, but should we ask questions about how they arise?  Are they in fact secondary rather than primary?

Jo Jo’s feelings changed from dramatic distress to pleasure in a moment. His Mum was still locked in the loo. That situation hadn’t changed. What had changed was the focus of his thinking; a change big enough to cause a 180-degree reversal of his mood.

What we can learn from Jo Jo, is that our feelings are secondary; they are driven by what we’re thinking in the moment. Our feelings don’t have a life of their own that’s independent of our thinking. This is a simple idea that can have profound benefits if we can learn to use it.

As adults it’s not so easy to change what we’re thinking about. We have more things to be concerned about than Jo Jo, and we’ve had more time to build up our worries about things that matter to us. Our thinking is made up of all sorts of choices about what we want and don’t want; of how we think things should be and what they seem to be like. The detail of how we think is so complex it can be hard to be aware of it. By contrast it’s relatively easy to notice how we feel. We are encouraged in this by media messaging that places an unquestioning emphasis on what we’re feeling. Could this focus be part cause of the rise in levels of distress and of the rise in mental health diagnosis?

We’re told that since Covid more and more young people are suffering from anxiety. Have they somehow been encouraged to focus on their anxious feelings and regard them as a problem? Have they been encouraged to see them as symptoms of something that might be wrong with them? But, in fact, making ourselves feel anxious is remarkably straightforward; we all do it.

To make ourselves anxious we simply have to predict something and at the same time decide we don’t want it to happen. Whenever we perform these two acts of thinking in the quiet privacy of our minds, we’ll feel anxious. It’s as inevitable as it is ordinary and universally human.

If this is the case, it is fundamentally unhelpful to focus only on our anxious feelings and see these as symptoms of some condition we are suffering from. Anxiety is not an ‘IT’ that is making us anxious.  We don’t ‘have’ anxiety; we, in effect, ‘think’ it. Our anxious feelings flow from us thinking in a particular way.

Perhaps a culture that encourages us to see our feelings as primary is part of why more and more sensible, intelligent people, young and old, come to see themselves as having a psychological problem. They’re doing their best to understand their situation using the tools available; cultural tools that are blunt. Tools that don’t help us see our feelings are just a reflection of what we’re worrying at the time.

Focusing on our feelings without recognising they’re essentially secondary to our thinking is nothing short of a cultural myopia that confuses and disables; this is like just letting Jo Jo cry his heart out. Sometimes there might be a simple alternative that can change tears to Jo Jo’s joy.

I think then I feel.