Does Speaking a Feeling Change a Feeling? by Ilana Simons:

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Does Speaking a Feeling Change a Feeling?

Case example: Imagine that I’ve been angry for a month, and I finally pass the woman I’m angry at, so say, “I’m angry at you.” Once I say it, I’ve actually changed the emotion.Now it’s harder to comfort or kid myself about it in secret. Once spoken out loud, an emotion is a different animal--now it’s information between us, which people can argue about or laugh at or critique.Talk with others changes the very thing we’re dealing with.

Talk changes the actual size of emotions. If I tell a friend I’m scared of something, my fear gets bigger or smaller, depending on the language we use to talk about my experience. And if I tell someone I’m lost, I’ve already done something practical to improve my situation. Conversation changes our emotions by changing our relationships and our practical options.

Modern psychology is doing very neat work with this idea.For instance, psychologists working in Narrative Theory study the influence of the words you choose on your own behaviors.The phrases you speak out of habit can change your tendency to do one thing or the other.This might seem obvious: If the youngest kid in the family is nicknamed the “grouch,” she’ll start expecting and excusing her own grouchiness. And if her older brother is routinely called “the disciplined kid,” he expects and pursues harder work. A large part of changing behaviors is changing the stories with which we explain our lives to others. If I change my story, I change my own expectations and tendencies.

I love this idea—that the stories we give to ourselves change who we are, or how we engage with the world. This is one reason I’m interested in the ways literature and psychology relate to one another. I’m a literature professor who fell in love with literature because of the moments in which novels accurately map the mind. That interest sparked my current study and practice in clinical psychology. Novels are stages in which smart voices fiddle with the structure of personality. Authors try on all sort of hats as they develop their characters; they play with the way language propels or reveals personality types. Our favorite authors also use words so much, themselves, that they usually tend to be bigger personalities than average. Authors are often crazy characters. They know far too much about words to be simple.

Your words about yourself change your interests and elevate or soothe your emotions. They are also a blueprint for what you’re likely to do in the future. I unpack these and others ways our stories alter our psychology in A Life of One’s One: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf.My book is an account of how one novelist, Virginia Woolf, used powerful expressions to shape and change her now-famous time on Earth. She also left us advice on how to change our own.

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Ilana Simons, A Life of One's Own, Virginia Woolf, guide, biography, 20th century literature, human nature, boredom, fulfillment, women, psychology, Penguin Books, books