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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.

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.

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(Parts of this blog entry first appeared on a blog called Literature & Life that I run at Barnes&Noble.com. Check out this ongoing conversation about how classic books change our daily lives).

You might love your job, house, and family, but the sound of your own voice might still sometimes bore you. That is: Life is good when we have a routine that works, but sticking to the routine has its own drawbacks: From time to time, I can feel deadeningly, or too much, like “myself.”

I do like my fixed routines--like the daily trip to the gym--but sometimes, lifting weights, I’m frustrated that another possible “me” isn’t living the life it could.

We are always allowing ourselves little escapes from the work-day “me.” Escapes come from the mild to the extreme: A midday cell-phone conversation is a mild form of self-escape; a book is a dependable, rich escape; so is a trip to a foreign country.

Virginia Woolf is my favorite dreamer and novelist—a woman who lived and wrote from 1882 to 1941. Woolf was someone who lived so thoroughly in her head that she also spent a lot of her time dreaming up ways to escape or expand it.

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It’s holiday time. Holiday time can be depressing. This is the time of the year when store windows sing with (commercial) cheer, house decorations insist we be HAPPY, and families flaunt their families. In turn, the “holiday blues” can set in just around now: From November to January, people who-are-often-loners-but-generally-feel-OK can get atypically depressed.

Holidays suggest we should be more joyfully social than a lot of us naturally are. So we doubt our simple love of solitude. A pressure for bliss can also make our (naturally imperfect) family or friendships annoy us all the more.

Who Parties?
Modern psychology makes a very cool distinction between people who thrive on stimulating environments and those who don’t. The distinction actually came out of research on pain thresholds: Some of us are more stoic about events like jamming our fingers or breaking our ankles than others are. In 1967, a researcher named Asenath Petrie defined two types of personalities: the “augmenter” and the “reducer.” The “augmenter” is sensitive to excitement: She feels pain more than most and dislikes other types of chaos, including heavy drinking and loud noise. In contrast, the “reducer” has a high threshold for action. She loves a party and is a social type; she has a bigger tolerance for pain, seeks crowds, and tends to turn her music up louder than others do. So: Different people have different relationships to stimuli. Some can’t get enough of the crowd; some like to shut it down.

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You can probably name a few novelists or artists whom you call smart confidantes or friends. You draw on their writing for guidance at difficult crossroads--for sympathy or advice. After all, literature isn't only valuable because it's entertainment, but because it delivers memorable insight about life outside the book. We know more about love because of Shakespeare, about jealousy because of Tolstoy, about self-esteem because of Charlotte Bronte. Literature moves us for what it says about events outside of their plots.

My book, A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf, finds everyday wisdom in a novelist who tends to intimidate a lot of people (some call Woolf terribly obscure; some say she's too brooding, too heady). But Woolf was a genius in her ability to record the human heart. In her novels and diaries, she described what it's like to ride through the highs and lows of a mood--or to have a conversation, to feel longing as another person speaks. My book describes the insight she delivered about friendships, ambitions, and careers.

Ever since I pitched this book, I've been faced with the Big Question: "How can we learn about ‘the good life' from a woman who killed herself?" Virginia Woolf did commit suicide in 1941, partly as a response to World War Two, and partly because of biology. Hitler had started bombing London, and so Woolf grew increasingly pessimistic about humanity; she also suffered from what we retroactively diagnose as bipolar disorder. (The diagnosis wasn't defined during her lifetime.)

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Ilana Simons is our guest blogger during the week of November 26th. If you have any questions for Ilana Simons, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf: 

One of the most admired writers of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf is as popular now as she ever was. In this remarkable book, award-winning professor Ilana R. Simons plumbs the depths of Woolf’s words and career, drawing on them to produce a lively and accessible guide to more fulfilling, more original living inspired by one of literature’s greatest observers of human nature. The result, beautifully packaged, is almost worthy of Woolf herself.

About Ilana Simons

Ilana Simons is currently a professor of English literature at The New School in New York City. She won the Willy Gorrissen Award for Teaching Excellence and the Molberger Fellowship for modernist scholarship while a graduate student at New York University. Simons is a moderator for the online Barnes & Noble Book Clubs. She is presently in training as a clinical psychologist.