Verified by 
Key points
- Feelings are the conscious components of emotions.
- Emotions pass through unconscious judgments, biases, and coping habits to become conscious.
- In the transformation process, feelings, though real, can be inauthentic instantiations of emotions.
- Drilling down beneath feelings reveals our coping habits, biases, assumptions, tacit beliefs, and values.
Feelings are the conscious components of emotions. What they feel like is not the same as the core emotions from which they emerge or the sense of self they seem to reflect.
Before they reach consciousness, emotions are mitigated and sometimes transformed by unconscious assumptions, judgments, biases, and coping habits. The resulting feelings, though always real, can be inauthentic instantiations of emotions and lead to behavior that feels inauthentic. That’s why we can act on our feelings and later judge that the behavior was not an authentic expression of ourselves.
Think of when you’ve done something and later thought: “That’s not who I am.”
Some authors conflate habituated and familiar feelings (those we’re conditioned and used to) with authenticity. The existential concept of authenticity includes choice, responsibility, values, and meaning. Acting on feelings without choice and responsibility and not in accordance with the values and the meanings we give to behavior won’t feel authentic for very long, if at all.
Examples of real feelings and inauthentic behaviors include:
- Sexual feelings for someone that lead to cheating on your partner
- Indulging interest in emails while ignoring your children
- Anger and aggressive behavior
A sign of precarious authenticity is the urge to justify feelings or explain why we feel the way we do, hoping that someone will validate us. Authentic feelings are self-validating.
Exploring feelings is the starting point of self-awareness, but it is by no means the endpoint. Like the surface of a lake, feelings reflect the sun above and the trees around it but conceal life within the lake. The authentic self lies beneath surface feelings.
The drill-down process described here is necessary only for feelings that repeatedly cause us to act against our long-term best interests or that keep us from doing what is in our long-term best interests. Those are usually feelings of anger, resentment, and anxiety.
Drilling down means examining the perceptions, coping habits, core emotions, assumptions, beliefs, judgments, and values that underlie feelings. When these align, authenticity is automatic. When they don’t, authenticity is elusive.
Start by writing down your feelings and then writing down what underlies them:
- Perceptions
- Coping habits (e.g., blame, denial, avoidance)
- Core emotions (e.g., guilt, shame, fear, sorrow)
- Beliefs, assumptions, or judgments that support the core emotion
- Your fundamental value
Drill Down on Anger or Resentment
Below is an example of examining feelings of anger or resentment.
1. Perception: Unfairness, dishonesty, or ego threat
2. Coping habits: Blame, denial of responsibility
3. Core emotion: Fear, shame, guilt, or sadness
4. Beliefs, assumptions, or judgments: The world’s unfair; this is a bad, selfish, or inconsiderate person, and the world’s filled with them.
5. Fundamental values: Care and appreciation are good; harm is bad.
Of course, perceptions, beliefs, assumptions, and judgments are not always accurate, but they are always biased. A prime example is the perception of unfairness that underlies feelings of anger and resentment. While we’re hypersensitive to being treated unfairly, awareness of our own unfairness requires effortful reflection, which we tend to forgo. Our bias about fairness is more automatic than hypocritical.
If perceptions of unfairness are consistently accurate, it’s necessary to form a new coping habit. Automatic attempts to improve situations (or our experience of them) must replace the habit of blame. Improving tends to uphold fundamental values; blame blinds us to them.
Perceptions of ego threat diminish in the drill-down process and vanish by the time we get to values. (When our egos grow bigger than our values, inauthenticity reigns.)
Coping habits that activate anger and resentment include blame and denial of responsibility. Blame is an attempt to transfer painful core emotions—guilt, shame, sadness—onto someone else. The coping habit of blame begins around age 3 and is reinforced with each repetition. Like all habits, it’s a function of past experience more than present conditions.
As a rule, we don’t reflect on the beliefs, assumptions, and judgments that underlie anger and resentment. Instead, we waste mental energy justifying the feelings, which guarantees frequent repetition of undesired behavior. The beliefs, assumptions, and judgments that underlie anger and resentment rarely align with fundamental values.
Arriving at the core emotions beneath feelings isn’t always easy. This exercise can help. I’m using anger and resentment as an example.
Think of a time when you felt anger or resentment toward someone you love.
What might you also have felt guilty about?
What might you also have felt ashamed of?
What might you also have been afraid of?
You should notice that when you get down to the core emotion, feelings of anger and resentment dissipate. Core emotions are self-regulating if we follow their motivations. Guilt moves us to make amends. Shame moves us to try harder to succeed. (In love relationships, shame tells us to be more compassionate, kind, and loving.) Fear tells us to make ourselves safe. (Anger makes us feel temporarily more powerful, not safer. Chronic anger breeds paranoia.)
Our beliefs, assumptions, and judgments must align with the most fundamental of values: Care and appreciation are good; harm is bad.
Drill Down on Anxiety
Below is an example of examining feelings of anxiety or worry.
1. Perception: Bad things will (might) happen
2. Coping habit: Intense focus on possible (not necessarily probable) danger
3. Core emotions: Fear or shame (e.g., dread of failure, rejection)
4. Beliefs, assumptions, or judgments: The world’s dangerous or too challenging
5. Fundamental values: Care and appreciation are good; harm is bad.
Forge coping habits of planning, strategizing, and developing skills to prevent bad things from happening and cope with those that are not preventable. As you plan, the volume and intensity of your worries will decline.
Following the motivation of fear (make yourself safe) and shame (try harder, practice compassion, kindness, and love) greatly decreases anxiety.
The beliefs, assumptions, and judgments that underlie anxiety must be challenged and replaced with beliefs in our ability to cope and improve while remaining true to our fundamental values.
When the drill-down process aligns beliefs, assumptions, judgments, and core emotions with fundamental values, feelings serve an authentic sense of self rather than distort, inhibit, or harm it.
