Part Two of Fighting Fascism Requires Feeling: Understanding How Emotions Work (A Body-Based Guide)
Emotions Are Body-Based: What’s Actually Happening in Your Nervous System
Though our culture likes to conceptualize emotions as feelings in our minds or head, they are actually full-body, nervous-system-level neuro-physiological experiences that convey directives for behavior (Panksepp, 2010). Also dissimilar to what Western culture teaches us, emotions are physiological responses outside of our control—similar to the muscles in our digestive tract or our heartbeat (of course, what we do in response to emotions, i.e. behavior, is within our conscious capacity to control).
Your Limbic System (‘Lizard Brain’) Reacts Fast on Purpose
In the brain, emotions originate in our limbic system—colloquially known as the “lizard brain” (Shapiro, 2021)—to connote that, evolutionarily speaking, this system is the oldest and most primitive. The limbic system does not think; it reacts and responds, working very quickly to keep us alive.
How Emotions Work: Stimulus → Emotion → Urge → Action
Emotions evoke urges, and urges—consciously or not—evoke action, and that’s precisely how humans evolved to move through the world. Jaak Panksepp, a researcher and neuroscientist, defines emotions as “ancestral tools for living,” meaning that we evolved to feel—not only to make sense of and move through our own individual lives, but also to propel our species as a whole into the future. More simply: a stimulus evokes an emotion, and emotion evokes an urge to do something. For example, you might see a cute dog on the subway (stimulus). You feel delighted and tender (emotions) in your body, as your torso feels warm and fuzzy while cheeks and the pitch of your voice rises (full body) as you check with its owner if you can say hello, hold out your hand for sniffing, and say “What a good boy!” (behavior).
Emotions Point Toward What Matters
Emotions are full-body experiences that propel us toward action—and toward what matters. Diana Fosha (2021), founder of the therapy modality AEDP, beautifully describes our emotions as “the experiential arc between problem and its solution. Between danger and its escape, lies fear. Between novelty and its exploration lies joyful curiosity. Between loss and its eventual acceptance lies grief and its completion.” By experiencing our emotions, we can get in touch with what our true self wants—and gain clarity on life’s biggest challenges without self-abandoning.
Emotions and Values: The Hidden Overlap (Why Feelings Are Powerful Glue)
In my work as a somatic therapist, one of the most meaningful ways I support clients who want to make difficult or scary changes in their lives is to identify “why this change is important”—or, put another way, their personal values, belief systems, and what their nervous system is protecting.
American culture tends to proclaim that certain values are universal truths that every American must want, painting an incredibly diverse population as homogenous and specific values as “normal”—like individualism, materialism, and competition, for example.
However, as Janet Finn reminds us in Just Practice (shout out to all my fellow Hunter alumni who slogged through this book in Practice Lab), values aren’t predetermined or finite: they’re shaped, evolve, and get pruned through lived experience. Here are a few forces, some completely outside of human control, that shape a person’s value set:
cultural identity
time period
gender and sexuality
social class
the physical location or environment
the opportunities and constraints within a system
life stage
educational trajectory
professional trajectory
As Finn points out, we might conceptualize beliefs as the behavior of “valuing”—being in constant appraisal of the people, experiences, and systems we interact with as good, bad, or in between—and those judgment calls impact what we choose to do or not do. The process of valuation works like an infinity loop: what we do shapes the world and the structure of our society, and the structure/value set of our society shapes what we do—simultaneously, all of the time.
The Power of Shared Values (Why “Power in Numbers” Works)
You’ve likely heard the phrase “power in numbers” before—an incredibly simple way to express that one individual, no matter how wealthy, well-connected, or powerful, simply can’t overpower a collective that is well-coordinated and irreducibly committed to collective action.
Any manager, supervisor, community organizer, or leader of any kind knows how difficult it can be to get a big group of people—with diverse opinions and backgrounds—to align behind a single purpose and course of action. And this is where shared values come into play.
If that leader can get a community in agreement about values each group member shares, then they will have a much easier time aligning everyone behind a singular mission. This is because shared values foster three things:
interconnectedness: social cohesion, community, and a felt sense of being brought back to each other
directive information: conveying how we should behave in relationship with each other. For example, if a community values accountability, that inherently shapes what should happen next in conflict—if one person hurts another, etc.
psychological energy: even though values aren’t provable truths, people feel very deeply about what they value—and confronting people, ideas, and behaviors that either celebrate or clash with those values can evoke strong emotion
And here is the hidden overlap: what else fosters interconnectedness, directive information, and psychological energy? Emotions. At a funeral, grief bonds us together in pain, conveys a directive to behave somberly, empathically, and reflectively, and carries a psychological weight felt deeply in the body. At a New Year’s Eve party, excitement bonds us together in hope for what’s to come, conveys a directive to let go of the year we’ve lived (and sometimes to behave recklessly and impulsively, because “f*ck it! the year’s over!”), and carries a psychological buoyancy of expectation and play.
Both shared values and emotions are powerful agents for bonding—and for coordinating what we do next. Power-over leaders exploit this human phenomenon, bonding communities with fear and nostalgia over shared values like hierarchy, white supremacy, and patriarchy, valuing the few over the many. Power-with leaders use shared values to empower us to fight for equity for everyone, whether they are like us or not.
Works Cited
Finn, J. L. (2021). Just practice: A social justice approach to social work (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Fosha, D. (Ed.). (2021). Undoing aloneness and the transformation of suffering into flourishing: AEDP 2.0. American Psychological Association.
Shapiro, J. (2021, November 5). Two parts of the brain govern much of mental life. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/thinking-in-black-white-and-gray/202111/two-parts-the-brain-govern-much-mental-life
