Once a powerful emotion takes hold of us, it no longer feels like an emotion. It feels like the ultimate truth about ourselves, the other and the world.
Anger tells us that we have been wronged. Shame tells us that we are contemptible. Fear says that disaster has already begun. Abandonment says that we will be alone forever. The feeling does not present itself as one possible experience of what is happening. It appears as reality itself.
In this respect, even the most articulate adult can suddenly resemble an inconsolable child. For the child who is left alone, there is not yet a reassuring distinction between: mother is in the next room and mother has disappeared. The child does not merely feel abandoned. At that moment, abandonment is the whole world.
Something of this lives on in each of us. When an old fear or longing is touched, the present loses its boundaries. A message that does not arrive becomes proof that we no longer matter. An absent gaze becomes rejection. A disagreement becomes betrayal.
What, then, makes it possible to take a reflective step back in the midst of such intensity, without denying the feeling?
Alongside the feeling, however tentatively, there must arise an awareness that the other is not the entire cause of what I feel. The other may have touched it, awakened it, intensified it or given it a face. The other may be the person along whom the feeling reaches me.
But the feeling does not begin entirely in the other.
That awareness changes everything.
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