"Feelings as Tapestry"

Feelings as Tapestry

Brian Lynch

We can think of every one of our personalities as a tapestry or ornate woven rug.

The materials for the finished product would start with the emotional apparatus we are born with.

There is a lot of evidence to say that we are born with a fixed set of emotions or feelings. For our purposes today I will name them as anger, fear, interest, surprise, distress, disgust, contempt, joy, and shame.

Imagine each of these as one of the threads we had to start with to weave with on our loom to make our tapestry or rug. The moment we were born the threads would all be separated and “pure” but immediately life would begin to weave them into our unique patterns of “knowing” the world."

There is me and my twin brother and my one-year-old sister and there is a terrible thunderstorm. How do we feel? I might feel much fear followed by some distress and then more fear. My twin, on the other hand, might at first feel surprised and then fearful, but then joy at the lighting and laugh. My sister on the other hand, simply might stare out the window in amazement or intense “interest.”

Since this storm was very intense and stimulated our nervous system in all of us in intense ways we all “recorded” it in some way in our memories and it is now part of our instruction manual as to how we will respond to thunderstorms. We, that is, learned in those moments how to respond to thunderstorms. How did we learn and who was our teacher? Well, we were nothing much, but putty in the hands of nature. Nature was our teacher and why one felt interested and the other felt fear is pretty much an accident. But little by little through these intense experiences and then by grouping similar experiences we learn what the world means to us. We begin to form our personality.

We can see it can be and is a very personal world just as every custom rug and tapestry is unique in the world so is every personality. Each experience is like a series of knots that are securely tied. Can they be untied? This is an important question.

The next thought about our patterns or life is once we have these feelings what do we do? During the thunderstorm what did we do? I cried. My brother laughed and danced around. My sister was still. We all could have “done” many different” things and still felt the same. I can be fearful and run away or I could have tried and ignored the problem by suppressing the feelings. Whatever I do at these early ages will also start to become “learned” experiences and like secure knots tied deep in the tapestry of our personalities. Can they be undone? This is an important question.

Once the tapestry or rug is made can it be changed? This is the question of therapy and the work of therapy. The purpose of this piece is to get us to think about how personality is formed starting with innate feeling most of all. But we are not rugs or tapestries we are living, breathing humans that can and do change but it is not easy.

Brian Lynch, 

COPYRIGHT 2010