This article was originally published on Common Edge.
My mother is a psychologist, so our family talks a lot about emotion. More specifically, we discuss the experience of emotion, because, as she likes to remind me and my sisters, “We don’t think our feelings—we feel them, in our bodies.” According to my mother, it’s this experience of emotion that gives our lives a sense of meaning and vitality; as a result, her work isn’t about intellectual insight or abstract theories, but rather about giving her patients a new experience of themselves in the world.
