Westminster Confessions

Our counseling class this fall is reading (among many other things) Dave Powlison’s new book Seeing with New Eyes. Chapter 13, “What Do You Feel?” looks at the various ways that we use the word “feel” in our conversations. Consider this example from the chapter.

“When I feel hurt because I feel my _______ (fill in the blank: husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend/sister/etc) has wronged me, then I don’t feel like going to talk to him. Instead, I feel like leaving because I feel he won’t listen anyway. I feel justified in the anger I feel. I don’t feel the Bible applies to our particular conflicts.”

The word feel can be used to describe sense perceptions (like external or internal pain); emotions; thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes; or desires.

I was intrigued by the way language can be misused to obfuscate sin. In particular, the word “feeling.” I’ve understood the idea that even if a person misreads the details of a situation, they can still have very real perceived feelings. But I never took to the logical conclusion that by using the word feeling we somehow attempt to validate our position. Appealing to the term feeling in response to a person’s reaction to my behavior takes the responsibility for my behavior off the burner and places the focus on the other person. “They made me feel bad (even though it was because what I was doing was wrong!)” But because I “feel” bad or angry or misunderstood, they must have done something wrong instead of me.

I wonder, however, since we are hinging so much of this discussion on language, if non-English or non-Western cultures would use the word feeling in the way we do. What other “masking word” or concept might be used? Does knowing a culture help me approach a counseling situation differently?

Keoki* was one of my 4th grade students in Molokai. He was a rascal and mischievous. An abiding memory of my time teaching him was his response to correction after he had caused a disruption or misbehaved in some way. He would often reply, (in a very pouting, shocked tone) “You shamed me!” Hawaiian culture places a heavy price on being shamed. It is a very terrible thing, and something that you would never want to do to someone else. However, by telling me that I had shamed him, he was actually using the word shame to obscure his behavior and shift the attention to something that I had done to him. In the same way that North Americans use the term feeling to validate their position, Keoki was trying to validate his perceived wronging by appealing to his sense of shame. Obviously a teacher would never want to shame their student, so many teachers would back down. A better way to approach Keoki would have been to try to help him see that the sense of shame he had was due to his own action and revealed a heart that was fearful of man and was prideful.

As we look to work within various cultures we should look for the types of idols that may be more particularly prevalent in a culture or revealed in a language. For the Hawaiians, “shame” can frequently reveal an idol of pride or fear of man. For English-speaking North Americans, “feeling” can reveal a cultural idol of individualism, which is really subjectivism because it is what feeling appeals to for its authority. This raises the value of the individual to a place that supplants God’s authority.

*name has been changed

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 3rd, 2004 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Academia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.