Letter 12: The Informants Within

Learning to Listen to Our Emotional Guidance System

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

- Joseph Campbell

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Dear Future Human,

In the beginning, there is chaos.

A child comes screaming out of the womb into a blur of light-sound and color-feeling. Nothing is differentiated or distinct. Everything blurs together. Nothing has been named, handled, or given boundaries of sensation.

Not yet.

But slowly, the world begins to organize for them. Born with an extraordinary capacity to adapt to their environment, they are fully equipped with biological and neurological systems that ensure their survival and growth. These include sensory perceptions, reflexes, agile brain plasticity, emotional sensitivity and social bonding, innate curiosity and drive to explore, pattern recognition and predictive learning, and language readiness.^¹

The child’s caregivers play a major role in shaping how they experience and interact with the world. With their guidance, caregivers organize the external world by pointing to objects, naming them, and giving them meaning.

This is a bed. This is a chair. This is a glass. This is a banana.

Through repetition and consistency, a child’s world becomes structured and familiar, as these concepts fall into place, cleaving the external world into separate objects and separate systems of physical interaction.

However, while the external world is shaped through their senses, language and interaction, their internal world (the realm of emotions and sensations) is often left unexamined, hidden and unfamiliar.

For children, feelings arise very much like objects and situations around them, yet they are rarely provided with the same attention or guidance. Imagine, for example, a two-year-old child who wants to watch television but is denied. The child feels thwarted and acts out with frustration. Rather than receiving guidance on what this feeling is to help soothe the child, the response they often get is one of impatience or irritation. The parent, who may now also be frustrated by the child’s behavior, transmits their feelings but not the language for it. Both are left to interpret what just happened, without tools.

This leaves the child in confusion, in chaos, without appropriate labels to understand their own feelings, and without the cognitive architecture to understand their parents’ response.²

Imagine if we didn’t name physical objects—say, we never taught a child the word "table" or “glass”—the child might still experience the table, but only as a set of sensations and associations: a hard surface they bump into, a cool texture under their fingers, or the place they get lifted to when it's time to eat. But without the word table, their brain wouldn't yet organize these experiences into a coherent, unified concept. It would remain a loose collection of impressions making communication and navigation practically impossible. This makes it harder for them to form a shared understanding with others, or to separate their experience from the object itself.

In a similar way, if we don’t help children name and make sense of emotions or social dynamics, their experience of others remains fragmented—defined more by unpredictable shifts in tone, touch, or attention, than by a sense that others have feelings, needs, or reasons for their behavior.

We do not expect children to navigate the external world or learn its conceptual categories without regular, repetitive help from their parents. And yet emotions, unlike glasses and beds and chairs—which can be seen, touched and handled—are even more challenging to grasp and to anchor without guidance. Emotions are invisible and can be overwhelming, making them much more difficult for children to understand without guidance. What children need is some kind of roping process, where their feelings can be anchored to sensations in their body to help them begin to recognize how external experiences are affecting the sensations in their bodies. This connection is essential in learning to name, understand and regulate their emotions.³

Why can’t parents organize children’s emotional and sensory environment the way we do their external one? Because parents, themselves, often don’t know what they feel. As discussed in previous letters, early childhood experiences are fraught with feelings of fear, pain, confusion and aloneness. To cope, children learn to numb and suppress their emotions. They become disconnected from their internal experiences, developing protective coping mechanisms that become both automatic and unconscious. These persist well into adulthood. These suppressed emotions are embedded in the adult parents, who cannot organize their children’s emotional world because theirs was never organized for them.

The result is that we each have hundreds of emotions locked in our “body memory,” waiting to be triggered by seemingly unrelated events: a conversation, a tone of voice or a fleeting look from another person can activate the unresolved wounds of childhood.⁴ These painful imprisoned emotions often reveal themselves in indirect ways—through conflict, withdrawal, defensiveness or avoidance.

So what do we do? We continue to numb, distract, suppress, or otherwise avoid. Or, we chase replacement feelings, much in the same way an addict chases a high. Most of us were never taught how to inhabit our bodies and be with our feelings. Consequently, our inner landscape feels unfamiliar, disorganized, and therefore threatening. Since we instinctively avoid threats but we can never truly escape ourselves, we do our best, which often brings out our worst. When left unexamined, our inner chaos, rooted in childhood, remains embedded deep in our psyche and continues to shape our lives.

In fact, as adults, we often have difficulty distinguishing between physical sensations from emotions—fatigue from sadness, hunger from emptiness, agitation from anxiety.⁵ We misinterpret our inner states and react in ways that are disconnected from what we truly feel.

We might say: “I feel like I could punch a wall,” or “I feel like talking to my girlfriend and see what’s up with her.” But these are thoughts, not feelings. If we paused and looked deeper, we might discover the true feeling below the thought, and that the thought may not even be a logical or an appropriate response to the feeling. Instead, the thought might be masking agitation, anger, lethargy, loneliness, insecurity, or simply boredom.

When we learn how to identify our feelings, we begin to see that our behaviors often arise more from unspoken emotions than from conscious thoughts.⁶ This explains why so often people find themselves in arguments that seem trivial and insignificant. The reality is that the emotions underlying those arguments are deep and intense.

But we fear our feelings. Confronting our inner world is a bit like wandering into a totally new and unfamiliar neighborhood late at night, where the street signs and landmarks are all cloaked in darkness. It’s intimidating—leaving us feeling disoriented, lost, and vulnerable. However, if we slowly, and with support, continue to visit our emotional neighborhood, the terrain becomes more familiar. We learn to recognize the streets of sadness, the alleyways of fear, and the bridges that lead from pain to healing. Over time, we learn to navigate even the darkest corners of our emotional neighborhood.

Emotions aren't weaknesses. They are adaptive mechanisms that help us navigate complex social environments. They are not separate from rational thoughts. By understanding this complexity, we can begin to approach our inner emotional landscape with greater compassion and nuance.⁷

To begin working with our feelings, we first need to learn to identify where we are already. This might seem like a meaningless statement, but this is true of any map. In order to be of any use as a navigational aid, a map must first allow you to locate your current position.

In other words: Where are you right now? What are you experiencing right now? What are you feeling right now? What is the story of this feeling, and what is objectively real?

The journey never begins with its ultimate destination. Every journey begins with a simple statement.

You are here.

So I will tell you where I am, Dear Future Human—right now, in this instant, while writing to you. I am sitting in my apartment longing to know you.

I feel grief.

I feel pain.

I feel wonderment.

I feel at home.

Overflowing with love,

Ronit

1. Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl, The Amazing Brains of Babies, National Geographic, September 2023.

2. The Attachment Project, Affect Regulation Development, February 2022.

3. Dr. Jeanette Sawyer-Cohen, Building Emotional Awareness in Children Through Interoception and Neuroception, Everyday Parenting Psychology PLLC, December 2024.

4. Dr. Elaine Ryan, What is Emotional Memory, July 2025.

5. Rachel Allyn, PhD, The Important Difference Between Emotions and Feelings, Psychology Today, February 2022.

6. Mardoche Sidor, MD and Karen Dubin, PhD, Unraveling the Unconscious: Linking Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviors, Habits, and Events to Unconscious Drives, Sweet Institute, January 2025.

7. Dr Esmarilda Dankaert, Emotions: A Weakness? The Truth Behind Your Tears, March 2024.

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