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, or 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 predicative 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, they 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 organized through their senses, language and interaction, their internal world (the realm of emotions and sensations) is often left unexamined, unnamed 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 sooth the child, the response they often get is one of impatience or irritation. The parent, who now may also be frustrated by the child’s behavior, transmit their feelings but not the language for it. Both are left to interpret what just happened, without tools.

Or in those times where the parent has the wherewithal to be more patient and present with the child, here is where things often go wrong:

A child is crying—frustrated, overwhelmed, maybe melting down. In that moment, their body is on high alert. Everything narrows to one feeling: something isn’t right. I’m not safe.

A parent tries to explain—calmly, lovingly—why the rule exists. The words make sense. They are even kind. But they don’t land. Not because the child is difficult, but because their nervous system can’t take them in. When a child is that overwhelmed, learning just isn’t possible. This is something developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld observed again and again.²

Rather than teach at that moment of distress, the best a parent can do is to help, to stay close. “I’ll help you turn off the TV.” No lesson yet. Just support—until the child settles and feels safe again.

Later, when things have calmed down, the parent comes back to it.
“Remember earlier? You wanted to keep watching, and I said no. That feeling you had was disappointment. It’s hard when things don’t go the way we want. Everyone feels that sometimes.”

This is when the words can actually land.

This is when the child can make sense of what happened.

But for many of us, that second conversation never happened. Our feelings came and went without anyone helping us understand them. So our emotional landscape remained mostly unmapped—and we learned to avoid what we never learned how to navigate. As a result, the child is left confused, overwhelmed with feelings they can’t name, and without a clear way to understand their own feelings or their parent’s response.³

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, 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 cannot organize experiences into a coherent concept. It would remain a loose collection of impressions that would make communication and navigation practically impossible.

Emotional development works the same way.

In a similar way, if we don’t help children name and make sense of emotions, 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 a way to anchor their feelings to sensations in their body—to recognize how external experiences create internal sensations. This connection is essential for learning to name, understand, and regulate emotions.⁴

Why can’t parents organize children’s emotional and sensory environment the way we do their external one? Because many parents never learned how to do this themselves. Early childhood is often fraught with feelings of fear, pain, confusion and aloneness. To cope, children learn to numb and suppress. Those adaptations persist well into adulthood. They are embedded in the adult parents who cannot organize their children’s emotional world because theirs was never organized for them.

Most of us didn’t grow up learning about our emotions. Instead, we heard things like:

Don’t cry.

You’re too sensitive.

Get over it.

Stop being dramatic.

Sometimes there was punishment. Sometimes silence. Often, there was avoidance. So we never learned emotional vocabulary. We weren’t taught that anger and hurt are different, that fear and anxiety serve different purposes, or that disappointment and sadness need to be addressed differently.

Emotions are information, and we need to understand what they are pointing to. They don’t disappear just because they are uncomfortable. You can’t decide not to feel sad when someone hurts you, or not to feel angry because it isn’t the right moment. They are normal and unavoidable.

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.⁵ 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 shown how to be with our feelings. Our inner world feels unfamiliar and therefore unsafe. Since we instinctively avoid threats but can never truly escape ourselves, we do our best, which often brings out the worst in us. Left unexamined, our inner chaos continues to shape our lives.

As adults, we often have difficulty distinguishing between physical sensations from emotions—fatigue from sadness, hunger from emptiness, agitation from anxiety.⁶ 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 calling my girlfriend.” But these are thoughts, not feelings. If we paused, looked deeper, we might discover the true feeling below the thought, and that the thought may not even be a logical or 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.⁷ This explains why people so often find themselves in arguments that seem trivial and insignificant. The reality is the emotions underlying those arguments are deep and strong.

We fear our feelings. Confronting our own 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. But with time and support, 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. Overtime, we learn to navigate even the darkest corners of our emotional neighborhood.

Emotions aren’t weaknesses. They are adaptive signals 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 compassionate and nuance.⁸

What you can do is learn to name them, understand what they’re telling you, and respond to them with awareness and care.

In other words: where are you right now? What are you feeling right now? What is the story of this feeling?

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 an 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. Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté, “Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers,” Ballantine Books, 2004.

3. The Attachment Project, “Affect Regulation Development,” February 2022.

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

5. Dr. Elaine Ryan, “What is Emotional Memory,” Retrain Your Brain, July 2025.

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

7. M. Sidor MD and K. Dubin PhD, Unraveling the Unconscious: Linking Thoughts, Feelings, Behaviors, Habits, and Events to Unconscious Drives, Sweet Institute, January 2025.

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

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