Feelings are widely misunderstood. Even by psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists. But if we look at them right — in terms of the the work they do in us — we can learn a lot.

Here, I’ll start with an understanding of emotions and see what it has to say about words like integrity and wisdom. At the end, I’ll talk about helping others find their feelings and values.

The Work Feelings Do

Here’s the key idea:

Every feeling is a reminder of something important to us.

So:

We learn about what’s important to us through our feelings. We learn about what we value.

And feelings help us reevaluate how we’re doing with what we value. Positive feelings remind us embrace or notice what’s important to us. Negative feelings do more: a negative feeling signals a conflict between our values that we have to think about:

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There are many other types of conflict. But feelings are there to tell us we have to grapple with these conflicts, not just skip over them. Feelings remind us to ask ourselves questions like:

Often these are questions we don’t want to ask. But the feelings keep coming until we do. Until we take time to reconcile all these conflicts as best we can, there’s a gap between how we’re living and what’s important to us. This gap means we can’t be proud of who we are. So, we have to grapple with conflicts to accept ourselves and the choices we make.

Integrity

People are sometimes deaf to these messages in feelings. This deafness comes in three flavors:

To avoid these problems, feel all the way through the situations of your life, starting with the emotions, ending with a reconciliation of values:

feeling → appreciating → grappling → reconciling

Someone who’s felt through all their situations has integrity. They’re grounded. Integrity means they know what’s important to them and they’ve grappled with all the conflicts.

Integrity is easiest when your situation changes slowly: you have lots of time to notice your feelings, to find out what’s important to you, and to grapple with conflicts.