Ildefonso and the Power Words has on Emotional Granularity — The Re-engineered You

If you had never heard a word before, any word from any language, how would you react to hearing the word “cat” for the first time? If you’ve been born with earplugs in, and sign language didn’t exist, would taking them out in your mid-20s make words sound like dogs barking? Overall, you would hear it, but it would have no meaning.

In 1970, a Mayan man who had been born deaf and had never learned sign language/language of any kind realized something profound: Everything has a name.

Ildefonso was 27. He’d been raised in a small town south of the border, away from high schools that might offer American sign language. Because of this, Ildefonso, his deaf brother, and several other deaf friends had never been taught any language of any kind. They got through life by banding together and communicating their ideas through arduous pantomime sessions. Talking about a bullfight that scene together could mean 45 minutes of pantomiming. And explaining a chore Ildefonso wanted his brother to do might mean actually doing the chores himself, or at least miming the whole process.

In interviews with Susan Schaller, his sign language teacher, Ildefonso called his language list pantomiming days his dark period. He said he was utterly unaware of sound itself. When asked how he thought talking worked, Ildefonso thought people were communicated by making weird shapes with their mouth, and he was just too dumb to pick up on the meaning of these mouth shapes. Sign language was similarly baffling to Ildefonso because without language whatsoever; he couldn’t understand that the signs he made had any meaning. For example, when Susan made the sign for book, which looks like spreading pages apart with your hand, Ildefonso interpreted this as her commanding him to pick up and open a book.

Finally, in a stroke of genius, Susan turned to a chair and began signing to a non-existent student. For weeks, she would sign to an empty chair, telling an invisible student about a “cat.” She would sign the word for cat repeatedly and sit in the chair and pretend to be the student having a breakthrough. This went on for weeks. Ildefonso watching Susan signing to a ghost was confusing and frustrating. But one day, while Susan was pantomiming a student having a breakthrough, something just clicked. Ildefonso slapped the desk, stood bolt upright, and pointed to the cat picture. Susan signs the word for cat. He pointed to the clock, and she made the sign for the clock. He pointed to the door, and she signed the door. Finally, he pointed to her, and Susan signed her name. Everything finally made sense to Ildefonso. He understood everything has a name, but when he realized what he’d been missing all his life, Ildefonso started to cry.

Today’s a bit of a special episode for the re-engineered you. While researching self-aware techniques for episodes about rejection, loneliness, and toughness, we concluded what good psychiatrists probably already know — all the best resilience techniques involve emotional granularity. That’s it. The better you define your emotional state and contextualize it, the better you are off emotionally, and the more self-aware you can become. It’s almost as granular recognition of emotion, or even just knowing the name for what you’re feeling, is a hack for overcoming it. So that’s what we’re devoting this entire episode, to understanding and identifying granular emotions. These are the emotions that go a little deeper than just happy, angry, or sad, and we’ll start our emotional identification by getting into three myths:

Myth 1: How could words and identifying emotion possibly make me feel better after rejection? They’re just words, right?

Our narrative today comes from a book by Susan Schaller, author of A Man Without Words. Susan was also the sign language teacher who gave words to Ildefonso, which ended his dark period.

If not knowing the word for an emotion, if you had never been introduced to the word, how would it feel to you when you realize it’s there? Disappointed maybe? It may sound like that is such a bizarre hypothetical because we’re humans who feel the full spectrum of emotions and put a word to it. However, I’m starting to get the sense that it is the other way around through this research. So, we’re going to go through a little bit of research we had before from an earlier episode because we want to figure out when we can identify the emotion and does it change the way we process it. To start, I want to talk about something called the Emotional Wheel. If you haven’t seen this before, I encourage people to pause the episode and look this up. It features different emotions, and as you scroll out, it gives you more meaning for the same word. If you are angry, the angry slice’s outer section goes to around eight or nine different emotions. So, anger becomes things like letdown, humiliated, bitter, mad, aggressive, frustrated, etc., and each emotion has this break down. The idea is that you break down the feelings into smaller and smaller parts, and you get incredibly better character from this clarity.

Overall, we’re talking about how much emotional granularity can help us get over pain, more specifically, how much it can help. Granularity oftentimes means searching for a new word to label what you’re feeling, which would mean going to the wheel. According to a 9/11 study from Northeastern University and George Mason University, they found out that most American people were unable to precisely say what they felt eloquently. Their granularity was not good. It was short and straightforward answers. Maybe taking out that emotional wheel could have helped here. That, for me, really illustrates granularity. That lets me know that if you stop and really figure out the emotion you are feeling, you can do something that takes the powerless part of emotion away. You don’t feel like a victim this way.

As for rejection, this break down of emotional understanding can support feelings of rejection. You can sort of step back and find the cause and get granular. Once you do that, you rob the pain. When you feel rejected, you get to the point where you can say, “I know what to fix” or “there’s nothing to fix.” In our original rejection episode, we talked about people playing a game in a waiting room (tossed a ball around a circle and would skip someone intentionally to make them feel rejected). They found out that people who were good at being granular showed less aggression. They were also able to differentiate their negative emotions. Even if the granularity, like identifying why you’re rejected or upset, doesn’t help you emotionally at the moment, it makes you less likely to retaliate. Breaking these words down makes you more mature and more emotionally stable. It legit and makes you step back and look at the big picture with the small world words.

Myth 2: Words and emotional granularity couldn’t possibly make me tougher as a person, could it?

What’s the difference between being mean and being tough? Because in life, you want to be tough since life is hard. But when do you cross that line and become just plain mean? In older episodes, we found out that toughness and resilience-building programs at the US military have started implementing optimism and granularity. This was a study that we found from the University of Sylvania, and they paired up with the US military to figure out what makes soldiers rugged. What they found was that it comes from optimism.

Everyone is optimistic when things are going well, but a true optimist is someone who stays positive when things aren’t going well. Another study comes from Penn psychologist Martin Seligman, and he talks about when individuals encounter adversity. They think to themselves it’s going away quickly, that it’s just this one situation and I can do something about it. It was realizing that this is a granular way of thinking, being able to identify that something is as temporary as it is and the setbacks are narrow, is what makes you mentally tougher. Literally, the word “harassed” can change the way you think about your stuck situation.

Myth 3: Okay, words for my emotions might make me tougher and make rejection sting a little less, but it could make me less lonely?

We did an episode on loneliness, and I think that one, in particular, stuck with us quite a lot. I always thought loneliness was just a situational thing because when you’re depressed, you go to a psychiatrist, but people don’t go there not allowed to complain or talk about loneliness. When we talk about emotional granularity, you better believe feeling lonely is on that emotional chart.

That emotional wheel that we encourage everyone to look at, it’s on there. Loneliness is one of the hardest things to become granular about because feeling lonely is uncomfortable. You don’t want to think about it. According to a Guardian Article on overcoming loneliness, you have to identify what kind of lonely you are, and that takes a lot of patience and optimism. Use that emotional wheel and identify what you are feeling to find the best path out. Get granular to recognize why you’re feeling lonely. Try to prioritize family and friends over strangers and acknowledge that maybe talking to your Facebook friends who you don’t know in real life will not be as big of a cure as talking to people who are in your immediate life. When we say granular with loneliness, we really mean taking the time to work out exactly why you’re feeling lonely and what exactly you need. Once you can identify that, you can start working on those emotions and building real connections with others to overcome it.

Final Thoughts

Without the language for it, we think differently, and we process differently. If we can’t define a thing, we literally can’t conceive of it properly, and thus it will continue to have power over us. Being rejected feels like a personal attack, but if we take time to identify exactly what we’re feeling and why we got rejected, we can significantly reduce the pain.

Emotional granularity isn’t just for rejection. It can be used to build personal resilience, actual honest-to-god toughness. We become more resilient by recognizing how we feel when we’re being crushed down. It helps us remember that it’s going away quickly, it’s just this one situation, and we can do something about it. That’s real resilience with a side of realistic optimism.

The same techniques can be used to reduce loneliness too. You can identify where you lack in interactions by considering why you’re lonely and what you need. Whether it is a romantic, friendship, or intellectual need, once you see the lack, you can begin to fix it.

We need the ability to identify our emotional state. We need the words and the language to get granular with our pain and our trials. And if we’re limiting our vocabulary to the simplest of feelings, like bad, good, or sad, then we’re choosing to remain in those simple emotional states. We’re choosing to remain in a dark time emotionally.

If you had never heard a word before, any word from any language, how would you react to hearing the word “cat” for the first time? If you’ve been born with earplugs in, and sign language didn’t exist, would taking them out in your mid-20s make words sound like dogs barking? Overall, you would hear it, but it would have no meaning.

In 1970, a Mayan man who had been born deaf and had never learned sign language/language of any kind realized something profound: Everything has a name.

Ildefonso was 27. He’d been raised in a small town south of the border, away from high schools that might offer American sign language. Because of this, Ildefonso, his deaf brother, and several other deaf friends had never been taught any language of any kind. They got through life by banding together and communicating their ideas through arduous pantomime sessions. Talking about a bullfight that scene together could mean 45 minutes of pantomiming. And explaining a chore Ildefonso wanted his brother to do might mean actually doing the chores himself, or at least miming the whole process.

In interviews with Susan Schaller, his sign language teacher, Ildefonso called his language list pantomiming days his dark period. He said he was utterly unaware of sound itself. When asked how he thought talking worked, Ildefonso thought people were communicated by making weird shapes with their mouth, and he was just too dumb to pick up on the meaning of these mouth shapes. Sign language was similarly baffling to Ildefonso because without language whatsoever; he couldn’t understand that the signs he made had any meaning. For example, when Susan made the sign for book, which looks like spreading pages apart with your hand, Ildefonso interpreted this as her commanding him to pick up and open a book.

Finally, in a stroke of genius, Susan turned to a chair and began signing to a non-existent student. For weeks, she would sign to an empty chair, telling an invisible student about a “cat.” She would sign the word for cat repeatedly and sit in the chair and pretend to be the student having a breakthrough. This went on for weeks. Ildefonso watching Susan signing to a ghost was confusing and frustrating. But one day, while Susan was pantomiming a student having a breakthrough, something just clicked. Ildefonso slapped the desk, stood bolt upright, and pointed to the cat picture. Susan signs the word for cat. He pointed to the clock, and she made the sign for the clock. He pointed to the door, and she signed the door. Finally, he pointed to her, and Susan signed her name. Everything finally made sense to Ildefonso. He understood everything has a name, but when he realized what he’d been missing all his life, Ildefonso started to cry.

Today’s a bit of a special episode for the re-engineered you. While researching self-aware techniques for episodes about rejection, loneliness, and toughness, we concluded what good psychiatrists probably already know — all the best resilience techniques involve emotional granularity. That’s it. The better you define your emotional state and contextualize it, the better you are off emotionally, and the more self-aware you can become. It’s almost as granular recognition of emotion, or even just knowing the name for what you’re feeling, is a hack for overcoming it. So that’s what we’re devoting this entire episode, to understanding and identifying granular emotions. These are the emotions that go a little deeper than just happy, angry, or sad, and we’ll start our emotional identification by getting into three myths:

Myth 1: How could words and identifying emotion possibly make me feel better after rejection? They’re just words, right?

Our narrative today comes from a book by Susan Schaller, author of A Man Without Words. Susan was also the sign language teacher who gave words to Ildefonso, which ended his dark period.

If not knowing the word for an emotion, if you had never been introduced to the word, how would it feel to you when you realize it’s there? Disappointed maybe? It may sound like that is such a bizarre hypothetical because we’re humans who feel the full spectrum of emotions and put a word to it. However, I’m starting to get the sense that it is the other way around through this research. So, we’re going to go through a little bit of research we had before from an earlier episode because we want to figure out when we can identify the emotion and does it change the way we process it. To start, I want to talk about something called the Emotional Wheel. If you haven’t seen this before, I encourage people to pause the episode and look this up. It features different emotions, and as you scroll out, it gives you more meaning for the same word. If you are angry, the angry slice’s outer section goes to around eight or nine different emotions. So, anger becomes things like letdown, humiliated, bitter, mad, aggressive, frustrated, etc., and each emotion has this break down. The idea is that you break down the feelings into smaller and smaller parts, and you get incredibly better character from this clarity.

Overall, we’re talking about how much emotional granularity can help us get over pain, more specifically, how much it can help. Granularity oftentimes means searching for a new word to label what you’re feeling, which would mean going to the wheel. According to a 9/11 study from Northeastern University and George Mason University, they found out that most American people were unable to precisely say what they felt eloquently. Their granularity was not good. It was short and straightforward answers. Maybe taking out that emotional wheel could have helped here. That, for me, really illustrates granularity. That lets me know that if you stop and really figure out the emotion you are feeling, you can do something that takes the powerless part of emotion away. You don’t feel like a victim this way.

As for rejection, this break down of emotional understanding can support feelings of rejection. You can sort of step back and find the cause and get granular. Once you do that, you rob the pain. When you feel rejected, you get to the point where you can say, “I know what to fix” or “there’s nothing to fix.” In our original rejection episode, we talked about people playing a game in a waiting room (tossed a ball around a circle and would skip someone intentionally to make them feel rejected). They found out that people who were good at being granular showed less aggression. They were also able to differentiate their negative emotions. Even if the granularity, like identifying why you’re rejected or upset, doesn’t help you emotionally at the moment, it makes you less likely to retaliate. Breaking these words down makes you more mature and more emotionally stable. It legit and makes you step back and look at the big picture with the small world words.

Myth 2: Words and emotional granularity couldn’t possibly make me tougher as a person, could it?

What’s the difference between being mean and being tough? Because in life, you want to be tough since life is hard. But when do you cross that line and become just plain mean? In older episodes, we found out that toughness and resilience-building programs at the US military have started implementing optimism and granularity. This was a study that we found from the University of Sylvania, and they paired up with the US military to figure out what makes soldiers rugged. What they found was that it comes from optimism.

Everyone is optimistic when things are going well, but a true optimist is someone who stays positive when things aren’t going well. Another study comes from Penn psychologist Martin Seligman, and he talks about when individuals encounter adversity. They think to themselves it’s going away quickly, that it’s just this one situation and I can do something about it. It was realizing that this is a granular way of thinking, being able to identify that something is as temporary as it is and the setbacks are narrow, is what makes you mentally tougher. Literally, the word “harassed” can change the way you think about your stuck situation.

Myth 3: Okay, words for my emotions might make me tougher and make rejection sting a little less, but it could make me less lonely?

We did an episode on loneliness, and I think that one, in particular, stuck with us quite a lot. I always thought loneliness was just a situational thing because when you’re depressed, you go to a psychiatrist, but people don’t go there not allowed to complain or talk about loneliness. When we talk about emotional granularity, you better believe feeling lonely is on that emotional chart.

That emotional wheel that we encourage everyone to look at, it’s on there. Loneliness is one of the hardest things to become granular about because feeling lonely is uncomfortable. You don’t want to think about it. According to a Guardian Article on overcoming loneliness, you have to identify what kind of lonely you are, and that takes a lot of patience and optimism. Use that emotional wheel and identify what you are feeling to find the best path out. Get granular to recognize why you’re feeling lonely. Try to prioritize family and friends over strangers and acknowledge that maybe talking to your Facebook friends who you don’t know in real life will not be as big of a cure as talking to people who are in your immediate life. When we say granular with loneliness, we really mean taking the time to work out exactly why you’re feeling lonely and what exactly you need. Once you can identify that, you can start working on those emotions and building real connections with others to overcome it.

Final Thoughts

Without the language for it, we think differently, and we process differently. If we can’t define a thing, we literally can’t conceive of it properly, and thus it will continue to have power over us. Being rejected feels like a personal attack, but if we take time to identify exactly what we’re feeling and why we got rejected, we can significantly reduce the pain.

Emotional granularity isn’t just for rejection. It can be used to build personal resilience, actual honest-to-god toughness. We become more resilient by recognizing how we feel when we’re being crushed down. It helps us remember that it’s going away quickly, it’s just this one situation, and we can do something about it. That’s real resilience with a side of realistic optimism.

The same techniques can be used to reduce loneliness too. You can identify where you lack in interactions by considering why you’re lonely and what you need. Whether it is a romantic, friendship, or intellectual need, once you see the lack, you can begin to fix it.

We need the ability to identify our emotional state. We need the words and the language to get granular with our pain and our trials. And if we’re limiting our vocabulary to the simplest of feelings, like bad, good, or sad, then we’re choosing to remain in those simple emotional states. We’re choosing to remain in a dark time emotionally.

Originally published at https://www.re-engineeredyou.com on February 10, 2021.