The Significance of Implicit vs Explicit Feelings

Feelings reveal critical information about an aspect of your experience. Our self-awareness isn’t capable of processing the innumerable signals and information occurring within and without our body. Feelings provide a secondary information system to inform the Self of specific aspects of our experience. (Cognitive processes being the other information processing system.)

The totality of all the feelings you have in one moment is a "felt experience." The Two-Factor Theory of Emotions describes two aspects to emotions- physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation. While modern neuroscience draws a different conclusion than the theory’s creators, I tend to refer to these factors as the difference between a feeling and an emotion. A feeling is felt, an emotion is a cognitive labeling of that affect.

Joseph LeDoux (2000, 2012) has written about the brain's two pathways to process feelings- a high road and a low road. The high road engages the cortex, our processing unit that synthesizes our external and internal stimuli into meaning. High road feelings are explicit; you are aware of the feeling in your body.

The low road skips the cortex and operates outside of our conscious awareness. Low road feelings are implicit and often prompt behaviors and influence thought processes without the Self's explicit awareness.

Perhaps you've caught yourself doing something without thinking about it in a consistent way. Perhaps it is the kind of friend or partners you are drawn to. Perhaps you find yourself being unusually quiet in some contexts and loud and demonstrative in others without knowing why you choose those responses. These are implicit processes.

This is why attunement is so important in therapy. By attuning, embodying a client's felt experience, you can identify emotional processes the client may be unaware of or even actively deny. Maintaining curiosity, empathy, and exploring language can help bring implicit experiences into clients' cognitive awareness.

With active awareness, the client's Self is much more able to begin to process, engage, and restructure the meanings of their implicit feelings, their internal experience, and their behaviors.