Over the last few posts, we have established that the actual experience of feeling is far more complex than our existing models can account for. In the most recent post, How Virtual Materiality Makes Perfect Sense, I shared a few examples of states to illustrate the gap between our expectations of a somatic origin for feeling experience with the observations we make into the virtual material dimension.
The first group of example states were highly related. The following is a composite drawing of these four states:
Anchor of Powerlessness
Cables of Confinement
Indignation
The Core
Just looking at the drawing, we can see very clearly how these four virtual material feeling objects relate to one another. They interweave their virtual materiality with one another as if occupying space and carrying their respective properties.
One important characteristic of this group of four states is that the explorer who observed them was able to hold all four states in her awareness at the same time. They coexisted as a dynamic polarity between two states combining into an experience of powerlessness and two more into an experience of outrage. This was not a situation where one state turned into the other along a sequence of four different representations. Rather, they existed in her awareness simultaneously, occupying distinct expressions in explicit relationship with one another.
Current Models of Emotional Complexity
Traditional models of emotion, rooted in psychology and neuroscience, often portray emotions as singular, discrete phenomena, experienced one at a time or occasionally as binary “mixed" states (e.g., joy and sadness). This perspective reflects the broader cultural tendency to reduce emotional experience to simplified categories for the sake of clarity and study.
Contemporary advancements challenge this view, recognizing that emotional multiplicity is a common, if underappreciated, aspect of human experience. Research on “mixed emotions" highlights cases where individuals hold opposing emotional valences — positive and negative — simultaneously. This often occurs during significant life transitions, such as graduations, where joy and nostalgia coexist. Neuroscientific studies affirm the distinct neural patterns associated with such states, supporting their validity as a phenomenon. Yet, this focus on binary opposition tends to neglect more intricate experiences involving three or more emotions.
Theoretical models like Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion suggest that emotions are not hardwired but constructed from individual perceptions, cultural influences, and past experiences. This approach underscores the potential for ongoing emotional complexity but does not explicitly frame such complexity as universal or continuous. Similarly, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model and other pluralistic approaches to the psyche emphasize that our internal worlds are composed of multiple parts, each capable of holding distinct emotions. These models provide valuable tools for navigating emotional multiplicity but stop short of asserting it as a defining feature of all experience.
Embodied cognition further enriches our understanding by examining how bodily states contribute to emotional experiences. Emotions are viewed not only as mental constructs but as phenomena deeply tied to physical sensations and movements. This perspective hints at the layered, interconnected nature of feeling states but often addresses them in isolation rather than as part of an ongoing, coexisting tapestry.
Despite these advancements, most models and practices treat coexisting emotions as exceptions or context-dependent occurrences rather than intrinsic characteristics of human emotional life. This oversight becomes particularly evident when examining the subjective experience of emotion. Even in studies that include “feeling" as a component of emotional experience, the subjective dimension is rarely rigorously defined or explored, leaving significant gaps in our understanding.
Unpacking Another Example of Coexisting Multiples
As we can see, nowhere else in our existing sciences and models of the inner world do we find the complexity that shows up in our observations. Our ability to observe this complexity depends upon turning the light of awareness to the virtual material properties that comprise our actual experience of feeling. It has simply not been possible to observe without this new discovery.
This phenomenon of simultaneous coexistence within awareness will turn out to be key to our further investigations, as we will see in coming months. Let’s take a look at another example.
The doorway to our next example of multiplicity showed up in the post Surprising Results as We Begin, in a gallery of images depicting observations of the experience of sadness. There, we see the drawing of a state Sam names Sad, reproduced below. This is Sam’s description of the state:
Sad
There's a funny kind of cascade down my front, over my belly, and it scoops back in around. More like mud than anything else. Feels like it's on the outside, but then it scoops in and under my stomach. Kind of warm — balmy. Black. The motion of it makes me think of what a mudslide might sound like. Starts at the collarbone, wide enough to kind of cover my arms. Scooping around a good, solid ball of my belly, a power center in my belly. Maybe the sadness is just like shrouding that. Feels like it just goes out the back, away. I don't know where it's coming from.
Thoughts/Beliefs:I've been witnessing a lot of the yucky parts of people. Seeing ways that maintaining classroom order brings out the worst in the teacher; seeing the kids being defeated and apathetic. It's sad seeing that. But it ties in with my daughter talking about not wanting to go to school; she's bored, wants to do something meaningful. Tied to this fucked up system. So hard to find alternatives without removing yourself completely from the system. It's sad. The whole rat race thing. It just feels like toiling.
Feeling states never exist in isolation. Multiple states coexist and interact, forming complex, interdependent structures. Using the clues given to us by the virtual material forms to discern related states becomes a key skill in the application of fieldwork.
In this case, notice where Sam describes the following: “Scooping around a good, solid ball of my belly, a power center in my belly. Maybe the sadness is just like shrouding that.” What might that be? What is the sadness shrouding?
When I ask her about this, Sam discovers a state she calls Fucking Furious and maps it. (In her description, she references two states she previously mapped, Abandoned and The Hole. I’ll show their images later.) Notice how something else she said in mapping Sad, “Tied to this fucked up system,” carries the energy of this fury state.
Here, let’s track the series of three states mapped as a result of inquiring into what Sad was shrouding. See if you can follow the connections between them.
Fucking Furious
Tense, teeth grinding. In my pelvis, sacrum. (Directly attached to Abandoned, my mom expecting me to validate her. “I'm not supposed to be your mother, you're supposed to be mine!") Coming up clearly last time, mapping The Hole, felt like somebody ripped something from me, and somebody was supposed to be looking out for me, and nobody was. And nobody should even have to because nobody should want to hurt little children. Everybody should have been looking out for me, because I was a little kid!
Three sensations: one in gut, one in sacrum, one in throat. (The gut one is The Hole.) The fury is in my sacrum. Something else in my throat goes all the way up to behind my sinuses.
Fury in sacrum. Size of a grapefruit. Solid, hard, like a cannonball. It's like a cannonball because it's full of fire.
(Here I asked her to discern between the fire and the cannonball, and we went into the fire first.) The fire is the furiest part, furious at being in this container. Like fire. Hot, burning in a really satisfying way, like I can imagine how fire must delight in a fresh piece of wood. Deliciously, destructively, furiously hot. Not unpleasant at all. Red and orange and yellow. It burns straight up. Sound is the wind of a fire, like how a big, huge fire sucks air, the flames make a wind. No crackling, the flames make a wind of their own.
Thoughts/Beliefs:This has always felt really destructive and scary for that reason. But it's exciting too. It feels like boundless energy, uncontrollable.
It wants food. It wants to gobble up evil and push out all the dark. It wants to burn up everything hurtful, every injustice and every malice. It makes my throat really tight.
It has a god-like feeling to it. If I am just that flame, it feels immense and so limitless, like invincible. I could see how a person could go the wrong way with that. (I suddenly understand Lex Luther. It's a consuming, intoxicating sense of power in that fire.)
Notice here how the Fucking Furious shows up with its own complexity, the “cannonball” containing the “fire.” Also notice a suggestion of something else located in the throat area. We’ve mapped the fire part of this, and now we delve into the cannonball.
Restraint
Cannonball surrounding the fire of Fucking Furious. Larger than grapefruit size, hard solid. Thickness is like a coconut, maybe an inch thick. Metal. It can hardly do its job - it's under so much strain, and doesn't do its job. It has a fuse hole, from which there is a constant geyser coming out of the hole. My sacrum throbs. Geyser is upward. The geyser is all of it I can handle, it's as much as I can make use of. Especially since it's so connected with my sexual energy, which I have so much of. Maybe keeping it restrained is what makes it so intense.
It's cold. It has to be, or it would melt. Black. Like cast iron. It's resisting all the pressure from the inside. You would think it would blow apart, but it's just cold, hard iron. It throbs, aches, and makes me think of Atlas, because he never ever could have a break, or fall. He just stood there. You would think he'd be crushed or something. He just had the constant tension. Sound is the ominous hissing of the discharging fire.
Thoughts/Beliefs:Memory: I was really destructive with my sexual energy in my late teens for a short period of time, before this took full form. Even before that… it's kind of disturbing when even my mom's friends were hot for me… this is why the fury comes up at my mother.
It believes that if I am as big as I can be, it will be destructive, it will alienate me, it will create a bunch of desperate leach energy all around me. It's trying to ward off fans, so that I can just have friends. (High school, top everything, no friends.)
The fire feels so powerful. With great power comes great responsibility. Without elders to teach me how to use this energy, I've had experiences where you make mistakes and people suffer. So it's really scary to consider wielding that energy responsibly. It's hard to trust that I know what to do with it. It's easier to just keep it under wraps.
Notice the complexity in Sam’s understanding of herself and her life journey that emerges with the awareness of the dynamic relationship between these distinct state objects. Here, we also can sense another energy, as if there is a higher-level concern for bad consequences directing the constraining efforts of the Restraint. She says, “it's really scary to consider wielding that energy responsibly.” We find that fear by asking her to feel into it directly, and we find that it corresponds to the previously-noticed location of the throat.
Fear
Bracing myself for a blow. Any time I would take a risk to express unhappiness or a need, I was taking the risk that someone would get mad at me. Even sharing this stuff with you, you're going to see how fucked up I am and you're going to go away. (Abandoned.)
Today, this came up in conjunction with Furious. Fear is a response to this, “Just bite your tongue and get through this."
Constriction at my throat, with Fucking Furious and Restraint. A really physical sensation. Size of a big walnut. Feels like a cap. Caps the fire that streams out of the fuse hole of Restraint. It's blue, opaque. Like rubber. Neutral temp.
It can change its size, because sometimes it's not doing its tightening up capping thing; sometimes it's just disparate particles, waiting until they need to do their job and contract into their rubber cap-ness. When capped, no movement. I just feel it fused with my tissues. No sound.
Thoughts/Beliefs:I have to keep my experience to myself because nobody understands, and it scares people. My full genius terrified people when I was little. And the ideas that I had terrified people. And the way I saw the world was always very threatening to everyone. So it was very important to keep it all to myself, and to just figure out how to go along with the play, or I'd be completely alone. There's a lot more, but I don't know it any more. I was a lot smarter when I was six.
The Quartet Plus Abandoned and The Hole
Looking at these four states together — Sad, Fucking Furious, Restraint and Fear — you can vividly see their intimate interconnections.
As Sam mentioned, there were also the states she referred to as Abandoned and The Hole. Here’s what they look like in combination, with descriptions below.
Abandoned
It's just a mound shaped blob with a point that comes up to my heart. And there's a hole in my gut. (The Hole.) Like wet play-doh, the word putrid comes to mind, it feels rotten. Yellow and green, kind of opaque, a little snotty, like goo. Warm, 102 degrees, like when you go into a dance studio where people have been working out for hours and hours with the doors closed, stinky and hot and stale. Not moving, but it's flexible because it's goo. No sound.
Thoughts/Beliefs:I am alone. Therefore I'll always be alone, I'll never be loved, and I'll never be happy because I won't have my needs met. I need people and I need love.
The Hole
Empty, inside Abandoned. Size of a bowling ball, but it feels like a tunnel from my front to my back, like a bowling ball went through me. I feel like something that belongs there was taken from me. Temp is just nothing, not cold or hot. Neutral. Black. Feels like sucking in from both sides, like air is being sucked in from the front and the back. Like a black hole, it's sucking things in there. It's a vacuum. Sound of air, sucking. Like in the movies when the wind moves over the desolate plain and you don't hear anything except the wind moving across nothingness.
Thoughts/Beliefs:I feel like something essential was ripped from me, and that's the place where it belongs. Because it's gone, it means there's this emptiness at my core that leaves me hollow. I don't even have any words for it, it's just a part of me that's mine, that's gone. Like a piece of my soul is missing. Part of me belongs there, and it's not there. It makes me feel hopeless, like there's just this big gaping hole, hopeless about feeling complete and whole.
It makes me mad. It feels like it was taken from me, like I had it once and somebody took it, like I got robbed. It makes me feel violently angry.
All Six States
A Quick Review
What do you make of this? Again, Sam was able to hold all six of these states in her awareness at the same time. Within that encompassing awareness, each of the six states existed independently from the others, and each was fully engaged with others in the group in ways that shaped Sam’s inner experience.
Being able to actually examine this inner dynamic with such tangible precision gave Sam far greater understanding of her complex inner experience. This is the kind of power that lies in psychotopology fieldwork, simply through the act of observing the virtual material properties of our inner feeling experiences.
In the next post in this series, we will track further examples of these interrelated states to discover that our experience of virtual materiality extends into “mental” experiences typically held as being completely different from that of feeling and emotion.
Reflections
Please let me know how this all lands for you in the comments, or feel free to reach out directly through DM or email (reply if you’re receiving this by email, or use the Frontiers of Psychotopology URL with an @ sign between “frontiers” and “psychotopology”). I’m curious to hear from you. And if you’re not yet subscribed, please consider doing so!
Joe, this is wonderfully written and coincides with my experiences using Internal Family Systems but also extensive amounts of time in zazen, just sensing into my inner world. I've recently started learning shamanic and Tibetan techniques to attend to complex emotions and their accompanying beliefs, and I appreciate the depth of your work. I know we've been aiming to connect...I'm around more now, kind of drifting.
Joe, this is wonderfully written and coincides with my experiences using Internal Family Systems but also extensive amounts of time in zazen, just sensing into my inner world. I've recently started learning shamanic and Tibetan techniques to attend to complex emotions and their accompanying beliefs, and I appreciate the depth of your work. I know we've been aiming to connect...I'm around more now, kind of drifting.