Kinda Catchy

Language fascinates me. I love the way words can get at something, directly or indirectly, from a thousand angles.

I'm especially interested in words with evolving meanings. Words with usage that changes by generation or by culture.

Take the word "catch". When I was  growing up, you could catch a ball (something good), catch a cold (something bad), or catch someone's attention (which could be good or bad, depending on whose attention it was).

When I started working with clients in corrections settings, I heard lots of familiar words and phrases used in a different way than I was used to hearing or saying them. One: when a client who was on probation or parole would get in trouble again, and the guys would refer to it as "catching a charge". I thought this was an interesting framework because it put all the responsibility outside the individual in trouble, as if he or she were walking down the street one day and got clobbered by a flying legal charge. (Of course, there are indeed some who are targeted by some bad apples in law enforcement for various non-criminal reasons, whose experience is like that. But I digress.)

The other way the guys in corrections settings used the word "catch" applied to social interactions. It was risky to engage in a friends with benefits type situation, they would say when chatting among themselves before or after group, because someone always ended up "catching feelings". What struck me about this use of the term was that 1) it was clearly meant to describe something undesirable, risky, or problematic, and 2) that it also had the feel of something that could be foisted upon a person by external forces-- "catching feelings", like, catching pneumonia, say.

At first I thought about this in terms of what it says about this population of guys, then what it might say about guys in general (sorry, male readers, we stereotype sometimes just like you do!), then what it might say about the times that we are living in. But gradually, I shifted from thinking about the original use of the phrase-- to "catch feelings" as in to "fall for someone" (a similarly dangerous-sounding expression), and started thinking about it in terms of how our society looks at emotions, period.

When I see clients in my private practice, they often come in describing a problem that is actually a feeling. Sometimes, the feeling is embedded in other things which make it rise to the occasion of a mental health disorder (i.e. persistent sadness+ lack of appetite + sleep disturbance + loss of interest in things = major depression episode, or so says the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual). Many times, though, the feeling is a response to a situation which would probably provoke a similar emotion in any number of people.

There are times, though, when a difficult dynamic happens where the client who is in, say, a high-conflict relationship, comes in with what they think is the problem (a feeling) and wants the problem fixed by the "expert" (played by the therapist). They don't realize that their feeling is trying to give them an important message, and that the feeling is not the real problem. That the feeling would diminish or vanish if they could reduce the conflict in their relationship or get out of the relationship.

As someone who is prone to strong feelings (positive and negative), I know to some extent where they are coming from. I know what it's like to have my sleep hijacked and my concentration derailed by distressing feelings or troublesome thoughts. I know, too, about "catching feelings for someone" in circumstances where I might be better off if the feelings had blown past me through the air and landed on some other unsuspecting person.

Yet, feelings have been important avenues for me to connect deeply with other people, understand myself and my needs better, and create stories, poems, essays, and even this blog. So while they might at times be challenging or inconvenient, I think I'll stay in the boat of trying to experience, or sometimes simply tolerate, my feelings rather than eradicate them. Without them, life would be pretty bland, indeed.