Reading/Feeling w/o moving your lips...

When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.[48] ~ St Augustine of Hippo

 It would seem odd, that reading silently, without moving your lips could be 'invented', at least to me whose contemporary understanding is that reading aloud is for small children or when a situation calls for it. There's a kind of independence between eyes and mouth we pick up with little effort.

But in the west, with low rates of literacy and a labor intensive production cost of books and parchment to read, seems like if the 4th century Bishop of Milan didn't invent reading silently it was certainly something worth remarking on to no less a figure than Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of history's most tragically wasted intellects.

Flash forward 15 centuries and this skill is no longer in any way remarkable. One doesn't live in a world constantly immersed in a cacophony of people vocalizing what they are reading. Unfortunately we live in a world immersed in a cacophony of people vocalizing what just occurred to them, we could all probably stand to read a little more, a little more than social media posts of course.

This history of reading, sketchy as it is, is legitimately skewed to European history, I'm aware other cultures had incredibly high literacy rates long before whatever the Anglosphere and European Union boasts now. I simply don't know if there was any analogous, or parallel spread of silent reading, it may exist. My capacity to research it doesn't however.

Compare it to walking vs running, at some point one of our ancestors did get up on all fours and so the person who discovered standing, may not have been the same to discover walking and running. That's all prehistoric, but if we look to horses that don't have culture, I'm guessing even foals raised in isolation don't need someone to demonstrate the possibility of trot, canter and gallop. They can spontaneously discover this on their own.

Leaving us with this idea with silent reading: Here is an innate capacity that requires some form of training.

And in a literate society, that training has dividends, it allows for example two or more readers to be present in the same room without driving each other crazy. 

What then if we have another innate physiological capacity that requires training? Here's what I suggest we do possess: The ability to feel feelings without expressing them.

Given my own struggles to obtain emotional competence, I am talking about something very specific here - specifically, emotional competence. The ability to be aware of emotions as they arise, and indeed to name them correctly a process of silently reading ourselves.

Or perhaps, the difference between acting and reacting. The ability to say 'I am angry' or 'I am sad' within ones own head and to make note of it, rather than having what is colloquially known as 'an outburst' or as we describe in children in the English language 'acting out' etc.

I feel there's a conventional take out there that there's really just a dichotomy: you either express your emotions, or you are repressing your emotions.

I believe this dichotomy to be a false one. For one, it appears to lionize people who are highly dysfunctional in society - people that with simple exercise in observation we can confirm aren't actually lionized: Grown men in group therapy studying anger management where they are learning to talk about their feelings rather than assault their partners and or children.

People who have consciously or unconsciously calibrated their sensitivities as such that adult-adult transactions, or participation in adult society becomes difficult and fleeting. Outbursts of tears drive the adults around them into a parent-child mode of interaction instead. (Here I like Doctor Todd Grande's 'car alarm' analogy to sensitivities - calibrate a car alarm to not react to anything and it is useless, calibrate a car alarm to react to anything and everything and it is equally useless. Ideally a car alarm only detects actual attempted incursions.)

Speaking from personal experience, I needed to develop my emotional competence because I couldn't consciously differentiate anger and anxiety. Furthermore, I was unaware of my emotional state to the extent that I would engage in emotional reasoning, thinking I was being rational, impartial, objective. I would only become disillusioned when the effect fell so far from the intent of my behavior.

The answer though was not to stop trying to make rational arguments and instead start yelling, baring my teeth and flailing my arms around (anxiety masquerading as anger) nor withdraw to a corner curl up in a ball and start shivering (a more honest expression of anxiety) but rather to work to raise my inner awareness of emotional states - the ability to feel and pay attention to my emotions and acknowledge them - 'I'm feeling anxious, I'm worried this situation is like that situation, I should communicate this and seek clarity/allow an opportunity for a different outcome.'

Now, one might, like me, have the naïve expectation that presented with an alternative to emotional reactions, specifically a more measured considered emotional action like 'hey honey, I'm upset about losing my phone. I feel ashamed and angry at myself for such an expensive lapse.' it would be like manna from heaven, problems solved. But no, which is why I suspect the ability to feel emotions without expressing them in an outward involuntary display, is a capacity we all have but just hasn't caught on.

Emotional repression does exist, one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read (in terms of interest, I am still open to a debunking of its thesis) is 'When the Body Says No' by Gabor Mate, where emotional repression translates into physical ailments, like many of the auto-immune diseases, ALS (from ice-bucket challenge fame), some cancers, back pain, IBS etc.

In your internet travels you may have come across this meme:

There's obviously not much content here, so the meme could resonate for a multitude of reasons. For me it summarizes a belief that children are innately emotionally competent and trained to repress these emotions. Toddlers if you've spent any time with them, are actually I feel a great example of how debilitating it is to be unable to regulate their emotions. They often require a team of adults to accommodate them, as they wildly fluctuate between extreme emotional states. 

I believe this meme, charitably, is attempting to address messaging that invalidates emotions. But children do need to learn to regulate their emotions, and also as their world grows also to contextualize their triumphs and tribulations such that having their peanut butter toast taken away after the second piece is thrown on the floor, their world no longer collapses.

I am not anti-crying, I am willing to cry in public and feel no shame at states of distress. These biological systems do stuff, even outbursts of anger can send beneficial social signals like 'back off'. The regulation is in terms of appropriateness, it is appropriate to cry when someone you loved dies, it is appropriate to express anger when you are being targeted with anti-social behavior. 

Even so, with the death of a loved one, there may still be a berieved person who has to arrange for the transportation of a body to a funeral home, or some other pressing task that is not best served by crying. An ability to choose when and where and how to express emotions is not repression, in my opinion. 

I can think of few situations where one is angry, where outrage serves better than calm mediation. I also feel when it comes to emotions like lust, desire, etc. most people intuitively understand the need to feel emotions without expressing them in a reactive way. Don't grab a handful of her hair and inhale deeply, maybe open with conversation? Don't say 'I want to thrust myself inside you.' instead try 'Hi, I'm ...'

The key thing though, is having a mindset where emotions are neither repressed or expressed, but acknowledged internally and earmarked for follow up with meaningful action, gets much closer in my opinion to the truth of emotions being something that happen to us internally, and are not caused by others. Furthermore we bring a lot of baggage to the contexts we pass through in life, and furthermore understanding this and just recognizing via curiosity the physiological sensation of our emotional states can enable us to better empathize with others - why I suspect that many people can no better handle a verbal report of an emotional state than a physiological reaction to an emotional state.

There's actually a lot of cognitive empathy going on in this humorous clip that at first glance might seem to be purely digging at an individual with poor emotional regulation:

The people understand that the outburst isn't about the rice pudding coupon, a common rookie mistake for both the emoter and the audience. 

Action requires time and space to make a deliberate positive act, often emotional outbursts and repression are automatic reactions, and they appear to leave people bewildered and confused by the world around them.

I suspect transactional analysis is a good framework for understanding a third potential, where feelings are felt rather than reacted to, a good primer is here, from theramintrees whose whole channel is excellent.