Our emotions can often blindside us. We can feel sadness, anger, jealousy, guilt and shame and often not know why or what our emotions are trying to communicate to us. In spite of our best conscious intentions to live in accordance with the “best” values of our time; to be industrious, productive, rational and certain about ourselves and the world, our emotional experiences can fling us quite suddenly into states that surprise and upset our best intentions. It is as if our emotions have a life of their own, never quite allowing us to dominate them and continue to send us a message that we are more than our conscious intentions. Our emotions are complex, often unbidden and at times appear as undesired aspects of our human experience. I might wish to be rational, sensitive to others, helpful and generally see myself as socially attuned and “good”. And yet who among us can claim that they don’t also exhibit jealousies, angry feelings, have petty desires and wish to dominate and control others? When we seek out therapy it is, I believe, quite often a search to understand these emotional experiences that do not coincide with our best selves. We contain multitudes it is said. And indeed our emotional lives can feel as if we are a cast of characters in a play, a movie or story with victims and villains, perpetrators of violence and heroes that can save the day. Often we get to play all the roles and at times we seek others to play some role for us while we stay firmly planted in our preferred or desired roles. I believe that our emotional lives are indeed like characters in our life journey with belief systems all their own that govern with a logic we might not accept, especially when that logic negates other parts of our existence.
Emotions have evolved over millions of years and are “designed” to further our chances of survival and mostly get what we want. They flair up when what is important to us is threatened or when we can sense a desired thing is within reach. They move us towards objects of desire and away from objects of harm. Anger often tries to reverse or correct the wrong done to us by force and by sometimes even getting back at someone we might believe is the cause of the harm. Our anxieties for example try to tempt us away from and to avoid what appears dangerous or unfamiliar to us. This is why the more we can face more fearful situations in life and build our tolerance for being outside our comfort zone, our anxieties will also diminishes. In those cases we learn to trust that we can handle a situation and our belief in our abilities grows.
It has been shown by many researchers and philosophers of human emotion, like Martha Nussbaum, that our emotions are wise companions, not opposed to our thinking but supporters of our thinking. If we listen well enough and with enough compassion to ourselves, our emotional life can serve as an important guide to knowing more about ourselves and what matters to us. Rather than being an aspect of our experience we might prefer to eliminate, our emotions allow us to know what things mean to us, the value we place on them and the goals we aspire to. It is important to remember that quite often we might find that the emotional value we have placed on certain experiences has been overblown or misguided and that what has revealed itself to be of major importance via our emotional reaction need not be as serious after all. What we feel in other words might be misleading and sometimes leads us to act in ways that are not in our best interest. The experience of threat for example can be overly sensitive in us leading to a heightened vigilance and readiness to fight or flee. Our thinking about our emotions, our inner observer can then be used to circle back on our emotions and evaluate our responses and what that assessment and response might mean about what we fear or what we desire. We are so often tormented by our own emotional lives, especially by what we might think they reveal about us that we never stop to listen to what the emotion is telling us about what is happening around us. We can feel ashamed by our sadness, judgmental about our jealousy, embarrassed by our show of anger. We speak about playing it “cool”, of being calm and collected, unfazed, wanting to exhibit calm “rationality” and dreading any show of the irrational, i.e emotional. But if we pay attention we discover what our emotions are revealing about us and about what we might want. For some a slight by a friend could send one into a deep depression, a fit of rage or into questioning the friendship as genuine. For others the response can be less severe and thoughts about the friend”s general demeanor over the course of the friendship allow for a more forgiving attitude. If a person”s threat system is activated and the slight takes on a meaning of betrayal or a threat to one’s sense of belonging and security, the response could reveal the significance of the event for that person. It is here that thinking allows us to evaluate if indeed what our minds have made of the situation is warranted.
Therapy is designed to be a slow and steady study of the emotional lives we lead and a process of sorting out the complicated judgments and assessments we have towards our emotional states. Our conscious minds are wonderful when it comes to planning for the future or trying to overcome obstacles. Consciously we mostly carry ideas of ourselves as rational, thoughtful and sensitive. In our unconscious minds other forces are at play. It is our emotional lives that give us a glimpse or x-ray vision into what kinds of other beliefs and thoughts we have that might influence us as much as, if not more than, our conscious intentions.
Implied in what I’ve been saying but important to remember is that our emotions are an evolved evolutionary system. One of the many reasons that remembering our evolutionary past when thinking about our emotions is important is because it is significant to remind ourselves that much of what we feel and much of what we respond positively and negatively to, is outside of our immediate control. It is not our fault that we feel what we feel. This does not mean that we are without responsibility or merely puppets of a biological fact, but it does introduce hopefully the notion of a more compassionate (Paul Gilbert) attitude towards what we experience. In psychotherapy one of the main tasks of the therapist is to help build a more compassionate attitude towards our emotions by recognizing their biological significance and “normalcy”, creating a more self accepting tone towards our multifaceted and complex heritage. In order to become more compassionate towards ourselves (and others) it is also important to remember that we are also historical beings. In other words we all come from families and from certain cultures that shape us significantly. Who we are and how we perceive the world and our place in it has been shaped to a large extent by our early environments and has been for the most part laid down before we could have a say in our destinies. Psychotherapy is also built to track or connect our present attitudes, beliefs, and what we seek for ourselves to the “rules” we might have learned earlier on in life. If we were treated with respect and love, a secure base from where we could explore our surroundings without excessive anxiety or whether we were brought up in an environment of fear, sadness and loneliness, will lead to different beliefs about what is normal and what is not, what we feel we deserve, how open to others we will be and our degrees of protectiveness versus trust. Psychotherapy takes it as a matter of great importance that when we can understand the connection between our present to our past, both our personal past as well as our evolved human-species past, new possibilities can open up. Without that knowledge we are more unconsciously driven by forces we cannot know and then possibly feel very confused or frustrated that we cannot simply change our behaviors and emotional states by sheer will power.
Healing our emotional lives is in large part understanding what our emotions are telling us about ourselves, our values and what we expect. It is one of the most courageous things we can do because looking at where we place our values, what we hold to be important will reveal that we are all vulnerable to hurt, all doubtful about our worth and all desiring of love and acceptance. Because the human condition always has aspects of those qualities and because those concerns are never fully relieved our best course is to be more accepting of them, more friendly towards them and with that will come a kinder, more loving attitude towards ourselves and to others who are just like us.