WHAT ARE EMOTIONS? This seems to be a very simple question, and yet psychologists, behaviorists, neurologists, evolutionary biologists, and sociologists cannot yet agree on a clear definition. Is an emotion a mood, a feeling, an impulse, a neurochemical event, a constructed reality, or all of these? Can we call one emotion primary and another secondary? Do primates and other animals share all of our emotions or just some of them?
These questions are extremely important for researchers, and many advances in psychosocial and neurobiological knowledge have occurred over the past half-century. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work in How Emotions Are Made on the construction of emotions is particularly marvelous. However, while categorization and classification systems are essential to science, they can have little connection to life as it is lived in the everyday world. These ideas are fascinating, but they can drag us off the point, which is that you and I want to understand our emotions right now and work with them in our everyday lives.
Besides, classification systems can lead people toward rigidity. I’ve heard people declare that, for instance, anger is negative and happiness is positive, or that anger is a secondary emotion (actually, it’s considered in most classification systems to be a primary or universal emotion), and you’re really feeling something else, and so on. But that advice doesn’t really help you or me in real life. Sometimes, it will make us struggle to repress our honest “negative” emotions and fake the “positive” ones (not a good idea if you want to understand all of your emotions). Even if we classify emotions down to a hairsbreadth of accuracy, our understanding of what to do with emotions tends to remain pretty unsophisticated. Because of this, I developed a Four Keys to Emotional Genius model that can help us work with emotions in new and useful ways. All four keys are vital to understanding emotions, but this first key can help you unlock their healing genius, and yours.
The First Key to Emotional Genius
There are no negative emotions and there are no positive emotions.
All of your emotions have important messages for you, and all of them bring you the skills and energy you need in each situation. Even though the way you work with emotions can have positive or negative outcomes, the emotions themselves are neither good nor bad. Each emotion – in its own unique way – is essential to your cognition, your capacity to understand and act, your social skills, and your well-being.
Unfortunately, we’ve all been taught that emotions are good versus bad, positive versus negative, or prosocial versus antisocial. But these are merely invented categories; they don’t belong to the emotions. Instead, these categories are often attempts at social control: the allegedly good positive emotions are the ones that support the status quo and make us easy to be around, while the allegedly bad negative emotions are the ones that shake things up. The allegedly good emotional states are happiness, contentment, joy, and some forms of sadness or grief (if an appropriately saddening situation has occurred, and if it has occurred within a re- cent time frame). Anger dips a little toe into the good category when it’s a response to injustice, but the acceptable time frame for anger is a lot shorter than that al- lowed for sadness or grief. Notice how some people will let you grieve a senseless death for a lot longer than they’ll let you be angry about it.
The allegedly bad emotions category is very large indeed. Sadness that lasts too long (or deepens into despair or grief) is bad. Depression is bad, but suicidal urges are emergency-room bad. Anger is bad, as are peevishness, righteous indignation, and wrath. Rage and fury, then, are extra-strength bad. Hatred, we won’t even go into. Jealousy is bad, bad, bad. Fear is so bad we’ve got bumper stickers that shout to others that we, at least, haven’t got any fear – not a drop! So all of the fear-based emotions are bad, too. Anxiety, worry, and trepidation are bad, and panic is call-the-hospital bad. Shame and guilt – they’re so bad that we don’t even know what they mean anymore! We’re persistently trained and implored to express or, more often, repress our emotions so that other people will feel comfortable.
Organizing emotions (or anything) into positive and negative categories is called valencing. You may remember organizing atoms in chemistry class into positive and negative categories so that you could build molecules that were balanced electrically. Emotions are valenced in this same simple way, but it’s an absolutely terrible idea. Emotions aren’t atoms with electrical charges; they’re crucial aspects of awareness and cognition! None of the emotions are oppositional to each other, and none of them cancel each other out. Valencing emotions has made us mistakenly but neatly sew up the emotions, and in so doing, we’ve sewn ourselves right into a straitjacket. Anyone who feels anything other than the light and fresh-scented emotions is, by association, bad. This simplistically valenced, good/bad system imprisons so many of us: we who are angry, we who are grieving, we who are fearful, we who feel shame – many of us with legitimate emotional realities are pushed out of the way to make room for the perky and the superficial. As a result, many deeply emotional people languish on the fringes because, even though we’ve categorized and valenced the heck out of emotions, we still don’t treat emotions – or the people who feel them – intelligently.
I’ve had the blessing of being forced to look at emotions in unusual ways. Aside from what I learned in childhood, my early empathic healing work focused on people who weren’t finding help in conventional places. In many cases, people who finally ended up at my door had been through every modality they could afford; people don’t go to empathic healers first! Many had run the gamut of psychotherapy and conventional medicine; they’d been through religious pursuits and numerous spiritual disciplines; and they’d been through physical and dietary regimens to heal their traumas and quiet their minds and hearts. With these people, I couldn’t fall back on any of the accepted or fringe treatments for emotional difficulties because all of those treatments had already failed to bring relief.
I also couldn’t fall back on accepted (and tragically valenced) beliefs about the emotions because those didn’t work either. For instance, many of the people I worked with thought that joy and happiness were the only healthy emotions, which is nonsense. Joy and happiness can only exist in relation to all of the emotions; they’re a boxed set. We can’t just pick and choose our emotions. That would be like picking and choosing certain glands and organs (I want only my heart and brain – none of those gooey digestive organs) or deciding to walk using only the two most attractive toes on each foot. Joy and happiness are lovely in their place, but they’re not by any stretch of the imagination better than fear, anger, grief, sadness, or any other emotion. Each emotion has its own valid place in our lives. Joy and happiness are just two states in a rich and brilliant continuum of emotions.
Many of the people I worked with had already tried to magically “transform” allegedly negative emotions into allegedly positive ones – to turn anger into joy, or whatever – but that didn’t work. Anger isn’t joy, just as joy isn’t contentment, and sadness isn’t grief. Each of our emotions has its own individual message, its own gifts and skills, and its own purpose in the psyche; our emotions can’t change into something else just because we’d like them to.
Besides, transforming an emotion usually means repressing the life out of the real-but-unwanted one and then fabricating a better one out of thin air or affecting it as if it were a party hat. That kind of transformation looks good at first, but it eventually makes people confused and emotionally incoherent. I saw that the people who came to me for help were filled with ideas about their emotions – with shoulds and oughts and have-tos – but they had no feeling at all for their emotions. They were disconnected from their feelings and from their innate intelligence.
My approach with each person was to clear away all the suggestions and routines, all the categories and systems, all the valencing, and all the fixes and crutches. We got back to the original situation, which was always that the person saw, felt, or experienced life in an unusual but valid way, considering the situation. When we got down to the truth of who they were, we created a secure atmosphere and looked at their emotions empathically. When we brought empathy into the situation, we became more intelligent about emotions and about being emotional.
The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karen McLaren is available from Amazon and Bookshop.