What Exactly ARE Emotions?
Let’s just jump right in.
What are emotions? According to the Beck Institute, emotions are “temporary feeling states that involve physiological arousal and influence thought and behavior.”
Neuroscientist and Professor at the University of Southern California, Antonio Damasio, identifies emotions as “mental experiences of body states”, meaning that when we feel something like grief, we first experience the physiological arousal of that feeling state (heaviness, tears, sobbing), and then identify it as grief, and process it using language to understand and heal through it.
The Good, The Bad, and The Feeling
If you’re like most of the population that were born between the 50’s and 90’s, it’s likely that you learned about feelings in school and then quickly learned that only a select few were considered “acceptable” and divined ways to ignore or deny the other “bad” ones.
What comes to mind when you hear “negative emotions”?
Likely the first one that came to you was anger, followed by sadness, then anxiety, and depression. Or, you might have had fun with adjectives and found that your list looked more like: anger, frustration, annoyance, irritation, sadness, depression, and scared.
Why did we classify these feelings into the “negative” category, while emotions like: happiness, joy, excitement, love, and compassion into the “positive” one? The no brainer response is that the “negative” emotions come with more physical pain. Our left brain tactics tend to override our more right brain, feeling state, and put us in a position to feel that we need to “solve” these emotions.
Feeling Strategy
Expressions like, “don’t be sad!” or “you shouldn’t feel angry” or “try changing your perspective” all follow those feelings that we’ve been led to believe need solutions and answers. As if the feelings themselves are pliable material that need a good thwacking to pull themselves together.
When we were younger, emotions like anger, sadness, and fear were powerful forces that elicited responses in early caregivers to react either with raised voices, punishment, neglect, or confusion. In the best cases, those feelings were met with curiosity and compassion, but for anyone who experienced childhood trauma or neglect, that was not likely your experience.
When children see their caregivers respond to their feelings like that, it then sends the message that “my emotions are causing distress to mommy (or daddy, or grandma) and should be stopped. It was bad of me for feeling that way”.
The Attachment Of Feeling
Taking an attachment lens, human’s need caregivers to survive. Unlike other mammals in the wild who are essentially on their own after two months, humans rely on their caregivers for 18 full years. If we learned early on that our feelings caused our parents to turn on us, lose interest, or react with chaos, we likely found ways to make sure those feelings don’t see the light of day.
What starts as an adaptive survival strategy to make sure we’re safe as children, becomes a highly maladaptive and disruptive strategy as an adult.
Could you imagine a world in which emotions weren’t categorized as good or bad, but were treated as information that our bodies were giving us related to what we want or don’t want? When I’m sad, it’s because I’ve lost something important to me or I am longing for closeness and a trusted person isn’t available. When I’m disgusted, it usually means my body is letting me know that a particular person, place, or thing is not something I ever want to let near me.
When we can take the time to see our emotions as partners that want only to be known and utilized appropriately, the whole confusion around “what should I be feeling?” melts away. Suddenly our feelings make sense and we can use their input the same way a compass lets us know if we’re going southwest when we really need to be going north.
Without Feelings, Netflix Wouldn’t Exist
Think of every single piece of music, film, art, or book that you’ve ever known. Could you imagine if their creator didn’t let themselves feel their emotions? It’s likely that nothing would come of their ideas because no feelings could connect them to the world they’re creating or the meaning they’re making.
A horror film without fear would just be a bunch of people standing around a bloody knife. A romance novel without lust would fall flat. To take it to a more relatable place, could you imagine what would happen if you didn’t feel anger or horror if a child or beloved pet went missing? Without those emotions, there will be no action and without action, nothing can happen!
Your emotions have to have a place within you if you want to move toward what you want and away from what you don’t. Beyond just what we want, our emotions can enrich our lives by taking us to a more nuanced place within ourselves and the world.
When you’ve had a crappy week and you wake up on a Saturday to a clear blue sky, I would hope you could let yourself soak in whatever feeling that brings up in you. When you smile at a stranger while walking down a busy street, I hope you feel a momentary lift in your spirit and a sense of connection. When your spouse says a cutting remark, I hope that you listen to your anger that tells you to stand your ground and respectfully set a limit.