Emotions: We’re Doing it Wrong

Emotions can put us in an emotional tunnel where we can’t see options and opportunities, and can slowly rob us of better lives.

Most people want to be able to have a strong, healthy,  flexible  body. Whether or not they know how to achieve that or are willing to put in the work to create it,  most people see that as a desirable end goal.  Very few people wish to have a body that doesn't function well, experiences pain  and  fails to make the things they want to do in life possible. 

But what if we consider for a moment  not the human body  but the human mind?  My guess would be that most people, similar  to their desires for their bodies, would want to have a strong and flexible  mind, capable of solving problems, seeing opportunities,  and understanding the path to creating the things they want in life.

Quite often doing those things requires collaboration between people.

And yet a novel property of the human mind is that it doesn't just process  information in a purely mechanical way,  such as a computer or Artificial Intelligence might,  but rather  human thinking is often highly influenced by emotion. 

Emotions can be both helpful in the way we think, for example, giving us subtle intuitions  and ways of knowing that go beyond the rational,  and they also can be unhelpful  when, for example,  they overwhelm us or distort  our understanding of something  because we're triggered. 

Effectiveness often rests  on one’s clarity of understanding and perception.  When you see something clearly and you can think  and feel about how best to deal with it, you have the highest chance of success. 

But there's a problem.

Human beings  impact each other  not only in the ideas they share, but also in the emotions they experience. 

In history class, many of us studied and looked back at periods in history where people seemed collectively caught up  in a particular tide of emotion,  which in retrospect seems  unwise or even destructive.   

We can see this in the obsession with mortgage backed securities during the US housing crisis, fascism in Germany during World War II, the McCarthy era in the United States,  or the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts.

In these situations,  a strong driving element behind  the events was the emotions of the people involved.  And that's the thing about emotions. 

We don't live in a world where emotions control our natural reality, even though they strongly impact our interpersonal and social reality.

Imagine if emotions could control the reality of nature.

Imagine if you could feel strongly enough about something  and gravity would stop working.

That if you just felt angry enough or sad enough or outraged enough that all of a sudden all the properties of gravity completely altered and no longer work the way they normally do.

Or imagine that if your emotions were strong enough suddenly, all of the speed limits in the world on the roads would automatically change.

Or the shipping lanes, or the rules of the FAA and the lanes in the sky that planes follow would suddenly alter because you felt strongly enough.

Imagine the vast damage it would do if our emotions completely controlled us,  or controlled the world around us.

All you really need to do to understand what this would look like is to look at a young child having a tantrum. 

In that state, a child has a very difficult time not only regulating themselves, but also interacting with the world around them, or thinking with any degree of context and perspective.

You can see this in other states where people  are purely driven by their emotions, states of rage, times where people are intoxicated by alcohol. People's  ability to make decisions and to act  effectively do not increase. In most cases, it decreases. 

In  the world of conflict resolution, especially Nonviolent Communication, emotions are sometimes elevated as if they are some kind of very special and important  feature of human experience. 

Now, of course they are. 

However,  I often struggle to point out that to even  know we have emotion  or to communicate to others what our emotions are, we have to use logic and thinking. Because we need to turn those feeling states into language (unless people are able to read our minds.)

But even if people notice our emotions through observation, THEY then have to turn what they observe into thought or language. It's the way we understand things and communicate as human beings.

So even in strong states of emotion,  some amount of logic is necessary  to express the emotion.

Sometimes, in an effort to  make it more normal and acceptable  to tune into and experience emotion, Nonviolent Communication practitioners throw the baby out with the bathwater and say that only emotion matters and that talking about thinking is bad.

Certainly the realm of emotion is its own art form. You can witness people who experience and express their emotions.  with a power and a grace similar to a great performing artist, a singer, a gymnast, a dancer.  There are people who are highly gifted in the area of emotion.

What concerns me, however, and what is perhaps more salient and relevant  to people who are looking to live their lives in a happy and effective way,  is when I see people express themselves  in a very nuanced  and thoughtful way, only to be dismissed and derided by others because the people listening are experiencing certain emotions. 

Not only do I see this happen in the  public sphere,  but I also see it happen when it's just  a few individuals interacting.  The logic here, or lack of logic here, is that if I'm feeling strongly enough about something, it doesn't matter what information I'm being presented with. And not only does it not matter,  but my emotion de facto is more important than any possible information.

I don’t need to listen to information BECAUSE I FEEL STRONGLY.  And because I feel strongly my emotion is more important than any information at all.  My emotions are the truth.

If i feel strongly enough gravity does not exist. 

This is akin to saying that when I feel things strongly the rules of  gravity don't matter and shouldn't apply and shouldn't be considered.  They don't even exist. And perhaps, for me, in that moment, when I feel very strongly, my internal experience is that the rules of gravity do not exist. But imagine what the world would be if everybody took that at face value, because of the emotional state I happen to be in.

The fact is,  we can't simply  demand  that emotions be some kind of  get out of jail free card,  which mean no  amount of information  besides our feeling state matters.  The other extreme is to  marginalize and demonize emotions  and promote logic as the only valuable  realm of human experience. 

And yet,  to use an analogy from the gym,  it's difficult to build muscle.if you aren't willing to experience some amount of increased load, whether from an external weight or putting your body in a unique position.  In the same way we need to use load to create muscle, we need to be able to use emotions to process information.  Conversations can certainly be emotional, or get emotional, or entail the expression of emotion, even strong emotion - that's not a problem. 

The problem comes when emotion drowns out the ability to think in a flexible way. When emotion  puts us in a corner where we're no longer able to see options, possibilities or solutions.

And you can actually see this happen to people when  you observe them in controlled circumstances.

In the group practice of Nonviolent Communication there are many opportunities to sit on the sidelines and watch other people engage in interactions and discussions where emotions arise.

These are often conversations that are unique to the individuals -  ones where you as an observer have nothing at stake and where you have no investment or particular feeling about  either side of the conversation.

In such observed conversations you can witness people go into what I call an emotional tunnel where suddenly their emotions take over and they are no longer able to resolve  the situation that they find themselves in even if it is relatively low stakes  and even if it is something that's relatively simple.

As human beings, we've all experienced this, where a conversation suddenly takes on a life of its own, and we get lost in emotion and are no longer able to think clearly.

This is the opposite of a flexible mind, a mind that's able to experience emotion and yet pivot and think in the moment.

Imagine a boxer who the first time he gets hit  gives up on the match.and concludes that there's absolutely nothing he can do and no way for him to box.  A boxing match is a series of different strikes, parries, dodges,  all of which make up a greater whole. It's not just one move.

But when we become overwhelmed by emotion, we approach situations as if there's only one move.  We  can no longer think about:  combinations, foot work or alternative approaches.

Over and over again you see in life with people that if one move doesn't work, they behave as if nothing else can be done.

One punch to the face  means that the game is over, and that the game was  never possible to be won in the first place.

This is not resilience. This is not a healthy, flexible, strong mind. 

It’s also a terrible way to run a:  friendship, marriage, company, partnership, or country.

This is the equivalent of a deconditioned body - a mind that isn't able  to move flexibly with the process of flowing emotion and think and adjust in the moment. 

There's also  an additional negative consequence to allowing our emotions to control social interactions. 

All of us have experienced in our lives situations that have shaped and formed us.

But just as our bodies aren't shaped proportionally and symmetrically, our minds and emotions are not shaped perfectly either.

And when we take the particular distortions  and emotional reactions that we absorbed, perhaps in not the most ideal circumstances, and we project them out as a measurement by which we wish the rest of the world would follow, we don't wind up making a better world, we wind up making a more distorted one. 

It's as if we were demanding that because we feel strongly about something or something happened to us in the past, that the laws of gravity should stop working, because that is the only just outcome for how we feel. 

Of course, it doesn't get expressed in this way. 

But the way it does get expressed is that,  if we walk at a certain pace down the street, everybody else should walk at that pace too.

If we're cold and need to put on a sweater, everybody else should too.

And if we feel strongly and emotionally about something, that's the only way it can be viewed, and everyone else must see it that way as well. 

We then exert a kind of emotional pressure on other people, and if that fails, we use any kind of technique available to us to squelch any kind of analysis, perspective building,  and to simply, like the child throwing a tantrum, to get our way at all costs, regardless of whether our cause is well thought through, just, or even make sense according to the laws of how nature works. 

This is not an effective way to run one's life.  And if you've ever been through a part of your life where you felt extremely emotional, you can judge if that's a  good model for how you'd like to run most of your life in the future. Perhaps it is. 

One way to look for this issue in your own life is to consider:

- Are you able  to navigate and negotiate  through a collaborative way of moving between feelings and ideas such that problems get solved and you're able to come up with multiple options and possible solutions for scenarios?  

- Are the people around you capable of this?  And if not, what impact does that have on you?

When I have heard people give public presentations that are thoughtful and nuanced only to be met with derision, and with strong emotion, with one sided and lopsided characterizations of what I just heard them say.  I can only conclude that the people responding feel very strongly.  

It doesn't mean they heard what was said.  It doesn’t mean they considered it.  It doesn’t mean they are reacting in a nuanced or thoughtful way themselves. 

Blind emotion, unchecked by thought, may have its moments where it serves us as human beings.  It may be the thing that gets us through incredible challenges or makes it possible for us to overcome  in a moment of athletic performance or,  life and death situations in nature.

But by and large allowing ourselves to be shackled to our emotions and reactions, with little ability to respond and adapt in a flexible way, creates a mind and life that is like living in body that is deconditioned and in pain. 

If we all want more for ourselves, then we need to become aware of when emotion drives us and we find ourselves reacting without the ability to consider new information and flexibly adapt.