Speaking the language of emotions …

The twisted love inside hatred, revisited!

May 23rd, 2013 | Comments (1)

Yesterday, we looked at the connection between hatred, disgust, and rage. Rage is the aggressive aspect of hatred that can make you obsess over your hate targets and project all sorts of troubling material onto them. The fascinating thing about hatred is that you actually choose your hate targets not simply because they’re odious, but because they’re specifically odious in ways that cause specific, shadow-driven ragequakes inside you. Yes, I made that word up, but it feels quite apropos.

Let me take a giant step back today and say that projecting your shadow material onto other people is a common practice – and it’s not always horrific. Projection isn’t a terrible thing – it’s a human thing. We all project our shadow material, because we usually can’t work with it in straightforward ways (if we could, it wouldn’t be called the shadow, would it?). In fact, many of us project our “good” shadow material onto others just as frequently as we project our “bad” material.

For instance, when we admire famous people, we often project our best selves onto them – we let them hold our talent, our courage, our beauty, our prowess, and our brilliance (these traits are suppressed into the shadow just as often as our more troubling traits are). This projection process is often useful, because most of us can’t just say (for instance), “My family raised me to be focused on business administration, but I’ll just ignore that and become an artist.” No, we may need to idolize artists in order to make room for our own artistic nature. We may even attach ourselves to certain artists (as if they personified art) in a form of shadow projection known as adoration.

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung, 1875- 1961

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung worked on the concept of the human shadow, and he pointed out that projection is sometimes the only way we can become aware of our shadow material – he even went so far as to say that projection is sometimes the only thing that will get us out of our parent’s houses and into the world. So adoring someone else’s talent can be a safe way to move toward our own.

However, you’ll notice that strong adoration often morphs into disappointment when our adored person acts like a regular schmoe and not a magical being. This is the point when the projection slips, and if we realize what’s happening, we can let go of our projections, shake off the adoration, discover our own talents, and begin to live our own authentic lives.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t figure this out. We remain attached to our adoration targets, and try to change them back into that shining, perfect vision (or we might fiercely defend them and ourselves from the truth of their fallible ordinariness) – which launches us on a roller-coaster ride with them. When we find ways to reattach our projections, everything is peachy, but if they slip, we have to start all over again. It’s an unstable attachment that can seesaw back and forth between infatuation and disillusionment.

In many cases, this sort of adoration will even drop into hatred – into a fierce and shadowy attachment (think of stalkers, internet trolls, and crazed fans and you’ll get the picture). This intense form of adoration, then, helps us understand what hatred is all about.

Hatred is a twisted form of adoration. Hatred is the underside of adoration – where the intensity, the shadow projection, and the enmeshment are identical in intensity, but different only in the material being projected and the emotions being directed at the targets.

In the excellent shadow books of Robert Bly, Robert Johnson, and Connie Zweig, each author points out that we can easily find our shadowy, unlived material by closely observing the people we attach ourselves to through adoration or hatred.

If people live out the strengths and talents we suppress, we usually attach to them through adoration, idolization, or infatuation. If they live out our unwanted or disowned aspects, we usually attach to them through hatred, contempt, or resentment.

Bunny who loves hatred

But in either case, whether we hate our targets or adore them, we’re attaching ourselves in an obsessive way and asking our targets to live out our repressed, ignored, shunned, or unlived shadow material.

Most of us can understand the enmeshments we create with our idols and our adoration targets, but when we flat-out hate people, we’re usually not aware of the strong and enmeshed attachments we create. Even hearing about it gives us the willies.

Yet these are the facts: If we dislike someone, we can walk away; if we fear someone, we can run away; but when we hate someone, we do neither of these things. When we express our hatred, we attach ourselves to our hate targets with an obsessive passion.

Tracking hatred in the brain

This connection between hatred and adoration (also called romantic love) is a concept that comes to us from art, poetry, and depth psychology, but the connection has also been found in our neurology.

Embracing your hatred and saving the world

May 22nd, 2013 | Comments (4)

Hatred: The Shadowy and Necessary Emotion

As we take a tour through the emotional realm, we’ve started with the emotions that help you set boundaries: Anger, guilt and shame, and apathy (the mask for anger). Today, we’ll look at an emotion that can set boundaries in very troubling ways if you don’t know how to work with it: hatred. Actually, we’ll continue to look at hatred tomorrow, too, because it’s such a large topic.

Though humankind’s expression of hatred has caused unrelieved suffering throughout history, hatred is actually a necessary and worthy emotion — but only if you know how to work with it. Hatred arises for very important reasons, and when your hatred arises, you need to understand what’s going on.

In our current psychological and neurological understanding of emotions, hatred is connected to the reflex of disgust, which is often classified (along with anger, sadness, surprise, happiness, amusement, and fear) as a primary or universal emotion. When I examine hatred empathically, I certainly feel that disgust: that lip-curling, backward leaning recoil from something foreign or unpleasant.

However, hatred is distinct from the simple reflex of disgust. In hatred, there’s also a strong, forward leaning, aggressive, anger-expressing tendency, where we want to attack our hate targets for being … so … repulsively … wrong! In disgust, we want to get away from the disgusting thing, but in hatred, we often become obsessively drawn to our hate targets. It is this obsessive attraction, and not so much the disgust, that can make hatred so very dangerous.

Neurologist Antonio Damasio, in his book Looking for Spinoza, says this about emotional reactions that can be dangerous:

I am thinking, for example, that reactions that lead to racial and cultural prejudices are based in part on the automatic deployment of social emotions evolutionarily meant to detect difference in others, because difference may signal risk or danger, and promote withdrawal or aggression. That sort of reaction probably achieved useful goals in a tribal society but is no longer useful, let alone appropriate, to ours. We can be wise to the fact that our brain still carries the machinery to react in the way it did in very different contexts ages ago. And we can learn to disregard such reactions and persuade others to do the same. (Damasio, 2003, p. 40)

So let’s look at hatred as something that was once important, but now requires a more nuanced, intelligent, and cognitively-moderated approach. Let’s also identify hatred clearly.

Hatred is not mere dislike, where you see something unpleasant that leads you to separate yourself from another person. Hatred is also not fear, where you intuitively pick up on another person’s improper or threatening intentions. No, hatred is an intense flare of disgust and anger – which (as we know from working with anger) means you’re dealing with boundary devastation and the near-complete loss of your sense of self and your equilibrium. When you hate, you haven’t just identified difference; you’ve ratcheted yourself into an aggressive state as well.

And what depth psychologists have found is that when you hate, you’re signaling a serious problem — not in the world outside you or in the people (or ideas) you hate — but in the shadowy areas of your own psyche. Hatred signals boundary devastation, certainly, but its pinpoint focus also has a brilliant secondary function (if you know how to do shadow work) – which is to alert you to specific interior issues that thwart and endanger you. This is where the need for cognitive moderation comes in, because if you know what hatred says about you, you can use its power to make powerful changes in your life.

Embracing and detoxifying your hatred

Shadow work is a specific practice you can use to understand and work with your hatreds so that they won’t endanger you or others. Let’s look at hatred empathically in order to understand what it’s doing.

HATRED: The Profound Mirror

ACTION REQUIRED: Hatred arises in the presence of shadow material (things you cannot accept in yourself, and therefore demonize in others). Shadow work helps you reintegrate and detoxify this material so that it no longer activates your hatred program.

GIFTS: Intense awareness ~ Piercing vision ~ Sudden evolution ~ Shadow work

THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What has fallen into my shadow? What must be reintegrated?

If you can grab onto your hatred and bring your full awareness to bear upon it, you can use its intensity to learn absolutely astounding things about yourself, your behavior, and the behavior of your hate targets. In fact, it is possible that many deep and buried issues cannot be fully revealed until the fierce emotion of hatred arises – because without its intensity, acute awareness, and strong convictions, you might not otherwise be able to make the profound leap from business-as-usual complacency into the sudden and piercing awareness that hatred initiates.

Photo of crowd-hating crowd member Again, hatred is not mere dislike, which goes away when you separate yourself from people who behave badly — and it isn’t fear, which will recede when you get away from a frightening situation.

No, hatred is a focused attack on another person (or group of people, if your hatred has decayed into racism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, or any other form of bigotry). Though it might seem fun to create a community of hatred, everyone in it will be injured by tearing other people down in order to build themselves up.

When hatred arises, you’re in some ways reacting with disgust to differences you see in your hate target, but you’re also shining a rage-powered spotlight on serious boundary issues buried in the shadows of your own unacknowledged issues.

How your emotions are evoked

We’ve looked at some simple pathways from emotion to feeling to action. Now, with the ground of that knowledge to rely upon, let’s look at hatred more closely.

The genius of apathy and boredom

May 2nd, 2013 | Comments (4)

Unmasking the genius of apathy and boredom

We’ve looked at anger and shame, and this week, we’ll focus on what I call the masking state of apathy and boredom. Empathically, when I look at behaviors, I sense the emotions that underlie them. In apathy and boredom, I see a state that serves to mask fatigue and depression, certainly, but most of all, I see that apathy and boredom mask anger that can’t be dealt with openly for some reason. And this isn’t a bad thing!

APATHY & BOREDOM: The Mask for Anger

GIFTS: Detachment ~ Boundary-setting ~ Separation ~ Taking a time-out

ACTION REQUIRED: Apathy is a protective mask for anger, and it arises in situations where you cannot or should not (probably) express your anger openly. Apathy can give you an excellent time out, as long as you don’t let it take you completely out of commission. The questions for apathy will often unmask your legitimate anger (and other emotions), so be ready to work with those subsequent emotions as well.

THE INTERNAL QUESTIONS: What is being avoided? What must be made conscious?

From the Apathy chapter in The Language of Emotions

Repression in any emotion causes trouble throughout your psyche – but anger is so vital to your health that repressing it actually brings up a specific state in response. This masking state of apathy (or boredom) arises when you’re unable or unwilling to deal with your true anger.

Apathy is not an emotion, but it does protect you and set boundaries (which is anger’s job). However, since it stems from repression, it can lead to trouble if you’re not aware of it. It’s fine to feel apathetic, but it’s important to know what’s happening in your emotional realm when apathy appears. In unmasking apathy, you can learn about the anger trapped within it (and how that entrapment is sometimes a very helpful thing), and how to support yourself in addressing the true angers beneath your mask.

When you don’t have the time, energy, or ability to work with your anger properly – when you aren’t able to protect your boundaries or the boundaries of others, when you feel unable to speak out against the injustices you see, and when you feel incapable of affecting your surroundings – you’ll often fall into the masking state of apathy.

In a masking state, you cover yourself with a protective attitude that can distance you from uncomfortable situations. Apathy squelches emotions by affecting an “I don’t care, I can’t be bothered, whatever” attitude. Apathy sets a boundary, but it also shuts down communication and relationships. Apathy seeks distractions such as TV, fun food (as opposed to nourishment), new loves, travel, money, shopping, instant fame, instant meaning, and a quick and easy way out. Apathy is a dissociated state, usually related to being stuck in the wrong environment for your needs. Because it masks emotion, though, apathy doesn’t have much power – it longs for change, but it doesn’t have the emotional agility to make conscious change happen.

If you can let your apathy flow freely, you’ll let yourself take small vacations from focus and industriousness – you’ll be able to daydream, detach yourself with diversions or comfort foods every now and then, or plop yourself in front of the tube or a mindless book when you need a break. You won’t fight your movement into distractions by throwing yourself into overwork or hypervigilance. If you welcome your apathy, it will move on quickly; but if you inhibit it (or wallow in it), you’ll plummet into imbalance. Here’s how to maintain your equilibrium around your need to detach yourself and take a time out.

The message in apathy

Apathy often masks anger and depression, both of which arise in response to inappropriate environments and degraded boundaries. You can see apathy trying to slap some boundaries together – trying to define itself with sarcasm, distracting behaviors, material possessions, addictions, or dreamy perfect-world scenarios. Apathy points to a loss of boundaries, and to a distinct and urgent need for change, but it does so in an ineffectual and distractible way. Apathy chatters and gripes, but it doesn’t accomplish anything lasting. Conscious Complaining (see The Language of Emotions), then, is an excellent antidote for apathy, because it takes that griping and turns it into an intentional empathic practice.

Apathy and boredom can serve important functions in many situations where effective action cannot be undertaken. Adolescents, for instance – whose lives are controlled by schools and parents just as if they were still toddlers – are often plagued by apathy. Since we no longer have rituals for the complex transitions of adolescence, we don’t often notice or honor the ascent into adulthood, nor do we often honor the individual who’s trying to emerge.

The human trapped in adolescence is ripe for ongoing bouts of boredom and apathy; she’s in an environment too small for her soul, and she can do nothing but wait until trudging, stubborn, endless time sets her free. Apathy can help mask and staunch the incredible angers within her – angers that might incinerate the only home she has. Sometimes, boredom in teenagers can be seen as a very good thing.

Apathy and boredom in adults is another story, however.

Karla McLaren celebrates 1000 Ausome Things #AutismPositivity2013

April 30th, 2013 | Comments (9)

Hello Ausomeness!

We’ve come to the end of Autism Acceptance Month, and now we’re embarking upon Autism Acceptance Year, Decade, Century, and Epoch!

Heck, let’s just call it Autism Acceptance Eon!

I’m being silly, but I’m also being very serious. Now that we’ve become somewhat clearer about what autism is and how many different ways it manifests, we’ve realized that there are a lot of autistic people around us — in our families, in our neighborhoods, and in our communities.

To be clear, these people have always been here (see the wonderful book We’ve Been Here All Along: Autistics Over 35 Speak Out in Poetry and Prose), and now we have the opportunity, finally, to recognize, welcome, and support our autistic friends and family members properly. Let the Autism Acceptance Eon begin!

Acceptance is an Action

At the beginning of this month, I posted about International Autism Awareness Day, and then I went to my Facebook page to create a silly series of pictures for my autistic friends and for my friends who are parents of autistic children. I did this because the autism awareness circus can be pretty grueling for my autistic friends and their families. So many autism organizations present autism as a melodramatic tragedy and an epidemic, and they manufacture a lot of panic and pity that helps them gather donations, but actually makes the lives of many autistic people — especially adults — very uncomfortable.

So I created a group of silly pictures and started tagging my friends in the autistic community — and wow. I didn’t realize it until that day, but this community has welcomed me — a complete stranger — into their lives. My feed is filled with autistic people and their families! Filled! My tags got ridiculously long, so much so that I had to figure out how to organize them. This is a vibrant online community, and so deeply connected that I just sat there and marveled at how open, funny, warm, welcoming, and loving the autistic community is.

So let me tell you what I see in my autistic friends — because these real-life views don’t often find their way into those dreadful fundraising pleas.

My autistic friends are …

Delightful

Sweet

Sarcastic

Highly, wildly empathic

Loving

Artistic

Contentious

Tender

Athletic

Deeply emotional

Sensitive

Activist

Caring

Brilliant

Goofy

Human.

My autistic friends and their families are fully human, with all the majesty and all the flaws that humans are prone to. I thank my many neurodiverse and autistic friends, and the parents of autistic children, for inviting me into your intensely empathic community and helping me understand empathy at a much deeper level than I ever did before. Thank you for your ausomeness!

Autism Acceptance Eon, engage!

Embracing guilt and shame

April 14th, 2013 | Comments (2)

Befriending all of your emotions!

In my post on befriending your anger, I re-framed anger as a necessary emotion that supports you in developing and maintaining your healthy self image. This week, let’s look at the emotion that I call anger’s friend or partner: shame.

I envision healthy anger as the sentry that calmly walks the perimeter of your self-image and watches out for any challenges to your standpoint or your sense of self. I envision shame as a related sentry emotion that turns inward and watches you and your behaviors so that you don’t unnecessarily challenge, offend against, or wound others. When it’s working well, your healthy shame helps you become a stand-up person who follows an inner code of ethics and honor — in regard to other people, certainly, but also in regard to yourself. And thankfully, when you and your shame are working well together, it won’t torment you; it will support you.

As I developed my empathic theory of emotions, I continually tripped over competing definitions of guilt and shame, and it seemed that everywhere I looked, people were defining these two words differently — and sometimes in ways that directly contradicted each other. I got really fed up, so I went to a dictionary to see what was up. Let’s clear up this confusion before we delve more deeply into this exquisite and necessary emotion. This piece is an excerpt from my book The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You.

The Difference between Guilt and Shame

Book cover of The Language of Emotions In my early teens, I read a popular self-help book that branded guilt and shame as “useless” emotions. The book presented the idea that we’re all perfect, and therefore shouldn’t ever be guilt-ridden or ashamed of anything we do. That idea seemed very strange to me, so I went to the dictionary and looked up guiltless and shameless and found that neither state was anything to celebrate.

To be guiltless means to be free of mark or experience, as if you’re a blank slate. It’s not a sign of intelligence or growth, because guiltlessness exists only in people who have not yet lived.

To be shameless means to be senseless, uncouth, and impudent. It’s a very marked state of being out of control, out of touch, and exceedingly self-absorbed; therefore, shamelessness lives only in people who don’t have any relational skills. Both states – guiltlessness and shamelessness – helped me understand the intrinsic value of guilt and shame.

Fascinatingly, in a dictionary definition, guilt isn’t even an emotional state at all – it’s simply the knowledge and acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Guilt is a state of circumstance: you’re either guilty or not guilty in relation to the legal or moral code you value.

You cannot feel guilty, because guilt is a concrete state – not an emotional one! Your feelings are irrelevant; if you did something wrong, you’re guilty, and it doesn’t matter if you’re happy, angry, fearful, or depressed about it. When you don’t do something wrong, you’re not guilty. Feelings don’t enter into the equation at all. The only way you could possibly ever feel guilty is if you don’t quite remember committing an offense (“I feel like I might be guilty, but I’m not sure.”). No, what you feel is shame.

Guilt is a factual state; shame is an emotion.

Karla McLaren

Speaking the language of emotions …