Archive for the ‘ Emotional Hygiene ’ Category

When I go out to speak about The Language of Emotions, I often have the audience call out the things they’ve learned about emotions. I start off by saying “Big girls don’t cry, There’s nothing to be afraid of, You should be ashamed of yourself …” and then the audience adds their own versions of the messages we all get as other people attempt to manage our emotions for us (or shame us about them). We ingest a huge number of messages about the inherent wrongness of emotions, which is one of the major reasons we grow up and learn about everything but emotions. I say in the book that humans are “intellectually brilliant, physically resourceful, spiritually imaginative, but emotionally underdeveloped.”

Our ignorance about emotional development has unfortunate consequences in each of our personal lives, but it also has societal repercussions, in that the understanding of emotions has been medicalized (many emotions such as shame, fear, anxiety, and anger are treated as problems in and of themselves) and professionalized. So if you’re having trouble with your emotions, you often have to pay someone to help you figure them out (if you have the money, or if your insurance covers mental and behavioral health). If you don’t have the money, you’re kind of on your own, so maybe you fill up on the junk food of pop psychology books, or try to ignore the issues and hope they’ll go away.

Developing emotional skills isn’t something we generally do out in the open, or in a logical, step-by-step manner. We often have to get our emotional education by hook or by crook, and in many cases, we don’t even realize that we are getting emotional education, because we call it anything but that (Are you a Skilled Emotionologist?). We just don’t think clearly about emotional skills, and we don’t identify them properly when we see them, because emotions have been so thoroughly demonized. This is deeply saddening, because emotional skills are absolutely necessary for our thinking processes, for learning, for attaching value to data, for our decision-making, for our communication and relationships, and for our capacity to survive and thrive in the social world. Therefore, even though we’re not taught to respect or even properly identify emotions, we’ve all found secret and roundabout ways to develop emotional awareness. Some of us work with emotions better than others do, but we all work with them in every second of every day. We have to.

Another stumbling block I see (especially among highly educated people, who should know better) is a simple-minded, black-and-white approach to emotions and rationality, where emotions are characterized as lower than, less intelligent than, less trustworthy than, and just plain less than rationality. At my talks, audience members will often call out messages like, “I can’t talk to you if you’re gonna be emotional, Can’t we be rational?, Your feelings will lead you astray!” The endlessly repetitive messages we get are that you should always trust your rational faculties over your feelings and emotions, because rationality is just … better somehow.

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