Yes These Are The Emotions You're Looking For
Recently the sheer power of the human emotional life has been made apparent in stark personal ways, both in people I am close to and in recent headlines parading around from the weird/ridiculous/horrible events out of Notre Dame and fake/real dating to the flare up in the gun control pontifications (I hesitate to call it a true debate as it almost always boils down to lobbing verbal bombs at the other party rather than real engagement). We humans, even those who think they’ve transcended that status, are emotional creatures. Hmm…I’ll file that last sentence into the folder of absolutely stupendously profoundly obvious points and move on. The emotional lives of our fellow life-inmates are as powerful as they are ubiquitous. We revel in the tearful confessions and get angry when there aren’t enough tears (seriously Lance Armstrong?); we read romance novel fluff and escape into the distorted lives of people we’d find disgusting were we to meet them in person and we turn on daily to the constant stream of “real life” portrayals of drama and chaos found on everything from docudramas to the truly fake reality shows. Throughout it all we are so constantly bombarded by emotional data that were it slime we’d be incapable of movement so encased in the sludge we’d be.
Rather disturbing and gross image above I realize. Here’s another one, referencing the movie “What The Bleep Do We Know?” While I cannot say enough how intellectually dishonest this movie is, there is a scene when the central character is dancing and having a crazy good time at a wedding with cartoons overlaying the shot indicating how she’s holding onto the IV line of her emotions which are flooding into her with every movement and touch, the emotions scampering about like squirrels on crack. I have yet to find a more potent portrayal of our emotional lives and how they overwhelm our systems with the sheer high of feeling, no matter what that feeling may be. Showcasing emotions like drugs is precisely what is going on and should give us pause when getting down on ourselves when we’re not feeling what we’re “supposed” to be or what “we want to be.”
We’ve all been there and seen others go through it as well, those moments of depression or anger or bliss that overwhelm the senses and paint the world with all the skill of exploding balloons. We do things when under the spell which in other circumstances we likely would not have and the almost inevitable castigation that follows is yet another emotional reaction though for some bizarre reason we often assume this is more real than the previous effusiveness. Whatever is going on here? Imagine for a moment a ball bobbing upon water held in a box with plenty of room between it and the top. Peaceful, serene, the ball just sits there, slowly moving as it floats upon the water. Then hook up a hose to the box and start shooting in more water from below. The ball starts roiling around, bouncing off the walls, all sense of equilibrium gone and any sense of calm destroyed. Were someone to be located inside that ball, there’d be little in the way of knowing what was up from down and certainly no way to form coherent thoughts. Welcome to your emotional life. This is our reality. The ball could not move without the water being there and neither could we, emotions serve as the impetus for all action and are the guiding force behind all thought (thus destroying the supposed clear distinction between emotions and thinking). When overwhelmed with sheer force the ball has little input as to where it’s going to go or what it’s going to do, it’s just along for the ride and thus so are we when strong reactions occur. Once the turbulence calms down or begins to the ball may find itself under water still for a moment even if there’s nothing more being done and will take a moment to rise to the surface; so it is when we find ourselves in those moments of self-doubt or feeling “underwater” or “over-exposed” after an especially difficult or otherwise emotionally-laden response.
I am not advocating for the abdication of ethics or responsibility here, I’m simply pointing out that just like that little ball in the box we’re not all as stable as we like to think. As the title to this entry pokes at in referencing the scene in Star Wars when Obi-Wan tricks the mentally-deficient troopers into not noticing the very real presence of the droids staring right at them, so with emotions their constant presence and the effect they have on our lives is often difficult to keep aware of. Like with vision we often are only aware of emotions when something changes, giving rise to the idea that they are separate from our thoughts and thus providing an image of will and the self that is hopeless in making sense out of our lives or pointing to a truly legitimate basis for responsibility.
Daniel Siegel imagines human beings to be a triune entity with the brain/body providing the physical manifestation of action and the ground for the transference of the energy and information flow that is instantiated in emotions/thoughts within and through relationships. None of these three (brain/body, energy/information, relationships) are greater than any other, none of them are broken down to any other and none exist without the others presence, joined as they are within the existential reality of our experiential lives in the universe we find ourselves. There is, thankfully, a reciprocity to this existence that is profoundly powerful and utterly beautiful. Not only are we not the disparate clumps of mass we sometimes feel we are, isolated and alone, separated from humanity, but we are neither wholly without tools to use to shape, albeit in small ways, the relational interaction we have as we think of our narratives. Responsibility does not mean ignoring the power of our emotional lives any more than it means self-flagellation every time we bob to the surface and realize what we’ve done isn’t in our so-called best interests. There was an interest reached in every feeling, there was and is a point in every reaction because we are not isolated creatures and reality is a constant relational interaction with everything, fueled and pushed along by the energy/information flow that is often bubbling up from beneath and outside of our awareness until we find ourselves shaken about. Nothing we do, however much we deny it, is without purpose or intent. Responsibility and ethics do not start there but in the recognition of and determination to begin expanding our conscious lives and through concentration/focus begin funneling that energy/information down more healthy tracks.
We do reality and ourselves a disservice for drawing our meaning only from the after-effects of our emotional responses. The reactions themselves are an indelible part of our lives as well and they are the reason, from the small to the huge, for why we do what we do. Embracing the whole of our existence will give us the freedom to cut ourselves some slack and perhaps put some sails on that bobbing ball.
