Lets talk about feelings.
We have a cultural bias against feelings. Feelings are fine if you are a child, less fine if you are a woman, and least fine for men. It is considered bad manners if anyone else is made aware of our feelings outside of a few, carefully defined circumstances.
Why do you suppose this is?
Displays of emotion are proof of humanity. They are proof that the people we observe outside ourselves have their own inner lives that are roughly analogous to our own. They are proof of imperfection, proof of struggle, proof of hardship, and proof of joy.
To understand why we seek to avoid this, we need to understand why we have feelings at all. At their most simple, we feel two types of things–rewards and punishments. This is true both physically and emotionally. Rewards are the response we get from taking actions that are productive of our greater welfare. Punishments would thus appear to be the response we get from taking actions that are counterproductive of our greater welfare. BOTH rewards and punishments are designed to inspire us to further action. To be more clear, all feelings, whether they be emotions or physical stimulations are designed to inspire action.
Unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that. You see, we engage in both reactive AND predictive behavior when it comes to feelings and when we engage with our emotions predictively some weird things can happen. First of all, predictive emotion is self sustaining and grows over time. Contrarily, reactive feeling diminishes and repeated, new, or greater stimuli is required in order to maintain a feeling. Secondly, predictive feelings are based on our current understanding of the status quo and are designed to keep things as they are rather than risk disruption.
The status quo is not necessarily productive of our greater welfare.
If you’ve been in the personal development arena for long, you’ve undoubtedly run across the idea that fear keeps us from our hearts desires. This is a perfect example of a predictive punishment upholding the status quo. If we’re not completely certain of an outcome, our fear is likely to stop us from going all in and so we sabotage our own efforts or take no action whatsoever.
So here’s a problem; feelings are designed to inspire us to action. If we touch a hot stove, our welfare is better served by jerking our hand away than leaving it to fry. If we feel love, our welfare is better served by expressing it than by hiding it. If we take no action, we short circuit the emotion to action loop and are at odds with ourselves and the universe as we loop emotion to emotion to emotion with no relief. Even fear, that much maligned emotion, is often productive of our welfare in reactive situations—the classic fight or flight scenario. But when we predictively fear, the best course of action is usually unclear because we are afraid of it and therefore afraid to know it. Unfortunately, when we don’t do anything with the emotion, it gets stronger because the whole reason for the feeling was to cause action in the first place. Sometimes this takes us all the way to panic where we simply shut down and are overwhelmed by this fear loop.
How do we solve this when we are in fear and don’t know which way to go? How do we get out of fear? The first thing to do is to let it move us…literally. Get up and move.
I usually go for a walk when I’m feeling fearful, and by the time I get home, even from a very short walk, I usually have a better idea of what to do. The key here is that while we’re walking, we don’t do anything else and we’re deliberately in a situation where we can’t act on the fear directly, so for a few minutes the pressure is off. In this we allow ourselves to know that we have the answer within us already—we wouldn’t be in fear if we weren’t already predicting a change to the status quo.
Second, do the thing you fear. (You can do this first if you want, instead of going on a walk.) By acting on your fear, you take it’s predictive punishment energy (that feeds on itself and grows) and turn it either into reactive punishment energy that fades away or, more often, turn it into reactive reward energy as you realize that what you feared wasn’t harmful and was actually productive of your well being.
This reward and punishment system is capable of very accurately guiding us to greater welfare, but we don’t act in a vacuum. We are surrounded by others in our lives who are likewise guiding themselves to greater welfare. And here is where the “Bad Manners” of showing our feelings comes into play. By showing our feelings, by demonstrating our joys and our hardships where others can see them, we invite others to engage more fully with themselves. When we show connection to the pleasures and pains inherent in our physical existence we point out how those around us may not be connected as deeply as we. Since we have a societal expectation that men must be stoic and muted in order to be masculine and strong, for anyone to display joy, pleasure, sorrow, grief, love, or happiness openly feels inherently rude as it points out what the man denies himself in order to be socially acceptable.
However, the opposite is true. Because it is detrimental to all of our welfare to ignore our emotions, failing to model acting on our emotions for others is a disservice to them and ourselves. In order to encourage others to act on their emotions, we must all be more open. If we are happy, let it radiate from us with every smile. Why must crying be reserved for the most desperate of losses? Violence, even verbal violence is not productive of anyone’s welfare, but calmly letting others know when and why we are angry is.
This points out, very clearly, that sometimes the action most begged for by a feeling isn’t the most productive action. We are, after all, patterned by everything we have previously done both in this life and before. Fortunately, we are always free to change our patterns if we want to. It may be difficult and we may need help, but we are always free to choose.
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