Numb to Ninja: An Affair with Emotions

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“I keep it all inside because I’d rather the pain destroy me than everyone else.” Inside Out

Consider the example of getting scolded by your parents for not putting your clothes in the laundry or shouted at by your boss for a typo error in a presentation. You feel frustrated but don’t redirect it to your parent or boss or acknowledge it to yourself. The result, you dump your frustration on a younger sibling or a junior at work or sulk over it for hours. They are totally confused about you yelling at them for no fault of theirs or you miss an important engagement because you were busy brooding. You are all wound up!

So why did a petty incident turn into a messy drama or extended distress for you? Your reasons could be different and many. But at the bottom of it all lays a simple truth – you have learned to ignore and suppress your emotions reducing your ability to tolerate or face pain. Avoiding emotions comes at a high cost to your overall well being. But why do I need to not avoid my feelings? Especially when I feel like exploding or screaming or bawling? What is the benefit of feeling such emotions?

Inside Out, an animated film by Pixar Animation Studios, is a delightful movie that gets it right about emotions. In the words of the writer and director, Peter Docter, “We initially thought Joy is the main character and her goal to be happy, to make her kid happy, that’s something we can all relate to and root for because we all want to be happy. But life is not like that. Emotions we thought of as negative and to be avoided like anger, fear or sadness end up having very important jobs in our lives.” Fear is a built-in safety mechanism and keeps you safe, anger protects us from being taken for a ride or treated badly or to do something and sadness tells us what we value in our lives. Guilt can lead to change and excitement can lead to motivation.

But our emotions won’t help us deal with the not-so-good stuff that life throws at us, if they don’t match up with the situation we find ourselves in. For example, if we are bored when we should be scared or overjoyed when we should be upset. Essentially, how can we cope with the shitty stuff when we are trying to wallpaper over everything because we believe that feel-good-all-the-time-no-matter-what strategy is the “mature” thing to do? That is so far from the truth because we are blocking strong emotions, pretending everything is fine and becoming emotionally numb. Imagine an appliance with a faulty connection. It will work but not to its optimum capacity, may get over-heated or harm you by a sudden discharge of electricity through a part of the body.

An excerpt from Mark Manson’s article on the same subject, elaborates on the usefulness of emotions. “So for instance you are talking to a co-worker and you find out that Betty took credit for your awesome idea and got a raise as a result. Chances are you are going to feel some strong emotions like anger, jealousy and betrayal among others. Chances are you are going to take some sort of action to let Betty (and/or your boss) know what you think. Shit’s going to get real in cubicle-ville because this injustice cannot stand. That anger and pain you feel is also likely to make you take a long, hard look at your workplace and your career. They’ll also probably make you a lot more vigilant in the future by virtue of the fact that you don’t want to fell like this again, so you’ll do more to make sure your work gets noticed in the future. It might have been a painful experience, but your emotions provoked you to deal with the situation and will help you again in the future.” And that’s what makes our emotions so powerful and so useful. It doesn’t matter if they make us feel good or bad as they motivate us to take appropriate action and deal with whatever comes our way. Allowing ourselves to fully experience our feelings can help us figure out what we really want and think and how we can make our behavior consistent with those desires.

But how does one get comfortable with emotions?

“Our emotions need to be as educated as our intellect.” Anonymous

Feeling our emotions is very different from allowing them to rule our behavior. It’s the difference between wanting to punch someone in the face, and actually doing it. Doing it is unacceptable. Feeling like you want to is a natural human reaction (sometimes). In Lisa Firestone’s (Ph.D) words, “when we feel even our most unacceptable feelings in a safe and healthy way, we are less likely to act on them in destructive ways. It is possible to feel hurt without acting victimized or to feel anger without lashing out or feel fear without going into hiding or feel heartbreak without breaking in two.”

We can do that by “unfusing” our emotions from our decisions, according to Mark Manson. For example, you might feel depressed at some point, but if you unfuse your depression and examine it closely, you might find that you are actually also angry about something not working out as you planned it. This anger can motivate you to do something about your plan, to find a different result, to not withdraw but engage proactively.

Its easier said than done, but it’s a skill. And like any other skill this too can be learned and practiced to serve you well.

Does that mean we have to expose ourselves to a variety of emotions in order to become proficient at handling them!!?!!

Bingo!

There is a concept in psychology called “emotional diversity”. It is just what it sounds like: experiencing a variety of emotions. And it turns out that people who feel and label a wide variety of both positive and negative emotions are a lot better off, both mentally and physically, than people who only experience a few emotions regularly, good or bad. However, none of us are born well adjusted, emotionally. But we can learn these skills at any stage in life. There is a plethora of information on how to acquire this skill so I will spare you all the details, except for one methodology that you could consider.

The possibility that the words we attach to our experiences become our experience.

Think about this: your spouse/partner may be annoyed or simply irritated or impatient. The accuracy with which you can identify his/her emotion could transform your relationship. Because you will see that your partner isn’t angry with you all the time. This means you can respond to their specific emotion and concern without getting angry yourself. Similarly, it matters in your own self-assessment whether you are angry or just grumpy, mournful or dismayed, elated or just pleased.

According to Compton’s Encyclopedia, the English language contains some 50,000 words. Yet the average person’s working vocabulary consists of 2,000 words, i.e. 0.5% of the entire language. And our habitual vocabulary averages at 200-300 words. There are close to 3,000 words to describe emotions, so you can do the math of the dismal number of words we use to describe our emotions.This statistic shows that most of us struggle to identify what exactly we are feeling and often times the most obvious label isn’t actually the most accurate. That’s because we have been trained to believe that strong emotions should be suppressed. We have certain societal and organizational rules against expressing them. Or we have never learned a language to accurately describe them. The more diverse your emotional vocabulary, the more resilient you are to the large swings in experience that life gives you. If you are comfortable with anger, you will be able to call it up at the appropriate moments and use it. And having the right vocabulary allows you to see the real issue at hand-to take a messy experience, understand it more clearly, and build a roadmap to address the problem.

The question then comes on how to build an emotional vocabulary?

The first step is noticing and accepting what you feel when you feel it. The next step is to describe the emotion accurately because words have the power to hurt or heal. Let’s test this out; how do you feel when you say something is awful or you are devastated? If you observe yourself, your facial expression will align itself to the word, making you display shock or sadness. Your shoulders may droop and your head will fall. The effect of these words will make you feel bad about yourself.

I first became aware of the power of words on our feelings and the response that came from that feeling at a discussion with co-workers and the client, that didn’t go well (everyday nonsense at an advertising agency). There were three of us and each of us labeled the experience differently. I was frustrated and angry, rolling my eyes and gesticulating extensively. One co-worker was enraged and talked about how furious he was. His face was beet red and he was totally out of control. The other co-worker seemed completely unmoved because he felt a little annoyed and “peeved” because he didn’t think it was worth being upset over. “Peeved?” I thought it was a ridiculous word to describe the experience but just saying it made me laugh and see the ridiculousness of what the client had done to our presentation. This exercise helped me notice the pattern of language and the effect it was having on me. And thus began my learning to use the right word to describe my emotion based on whether it was magnifying the emotion or softening it? Here are a few examples that helped me become more aware: Could I be wrong or mistaken? Was I uncomfortable and not stressed? Or disappointed not angry? Did I feel enthralled not just happy? Or delighted over fine?

But let me clarify that this methodology does not mean that you underplay a negative experience. Sometimes, bad things happen and no words can give you solace or make you feel better. But having a handle on the right emotion can increase your chances of better dealing with adversities.

If you are wondering how that works, let me explain. When you know exactly what you are feeling and what makes you feel that way in the first place, it will be a whole lot easier to react appropriately. For example, you may feel attacked or defensive when your spouse or partner criticizes a decision you made because your father was overly critical of your homework and never praised you for doing it well. You may not automatically think of your father when your spouse criticizes you but it is an emotion connected to something but not having a clear path to why you feel that way. If you are unaware of this connection you will most likely react as you did in the past leading to the exact same result you had with your father. But you could respond proactively and have a different outcome now, if you identify the source of your feelings.

Also, more variety of emotional experience gives you a greater appreciation for just how transient emotions are. When you allow yourself to feel one or two emotions all the time, you start to feel as though they are permanent. The world always sucks. Life is always great. You always feel guilty because you are a horrible person. You are always proud because you are narcissistic. You are stuck in this one-emotion-defines-the-world mentality, diminishing your chances to bounce back from a troubling situation.

To sum it up, a diverse emotional vocabulary helps us connect accurately with a wide range of feelings allowing us to be better equipped with handling them and sometimes even reducing or improving the experience. It is not about being happy or feeling bubbling contentment all the time, but recognizing the layers of feelings and utilizing them in helpful ways.

Life is not about controlling emotions. That’s impossible. It is about channeling emotions and being an emotionally well-adjusted person.