Expression/Event Link

In the post on emotional porn, I said that connecting our emotions to the event that caused them will help remove us from the emotional porn cycle.  This is one of the most important things I have learned about emotions:  The energy of emotion stays in our systems until we resolve that emotion.  So we can either express/resolve our emotions, or we can be dominated by them.  If we express them as they occur, then they come in, we express them, and we move on.  They have no more impact on our life than do our thoughts or our actions.  They are just one part of a healthy whole.

But if we ignore them, they plug up our emotional system and then everything goes haywire.  At that point, engaging the emotional porn cycle is a very common outcome. That's when we see drama become the centerpiece of a person's life.  And that's no good.

If we wish to stay/become healthy, aligning our emotional expression with the events that cause our emotions is key.  So, the way to do that is to express as soon as there is an emotion to express.  Something upsetting happens, you express about it, and then move on.  Obviously, this model presents some difficulties.  If you start crying every time your boss hands you a little more responsibility than you really want, it might not go so well. The good news is that it's fine to push that emotion down in the short run and wait to express it until an appropriate time.  As long as you maintain your awareness of what the bad feelings inside are connected to, there will be no problem when you get to the point of actually expressing it.

So, to recap, if you are able to link your emotional expression to the event that caused it, you are likely to maintain a healthy emotional system.

My Emotional Porn

Ewwww.  I really do need to change that.  

You all are just going to have to accept that I emote (usually cry) a lot.  If I'm going to write a blog about emotions, it needs to be known that I'm not scared of them.  And I'm not.  So there it is.  

The reason it's important is because we've been taught not to emote.  Not emoting doesn't work.  We need to release the energy of emotion as it happens, so that it doesn't build up and bog down our emotional processing system.  So, most of the time, when something happens to me that causes emotion, I purposely allow that emotion to come out.  But, like everybody, I'm not perfect.  Sometimes I just feel pent-up.  I have a need to release emotion that isn't connected to any event.  There are many ways to do that, but the one I'm writing about is emotional porn.  Using something other than the original cause to release the energy of emotion.  My best source of emotional porn is anything that triggers feelings of abandonment.  I clearly have not fully resolved being emotionally abandoned as a child.  So, when I watch a movie where a character is emotionally abandoned, it will usually make me cry.  Or wail.  I used to feel really stupid about that.  And then I realized that I was feeling stupid for feeling abandoned.  And that was really dumb, because I obviously would not have chosen that if I had any say in the matter.  So now I just cry and don't worry about it.  Either way, it helps me to release pent-up emotional energy.  After crying, I feel better.  And then I move on, no longer carrying the burden of bad feelings.  Or at least, that burden is not so heavy.

Emotional Porn

I have to admit, the name rubs me the wrong way (Ha!).  But it's so on-point, I can't stop using it.  Emotional porn is a cycle where a person's emotional needs are un-met, and they either can't or won't deal with them in healthy ways, so they constantly search for resolution by alternative means.

What happens is this.  An emotional structure becomes cemented in a person's life.  Every time the person comes back to whichever emotion triggers the structure, they will feel the structural emotion, not the real emotion.  So, if you have a structure that causes you to feel guilt every time you should just feel sad, that's a problem.  But much worse is the fact that you don't really get to the part of actually feeling sad.  You just feel guilty.  So now you are building up energy from sadness in your system, with no release for it.  Over time, this sad energy fills you up.  At that point, you'll usually become aware of feeling very bad, but won't know what to do about it.  Some people put on a smiley face, some people explode, some people break, some people learn how to deal with it appropriately and some people deal with it by engaging in behaviors that release the energy in a manner that is not connected to the original emotion.  And a common way to do that is the use of emotional porn.

Emotional porn is using something unrelated to the original event to release the energy of emotion.  So, instead of expressing your sadness about a specific event, you watch a soap opera.  You get really involved in the characters.  When something "tragic" happens in the soap opera, you cry.  Now you've released the energy of the sadness you felt without addressing the original event.  It sounds like a great solution at first.  Don't want to address something problematic?  Just find something else to help you express and you'll feel better.  And we do.  A ton.  Television, movies, road rage, sports, politics, religion, on and on and on.

So, what's the problem?  The problem is that we become addicted.  Instead of expressing our emotions appropriately, we're spending our entire lives pursuing emotional porn. Instead of being interested in politics because we want to make a difference, we're driven to politics because it gives us something to be upset about.  Because of this, we've become slaves to our emotions, constantly seeking a way to release the energy of emotion instead of just crying when we feel sad.  When people say they don't want to be dominated by their emotions, I believe this is what they are referencing.  And this cycle of emotional porn is debilitating.  But it's also unnecessary.  All we have to do is connect our emotions with the event that caused those emotions.  At that point, it's:  emotion in, emotion out, and then the whole system just starts to work again.

My Structure:  Spiders

A structure I have to deal with all the time is my fear of spiders.  Rather than throw people under the bus, I'll just say that when I was young, I repeatedly experienced situations that taught me that spiders were something to be feared greatly.  So, ever since then, I do. My structure goes something like this:  Emotion-causing event (seeing a spider) leads to emotional structure (feeling intense fear despite a lack of real danger), leads to emotion caused (intense fear), leads to emotion felt (a strong desire to run away), leads to emotion expressed (crying, if the spider is big enough), leads to emotion (not) resolved.

Clearly, this is ridiculous.  So, what I've been doing is trying to fix the structure by consciously replacing it with the truth.  Every time I have to kill a spider in our house (and boy, oh boy are there a lot of them in this house!) I tell myself, "there's nothing to fear. Even from a truly dangerous spider.  It's one/one thousandth as big as you are.  Just smush it calmly and move on."  And I do.  And slowly it is starting to work.  I handle the small and medium spiders with little to no emotional upheaval.  When it comes to the big and fast spiders, I now usually cry while or after I smash it (or spray it!!!), but I don't run away.  And that's progress.  Eventually, I'll have enough experiences that show me that spiders aren't really dangerous and then my fear will go away.

Emotional Structures

(I've already written this post, but somehow, lost it.  So, if this one is somewhat less inspired, stay with me.  I'll be better.)

In the Emotional Mechanics post, I referred to deviations away from a healthy emotional pattern.  I call those deviations "structures" because they are built on top of the normal healthy pattern.  In general, we start off as kids with the healthy pattern.  But then something, usually trauma, causes us to start responding differently to situations.  I think when we're young, these behaviors are defense mechanisms against difficult environments that we can't control.  As we get older, we gain the ability to have say over our own life and therefore, don't have to be subject to the difficult environments.  But most of us don't realize that we can ditch these defense mechanisms and gain health, so we continue using these structures.  What may have saved us pain as a child, causes us pain as an adult.  For example, as a response to a habitually angry parent, a child learns to please everyone in every situation.  This may mollify the angry parent, saving the child some pain, but when the child becomes an adult, he/she won't know how to meet their own needs because they have spent their entire childhood focused on their angry parent. Even worse, without purposeful intervention, that person will continue to just be a people-pleaser throughout their life, never learning how to meet their own needs.  So this isn't just someone who's 18 years old and has to start from scratch in learning how to live. This is someone who will likely spend their entire life doing it wrong.

Of course, with a little understanding and hard work, that structure can be removed from a person's life and they can learn to be healthy and happy.

Link:

http://drgabormate.com/how-to-build-a-better-culture-of-good-health/

Probably the best article I've ever read.  I highly recommend it.

My Emotional Mechanics

Yesterday, I took my daughter (E.) to her preschool holiday party.  A man was there who played the guitar and sang holiday songs for the kids.  They loved it.  E. really loved it.  She sang and danced and really got into it.  Got into it to the point that she was making people laugh with her dance moves.  It was hilarious.  And it made me happy that she was enjoying herself and bringing laughter to other people.  That's a normal, healthy emotional experience, both for her and for me.  And I'm thankful for that.  But when I was young, I would have felt ashamed for feeling happy about it.  Somewhere in my brain was a belief that being happy was uncool.  So I wouldn't have allowed myself to experience that happiness.  I would have probably been angry and sulked instead.  Not a fun way to live.  I'm so glad that now I can allow myself to experience happiness.

For this situation, the difference between when I was young and now is mostly just a natural maturation process.  But much of the mechanics of emotion are too complex for the normal developmental process to take care of.  If we want to be emotionally healthy, we have to learn about these processes with intention, so that we can purposely use the skills in our day-to-day life.

Emotional Mechanics

I believe that what's missing from our culture is an understanding of the mechanics of emotion. What I mean by that takes a bit of explaining.  So, I will explain the basics of that below, but, going forward, the point of the blog will be to illustrate how an understanding of emotion would change the outcome of different incidents, from personal situations to current events.

When it comes to emotions, most everyone understands how emotions feel.  Sadness probably makes you feel like crying.  Anger might make you feel like you're going to explode.  Most people get that.  What most don't get is the mechanics.  How they work. The basics look something like this: Emotion-causing event leads to emotion caused, leads to emotion felt, leads to emotion expressed, leads to emotion resolved.  Got it, right?  Okay, with examples might be better:  Emotion-causing event (neighbors drop yard waste in my yard [Really!]) leads to emotion caused (anger), leads to emotion felt (feeling like my head might pop clean off my shoulders), leads to emotion expressed (I pull out a big stick...  No, not really.  After speaking calmly to my neighbors about not dumping their lawn trash on my yard I express my emotions at home by possibly yelling out loud or maybe crying), leads to emotion resolved (when I have expressed enough by yelling or crying, the energy of the emotion will leave me and I will feel much better).  If your emotions follow that pattern on a regular basis, congratulations!  You are one of the few people who have some degree of positive emotional health. But most people deviate from that pattern at one point or another.  For those of us who do, the way to emotional health is to understand where the deviation occurs and to fix it, because most of those deviations are not one-time occurrences, they're on-going patterns.  And those patters cause a lot of suffering.

Through this blog, I hope to illustrate how people handle their emotions incorrectly, how that effects them, how it effects others, and how it can be corrected.  If we all understand how emotions work, then we have the ability to choose emotional health if that's what we want.

Why?

"A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.  In this nature of its origin lies the judgement of it:  There is no other."  -Rainer Maria Rilke
                                                                                              

When I was young, society had problems.  But those problems were of the "we need to work on that" variety.  Now, everything feels more like "what's the point?"  And I don't think that's just me.  I'm a much more positive person now than I was then.  I think it's a recognition, part of our collective consciousness, that life has gotten out of hand.  There are many contributing factors and possible culprits:  the growing population, the proliferation of technology, and new societal norms, just to name a few.  But in my mind, those things, while true, are really just symptoms of a larger problem. And that problem is a lack of emotional health.  More specifically, a lack of understanding about the mechanics of emotion.

Because the experience of emotion has such an intimate, personal feel to it, people commonly feel like experts on their own emotion.  But most of us are only experts on how it feels, not on how it works.  If you fly down the road in a sports car, it may make you feel great, but that doesn't mean you understand how the engine works.  And just like with emotion, as long as everything works all right, you'll probably be fine.  But eventually that engine is going to break down, and then you're going to need to know what to do.  But we don't know what to do.  And I believe that is a fatal flaw in our worldview that is causing the breakdown of our society.

I've spent many years watching mainstream society misdiagnose what is going on.  It is well past time for there to be a voice that "gets it" about emotions.  I'm ready to try to be that voice.