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.