The Action Words of Emotions
What do the words we use, say?
In The Adaptive Role of Emotions, I argued that a functional view of emotions might help people deal with them better.1 Here, I scrutinize that word, ‘deal’—along with related words and phrases—in an attempt to understand what our language says about how we conceptualize emotions. This article therefore focuses on how we think of emotions, intuitively and culturally, and not necessarily what emotions are. (They are a set of specialized modules designed to handle adaptive problems that occurred in our ancestral past, FYI.)
In addition to dealing with our emotions, we also manage, explore, handle, work with, navigate, confront, tolerate, sit with, breathe through, work through, process, gain insight into, develop strategies around, live with, share, reflect on, acknowledge, and accept them. Those are seen as our “healthy” options. We can also avoid, distract ourselves from, repress, justify, fall prey to, power through, redirect, and indulge our emotions, which are our “unhealthy” options.
What do these phrases, both of the healthy and unhealthy kind, say about how we conceptualize emotions? First, that they are abstract entities. This is particularly top-of-mind for me at the moment, because in rewriting this piece I kept resorting to both ‘deal’ and ‘handle,’ which are the kind of words next to which my 10th grade English teacher would have written “imp,” as in “imprecise.” (This note itself was imprecise, if you ask me, because for a long time I thought she meant “important,” which I was only too happy to agree with.) But the terms we use for how to navigate emotions are imprecise precisely because emotions are indefinite, intangible, abstract things. We have more specific language for what to do with a broken humerus or a pile of sheet metal because we are going to do more specific things to or with them. (Note that this doesn’t mean we are incapable of experiencing distinct emotions; it only applies to what we do with them.)
Next, the list of phrases suggests that emotions are, well, kind of stubborn. They aren’t going to be shoved aside lightly, so the person having them needs to find a workaround. This leads to strategies such as “come to terms with,” “tolerate,” and “manage,” which, if you ask me, are pretty disappointing compared to other tactics we might use for something less formidable, like “banish,” “defeat,” “cure,” or “solve.”
What about the difference between our healthy and unhealthy options? Does that say anything about how we view emotions? At the core of the healthy options seems to be interaction—an acknowledgement that the emotion is there—and an intention of making the best of it. At the core of the unhealthy options is avoidance, a failure to acknowledge the emotion’s presence or the power it has over us.
Here we run into a fascinating assumption, that direct engagement with emotions is the best course of action, and avoidance the worst. Much of this can probably be attributed to Freud and his early work on ego defense mechanisms. For Freud, the goal of therapy was to “make the unconscious conscious,” which meant circumventing defense mechanisms a bit like Harry, Ron, and Hermione en route to the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s possible that this initial stance on defense mechanisms—as protective, but ultimately counterproductive—got into the drinking water and never left. Regardless, there is good reason for reevaluating the role of defense mechanisms, both from the perspective of individual mental health, and as candidates for panhuman adaptive design. I, for one, think therapists need to spend more time asking if/when ego defense mechanisms should be kept intact.
What The Words We Don’t Say, Say
Some options for how to manage emotions are rarely mentioned. In Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, Nesse mentions two: ignore and wait out. Why are these not invoked more often as viable strategies? I think their omission results from what I call the “big deal problem” of emotions, which is that we tend to consider our emotions as extremely important—as a big deal. If we assume that emotions reveal something crucial about us or our circumstances, then we are less willing to consider them as:
a normal response to that circumstance (i.e., not unique to us)
the byproduct of something else, like an upset stomach or too little sleep the night before (i.e., having nothing to do with the scrutinized circumstance)
explained by the random fluctuation found in any system (i.e., meaningless)2
The best way to understand this “big deal” attitude of emotions might be in terms of signal detection theory’s “false positives” or “false alarms.”3 Signal detection theory arose in WWII in response to the problem of interpreting radar signals. Radar was not as reliable as it is today; a flock of birds, or weather, could look similar to incoming enemy aircraft. While it would have been disastrous to ignore a bona fide threat, false alarms were costly, too, in wasted time and resources. So, some math was developed to help operators make optimal decisions.
There is every reason to believe that evolution, by the blind path of mutation and natural selection, designed a similar system. In other words, humans benefit from having perceptual systems that occasionally mistake a stick for a snake, because not perceiving a snake has deadly consequences. Nesse illustrates this same point using a smoke-detector as an analogy. He argues that programmed sensitivity can explain why so much human suffering is based on false interpretations of reality.4
This perspective has two extremely important implications. First, if “false alarms” are built into the system, doesn’t that mean we should ignore or wait out our emotions far more often than we do? (Sort of like how we actually respond to fire alarms?) Yet consider how much this diverges from the prevailing attitude toward emotions. Picture a therapist saying: “Eh, your guilt sounds like a misfire. I’d just ignore it until it goes away.” Hard to imagine, right? Secondly, because the modern world is different from the ancestral one in which our perceptual systems evolved, there are likely to be more false positives than before. If someone throws a snake-looking stick in my path, I’m still going to jump, despite living in Philadelphia where the odds of running into a poisonous snake are about the same as having my plastic recycled.
Thus, ignore and wait out are even more reasonable approaches for modern humans. Ignoring would involve, among other things, the recognition that our minds play many adaptive tricks on us, such as routinely considering the worst-case scenario. Waiting out would involve a lighter view of emotions, as things that come and go like rain clouds—as things that make sense generally, but not always specifically.5
Conclusion
Hopefully, this linguistic exercise helped to clarify some of our fundamental assumptions about emotions. Emotions are considered abstract, obdurate entities: things we can’t hold or get rid of, but can perhaps have a better relationship with. We also grant our emotions a lot of power, not only to direct our behavior but to communicate vital information about ourselves or our environment. However, if we thought of emotions as smoke-detectors—as overly sensitive because of the risk of under-sensitivity—then perhaps we would pay less attention to them. Many people accomplish this through meditation, religion, therapy, and so on. I am hoping the conceptual framework presented in this article offers readers another opportunity to move in that direction.
By the way, none of this applies to positive emotions, because nothing needs to be done about them. (In fact, clients will often apologize when they only have good things to report in therapy. They see our sessions as an opportunity to fix things, and if nothing is currently broken, then they worry about wasting my time and their money.) This may also explain why the list of phrases regarding what to do with positive emotions is comparatively short: it hasn’t been necessary to struggle through language toward a solution. Instead, we simply enjoy and appreciate. We tend to have more words, and more imprecise words, when there is no clearer idea of what exactly to do.
Sources & Suggested Readings:
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph Nesse
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Functional, meaning the emotion served some adaptive purpose, i.e. had adaptive functionality.
By the way, these happen to map onto the three possibilities for biological traits: adaptations, byproducts, and noise.
Clinical psychology has undoubtedly influenced the general culture’s attitude here, but the best way to explain our intuitive assumption of emotions as big deals is probably in terms of signal detection theory.
This is one of the major things CBT misunderstands in insisting that clients should have “more realistic” perceptions of reality.
They have an ultimate explanation, but not always a proximate relevance, we could say.