[lit-ideas] Talking about emotions
- From: Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 5 Oct 2007 02:40:11 +0000
Andy writes: "I'm extremely sorry for your loss Eric. Emotional problems hit
anyone, up to and including the highest rungs of governments. I'm coming away
from your experience thinking that the only thing that's truly ours is our
emotions and our feelings. We share words, we share thoughts, we share ideas,
but we can't share emotions. Only we ourselves can feel our emotions and
feelings. Ironically, that's the one area we all shun, running instead toward
the collective, the word. I wonder if the desire to outrun emotions and
feelings underlies collective amnesia (Gore Vidal's the United States of
Amnesia, but certainly it's not just us). It certainly underlies all the
conflict of the world. We can't deal with our emotions/feelings, but we can
dump them on another, as your fiance's ex-husband did, and as every and all
fight, from biggest to smallest, including invasions, has done." Thank you,
Andy. I wrote that piece yesterday as part of something I'm trying to do
generally these days, figure out how to talk in public about emotional things
without sliding into either demagoguery or maudlin public displays of emotion.
I do so, though, in part because I am convinced it is not entirely right that
"only we ourselves can feel our emotions and feelings."
Certainly there is a very important sense in which that is right: if I cut
myself no one else feels the pain of that wound. I believe, however, that we
*do* experience one another's emotions in some important if intractably
ambiguous and often tragically limited ways. The fact that our experience of
each other's emotions *is* incomplete, subject to gross error, and intractably
ambiguous makes that experience both extremely difficult to talk about and
anxiety-provoking. None of those characteristics, though, mean it is false
that we have such experiences. A small example of the applicability of this.
In my most recent position, the one I'm leaving as I move from Phoenix to
Washington, I ran into several situations where we all knew what needed to be
done to fix something about how our business worked, were all capable of doing
our parts to fix it and understood our parts, agreed that it was important, but
still didn't do it.
I, the head computer guy, the one whose job is to do the supposedly hard
engineering things to make the company's systems run well, would find myself
pointing out to my peers and subordinates that the problems we were having were
not intellectual problems. There were no objective impediments. There were
only emotional impediments.
In these situations it seemed to me that we were each afraid of the consequence
of changing even things that were manifestly broken and as a group we were
unable to find a way to overcome our individual fears. There were lots of
cases where we did get things done -- that's why Aetna just bought us for $535
million -- but the cases where we didn't were very instructive. They were
clearly emotional, not intellectual problems.
It seemed to me that among the things that happened was that people would feel
how others felt. The most obvious and destructive example was when one person
became afraid, others who might not have been afraid before would become afraid
too, and then would begin finding all the reasons they should be afraid. The
reverse happened as well, people who had the courage to assert their belief
that a change might be for the better, and who had the stamina to endure the
both self-inflicted and group-inflicted sense that they might be pollyannas,
they would gradually find others feeling and acting the same way.
I think the reality is that we do feel each others' emotions, though in
attenuated, incomplete, ambiguous and often inaccurate ways, and how we react
to each others' emotions does indeed have a lot to do with what happens, in
part because our reasoning selves do not always recognize what's going on, as
in the case of the person who's not frightened but encounters another who is
and then begins searching for (and finding) putatively rational reasons for
their fear. That's among the reasons I think it's worth trying to find a
constructive and productive way to talk about emotional things in public, even
though doing so is often awkward.
Anyway, thanks again for your kind words.
Best regards to one and all,
Eric Dean
Phoenix --> Rockford
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