Emotional

We’re told we should show our feelings – be ‘authentic’. We’re told, “It’s what makes us human.” And we get plenty of advice about what emotions we should show, and how we should show them. But every other animal shows feelings; even insects show feelings. To be emotional does not equate to being human. What that advice really boils down to is, “Don’t be intellectual and calculating, because it leaves others unable to determine your inner state.”

If someone is overtly angry (hurting), sad, or happy, it gives another person a ‘handle’ on what to expect from them. That’s what they mean by being authentic. Our biggest fear – bigger, even than dying – is that we lose ‘control’. When it does happen, it paralyses us in the moment, and then it leaves us with a huge trauma to deal with afterwards. If someone doesn’t show their emotional state, it leaves us wondering whether we are being manipulated – led to the slaughter by an evil vampire. We feel we can detect when someone is faking emotions: their display is subtly at odds with the situation. Though of course, we don’t really know that …

But should we really be showing the world all the time that we don’t have any inner control: that we’re a slave and a booby? What the evil vampire fears is a person whose inner will is strong enough not to be hypnotised; who notices what’s actually going on and resists manipulation. A vampire may be fast and strong, but a long life (unlife?) teaches it to be careful. Sooner or later, a victim will get away, and the truth will out. The serial killer will be caught or have to hide.

Emotions – feelings – are an indicator. They show how much tension there is between an internal ideal and a perception of the world around us. We ‘should’ be in control of what follows from that indication – we should be choosing our actions – but all too often we let emotion flow directly into expression. Feeling hurt is one thing; lashing out to hurt others (expressing anger, or just cold hate) is another. I am not saying we should deny our feelings – push them down and put a cork in the bottle – just that we don’t need to be a slave to them. And we don’t need to show our total lack of control.

Visible feelings do help us ‘connect’ to other people; they help us to empathise, or at least sympathise. And that helps us to build networks of like-minded allies. It also helps us to exclude those who say they are like-minded but don’t show the same attachment to the outcomes that we desire. (Those latter could easily have a different agenda, and could remove their support at a critical moment.) But all of this is ‘animal’ behaviour: it’s not uniquely ‘human’. We are able to domesticate our food animals, our work animals and our pets precisely because they are social animals, and work with emotions just as we do.

What is uniquely human – at least, amongst the life that is native to this planet – is the ability to transcend emotion: to feel it but not identify with it. Instead of “I am angry,” we can say, “I feel anger.” Dissociating in this way helps us to stop the automatic reactions that would usually follow. It helps us to see other emotions that are tagging along with the primary one – for example, “I feel anger and I feel slighted; I feel I have as much right as the one who has projected this slight and I feel I need to show them that they are being selfish.”

I don’t mean that these secondary feelings are ‘true’: they are a projection from our own, inner world. But when combined with stopping the automatic reactions, they give us time to consider whether, perhaps, it is we who are being selfish – we who should be more considerate and perhaps sharing more. There’s always another end to the stick, and if we aren’t identified with just one end, we may see the other.

We know that a wounded dog will bite at the hand that tries to calm it. We know that a peacock will engage in overt sexual displays towards anything that moves. Anyone who has kept a horse knows they have ‘good’ days and ‘grumpy’ days. When we don’t put even a sliver of attention between our feelings and our reactions, we are no different. If you want to be human – and not “human in quotation marks” [a member of the human species but not possessed of a human being] – then give some thought to stopping your automatic projection; to letting emotions happen inside, and to letting them show when they communicate something of consequence.

Unless you prefer to present to the world as an air-head.

[If you think I am being fanciful in referring to ‘vampires’, consider Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, or Ed Gein, or many other serial killers. All were – in effect – social vampires, with a thirst for blood.]