While we crave drama in our movies, most of us do our best to edit it out of the script at home. If we didn’t, we’d be too “___________” (fill-in-the-blank). I believe that this tendency to embrace emotion as a spectator while rejecting it as a participant points to a schism inside us.
We all cried as babies but regardless of where you grew up, the odds are good that as soon as you could crawl, you were taught to suppress your emotions. The old saws “Boys don’t cry” and “Girls don’t get angry” pretty much sum up the process by which external dismissal, judgment and shame become internalized to ensure we put the kibosh on emotional expression. But, while the ensuing suppression may make us unaware of our emotions, it doesn’t mean that they’ve ceased to exist. That’s why we love a good cry in the dark of the theater but fight back our tears most any other time.
The inability to easily cry is just the tip of the iceberg of losses that come with this internalized cultural belief system. When we become the agents of our own emotional suppression, we lose access to an amazingly adaptive inheritance that is so necessary for survival that it comes down to us through our DNA. And that means that when we suppress the so-called “negative emotions,” we suppress them all, even the only one we privilege, happiness. There is no such thing as selective emotional suppression just as there is no light without the dark.
True happiness, just like true sadness, anger, fear and disgust all serve an adaptive purpose for us humans. Uninterrupted, they come online automatically when we need them, accomplish their purpose and quickly dissipate. Yet when we disallow them, our emotions become maladaptive, get stuck and can persist indefinitely. For example, sadness that is allowed helps us metabolize a loss through deeply felt grief while sadness that is disallowed manifests as depression.
We tend to think that it is our massive cerebral cortex and ability for cognition that makes us human but, when we try to outsmart our own biology, we inevitably lose that battle and a vital part of our humanity along with it. This is why I am such an advocate for the emotions: without them, life is robbed of its significance and its richness. Therefore, I say, Embrace Emotion!
Please find my other upcoming blogs that will highlight the value of each primary emotion (Anger, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Happiness) in more detail.
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