by Stanley
When you’re angry the correct way to express yourself is to use ‘I statements’. You have to say ‘I am feeling angry with you’ rather than, ‘Don’t talk rubbish’. Saying that you are feeling angry is OK. Being angry is not. The problem with simply changing the language like this is that although it may provide an atmosphere of civilised politeness, it encourages a certain duplicity and incongruence. It is really a form of behaviour modification.
Changing the language here is supposed to help you take responsibility for your anger, rather than just blaming other people. But it can make you less responsible because blaming can now take place on a lower level while pretending otherwise. I’ve heard some flaming rows using ‘I statements’. It could be funny if it weren’t so agonising – two people in conflict whilst one of them tries to maintain this terribly grown-up façade. Sooner or later they will cry out: ‘I’m only telling you my feelings’, as though they were saying, ‘I’m not telling you about me, I’m telling you about my feelings’ – which is odd.
Whatever you do, you must be seen as calm and in control. Worse still, making sure you see yourself as calm and in control. My worry is that the philosophy of ‘witnessing’ oneself points us in the wrong direction.
There is no way you can get the depth and reality of your anger, sadness, sorrow, boredom or happiness unless you are wholehearted. In the grip of an ecstatic moment, to merely say, ‘I feel happy’ is not good enough. You haven’t really got it until the usual words sound totally inadequate. When you are rapturously ecstatic you never say calmly ‘I feel happy’. Rather, your words tumble over themselves; crazy language bursts out of you – or you’re just stunned into silence.
We have to grant that some emotions can be a terrible source of trouble. There’s no need to enumerate on that. But think how much trouble can be caused by being ‘unemotional’. The guards at Auschwitz were very unemotional.
It isn’t that feelings are one thing and you are something else. However emotionally neutral you think you are, the fact is you are always feeling something. As I said in my last newsletter: you can’t observe something from nowhere. You are always looking from somewhere; and every somewhere has an emotional tone. OK, so a moment ago you were angry; then you are looking at your anger and feeling sorry. Now you are looking at all that and thinking, ‘I can’t be bothered’. Each moment you are in a different somewhere. The spiritually inclined are always telling us that we are not our thoughts, we are not our feelings, promoting a kind of emotional anaemia. The statement that the person is not their feelings is misleading. There is no such thing as a neutral observer, a witness without an attitude. Trying to be neutral dissociates you; you never really get where you’re at.
I have a theory that you can be emotional without actually getting that you are emotional. Sounds crazy, but think of it. When you are used to being in control, when it has been your habitual way of being, the sudden rising of emotion overtakes you without your actually being it. So you don’t actually get it. Even as you are angry you feel like you’re being reasonable – being reasonable and at the same time dramatising like mad. This is dissociation. You could truthfully say ‘I am not angry’. In fact, people will very often do this. Whilst their face is purple with rage they will deny that they are angry. Of course, there are all degrees of being or not-being an emotion; it’s when you are being removed and neutral that emotion is more likely to overwhelm you. When it hits it’s almost like the emotion doesn’t belong to you.
Wise council in focusing tells us to be careful of getting swallowed up by emotion. From what I see – admittedly a limited field – it seems the greater danger is dissociation, being swallowed up by nowhere. The standard defence against feeling is feeling nothing. This is far more lethal. We suffer from over-control rather than over-emotion. Control of emotion can be such a priority that our problem becomes nonchalance, a chronic lack of caring, so that anything goes. For us, in our emotionally immature culture, the problem is pre-maturity, the adolescent ideal of having life under control, independent and free from any interference. Naturally, when powerful emotions surface, unbidden from the depths, they overwhelm the fragile fantasy of immunity.
When a person’s priority is control they tend to go unconscious when emotion does hit. This is what is called ‘acting out’. I’m going to suggest that a key element in acting out is that feelings and emotions are not self-conscious. We should speak of ‘conscious emotions’ and ‘unconscious emotions’. But unconscious emotion does not mean it is not exhibited. Such emotions can produce a powerful impact on everyone, but still be relatively unconscious. A person who is unreflectively thrashing around in a rage is not fully conscious, or only dimly so.
‘What nonsense’, someone will say. ‘When I’m angry, of course I know what I’m feeling. I am fully aware of my feeling’. But wait a minute. If the word ‘angry’ seems adequate, then you haven’t got it. If you think you’re ‘just angry’ and that’s all there is to it, the feeling has no depth. It’s stunted. It goes nowhere. It’s a dead feeling, if there is such a thing. In fact, it’s hardly more than a label. When a feeling is living, when you are being the feeling, it furthers itself, it explicates. As your life flows, it flows with it, mutating into all kinds of associations and connections. Conscious feeling is alive, always changing, always gathering more than you can say.
Feelings themselves, before they are conscious, are an inchoate jumble, what we have called in focusing ‘the felt-sense’, or the ‘murkiness in the body’. Then, as you pause on it, something begins to take shape. More accurately: as the feeling reflects on itself it becomes clearer. It begins to articulate itself. It begins to recognise itself. In that moment I also acknowledge who I am. I am what is consciously being felt. If we drop the artificial distinction between me and my feelings, we allow wholeheartedness and congruence. I am the feeling I am being.
The crucial factor is recognising an emotion or feeling. But not something else recognising it. More accurately: an emotional recognition takes place; and this is the same as recognising myself.
There are times when I need to be wholeheartedly generous or mean, just as there are times when I need to be wholeheartedly sad, or joyous or angry. But a modern tendency in psychology would encourage us always to step aside, to overview and observe, to witness ourselves.
It’s has almost become de jure to be half-hearted. Instead of saying, ’I’m confused’, you have to say: ‘part of me wants this and part of me doesn’t’. But then you miss the essence of the conflict which is, ‘I want this AND I don’t want it’.
We don’t need to postulate a different ‘part of me’ that is witnessing what another parts of me wants. That’s leads to an infinite regression: (and who is witnessing that part). We get lost in such a maze there is nowhere to stand. The buck has to stop somewhere. You may as well stop it at the beginning: a feeling is aware of itself. Feeling and the self-awareness of ‘I am’ are not different things. You know what you feel and you feel what you are; they’re the same thing. A present feeling is the sense of myself.
Are there inarticulate feelings? Well, yes, but you can only say that when an inchoate ‘something’ is beginning to articulate itself. That’s the beginning of a recognisable feeling and of your own becoming.
A person is being their emotion in so far as they are emotionally self-aware – or put another way, in so far as feelings become aware of themselves. I often pause to really get what something feels like. Getting it is being it. You need no second entity that’s conscious of it. You know the inside of a feeling like no one else can. The feeling is the inside of you. You can’t know anything better than being it. A feeling is existentially who you are, and from where you can speak authentically.
You see, I am refusing to make a split between me and my emotional life, pretending that I am some kind of pure spiritual being, an uninvolved witness to the uproar of my days. That’s a godlike delusion. At every moment I am fully engaged in the rough and tumble of my existence.
The view I am advocating does not suggest that one always be emotionally full-on. I am simply making a plea not to encourage dissociation from emotion as a method of therapy or as a good way of doing life.
