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I firmly believe that many people carry much stronger emotions than they show to almost anyone, including themselves, and it's super fucked up how much emotional suppression we need to engage in in order to appear normal, calm, sane, and happy to ourselves and others.
We - perhaps correctly! - believe that others can't handle our emotions, that they would freak out, get angry, try to caretake us because they'd feel like bad people if they didn't, etc. We don't want to burden them or worry them or annoy them, so... we don't.
We might also - perhaps correctly! - believe that we can't handle our own emotions, that our sadness, fear, and anger will crush us under its weight; we have stories about these emotions that cause them to generate more emotions in a runaway feedback loop.
We have mostly lost the ability to feel simple, bare, unadorned sadness or fear or anger; instead we might feel anger, then fear of the anger, then embarrassment of the fear, then frustration at the embarrassment, and then dissociate from all that.
It's easier to notice this for "negative" emotions but it's also happening with "positive" emotions. We also don't know how to handle our own joy or wonder or euphoria; we feel we don't deserve it and fear punishment; we fear that we look ridiculous or unacceptable to others.
"Positive" and "negative" are in quotes because the story that some emotions are "positive" and others are "negative" is itself part of the problem. Emotions don't work that way. We absolutely need to feel all of it. Including resistance and dissociation.
Emotional suppression slowly corrodes you. It saps your motivation. It weakens your immune system. It tenses your muscles. You become sicker, more anxious, more depressed, more numb. Your energy is tied up at war with itself instead of flowing out into the world.
Emotional suppression also cuts you off from a key component of your discernment, your sense-making, your meaning-making, your knowing. You lose sight of what's important. You become distractible and distracted. You become vulnerable to manipulation.
This is one of the parts of modern dystopia I hate the most, because IMO it's one of the key components propping up the rest of it. When you've learned to cut yourself off from fear and sadness and anger, you've also cut yourself off from love and caring and wisdom.
When you can't feel yourself, you can't feel other people either. A life spent numb is a life where it feels like nobody else actually exists and nothing actually matters. Now imagine that many of the most powerful people in the world are in this position.
That scares me, the idea that the people with their hands on the levers actually cannot feel themselves or anyone else. It would explain a lot, though. Nothing left to do but chase power and status, in a world like that. I imagine it's an incredibly lonely place to be.
So, this is my take, the take that's such a background component of how I relate to the world and what a mess it's in that I forget to actually say it: We will never deal with AI or climate change or the culture war or whatever else until we relearn how to simply feel.
Simply feeling is the first step towards sense- and meaning-making. Towards taking in fully what the world is like now, and what actually matters and is worth doing. Towards becoming a good, trustworthy person whose way of being will not break under emotional strain.
It's not as simple as just telling people to start feeling things. We don't feel things for very good reasons. We've inherited piles of trauma and conditioning going back generations. We don't want to risk losing the people we have in our lives, who have their own piles.
I feel anxious and embarrassed as I write the above. I've been mostly avoiding social contact the last two months. I've been feeling sick and hopeless and exhausted and small. I worry I've been a bad friend and I'm letting people down.
I've been afraid to talk about the details; the very short, painfully incomplete version is that I learned that someone I trusted was hurting me and people I cared about, and I also learned that I was hurting someone I cared about, in ways I hadn't recognized or understood.
That paralyzed me. I felt guilty, ashamed, disoriented, betrayed. I lost trust in myself. I didn't know what to do. I didn't do much. I shut down emotionally. And, that experience taught me things I desperately needed to know, and I can sometimes manage to be grateful for it.
The problem with being powered by hope is that you can't look at things that you sense would cause you to lose hope. The hope becomes intertwined with a fear of losing hope. You get addicted to it and it distorts your behavior. I hurt someone I cared deeply about this way.
It took the almost complete dissolution of my most important group of friends for me to begin to understand that hope wasn't the answer any more than fear. That, in fact, there was nothing I could do that would make it all okay.
I have been slowly losing hope over the last year, and I want to be very clear that I think this is progress. I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do the things I want to do in the world without risking hurting people. I don't know, yet, how to act without hope.
I'm gonna spend a decent chunk of the day trying to say nice things to strangers on Kind Words if anyone would like to join me: https://t.co/1UKYjgTKiU
Commentary on this thread from my friend and mentor Pete Michaud on Facebook, re: emotional capacity, reproduced with permission: https://t.co/ixMptXoFP2 https://t.co/W4nC7Hq96Y
@QiaochuYuan ♥️ Oof, yeah. Reading your thread, I'm thinking of this piece from Nora Bateson. What's out there, past fear, past hope, into a space of not-knowing? And not a vague, abstracted, conceptual not-knowing, but a visceral, embodied, sticky not-knowing: https://t.co/IYLtz3G8oZ
@QiaochuYuan https://t.co/QPDBZQ14uL
@cognazor Have been thinking about this since Bio-Emotive retreat at @MonasticAcademy last summer, because two of the Core Feeling pairs are "Hopeless" and "Optimistic", and I have provisionally concluded that both of those are functionally naïve. The stance I aspire to is Courageous.
@QiaochuYuan I would say my experience has been that this is actually ~basically~ correct but it takes a lot longer than you’d think. There are several kinds of loneliness, the kind that gnaws is when you don’t love yourself and yes, everything was always ok
@visakanv yeah, you could say my issue is i thought i was "done" and i had no idea how long the process really took the okayness stuff is tricky to talk about, i think there's something important about holding "everything's okay" and "holy shit things are definitely not okay"