Rampant
The Cost of Unbridled Emotion
A couple in the apartment block across the street from me have been fighting. One keeps locking the other out. The aggrieved partner stands at the intercom, in front of the security door, shouting and swearing at fierce decibels.
The first few times it was the guy. The thrust of the argument was hard to follow amongst the spewing rage. Something about… nothing….
Then yesterday, it was the girl. She yelled for so long that he came down and chased her across the nearby park. Her screams reached a truly blood curdling pitch as she ran away from him.
People appeared from everywhere to observe, and his pursuit fizzled out, once he realised how many spectators they had. He disappeared back inside and within minutes she’d returned to the door, to begin the process all over again.
They were engulfed in a storm of their own fury, high on its energy, and addicted to the ions — destructive and certainly not offering any solutions to their problems. It was a discharge, like a lightning strike. And it will happen again and again until it scours their emotional landscape rendering it barren. (And that’s without the misery of drugs added to the mix).
Residents came and went carefully from the front door, sliding around the woman as if she was blanketed by a repelling forcefield.
That forcefield had a name. Rampant emotion.
I was telling my good friend about this unfolding drama next door in the context of another conversation and she asked me, “why don’t we get taught how to manage our emotions better?”
And I thought… because we can’t even recognise what they are!
What I mean is… often one feeling will masquerade as another, leaving us floundering, misdirecting, and misrepresenting what’s really going on. It’s a Buddhist concept called Near Enemies. For example, what we think of as love, may actually be possessiveness and co-dependence, or pity may look like compassion, and the big one… hurt can look like anger. It’s much harder to say “you hurt me”, than to be angry with someone. The former puts us in a vulnerable space.
So, my friend’s comment set off a little chain reaction in my brain that went something like this…
Humans, generally speaking, only ever receive implicit instructions on how to manage our emotions. We have to learn by osmosis from what we see, and what our laws around human rights tell us. You know… the don’t harm another person thing, don’t lie, etc.
But the ten commandments, or whatever human creed you follow, pole vaults right over the process, and straight to the outcome (just do, or don’t do). These rules might well be principles to live by, but who teaches us to how to manage how we feel, so we can live up to them?
[Insert: parents, educators, other significant adults]
Maybe… But who the hell taught them?
NO ONE.
My line of thinking is perhaps why Merve Emre’s article on The Repressive Politics of Emotional Intelligence (holy crap it’s a good read!) really rattled my cage. And why Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, which works to describe and define human emotions in a nuanced way, may be a singularly important guidebook for the next step in human evolution.
Imagine if we had a much better understanding of what we are feeling, a true understanding. How revelatory for our relationships. What if we grew up to be practiced at sitting with our emotions, naming them, examining them and being able to articulate them to others? What if learning those skills was woven into our education system? What if we actually believed it was important?
How far and fast could we evolve as a species if so much of our energy wasn’t spent yelling at locked doors?
