Doing Their Job

May 2022

I’ve been thinking lately about the function and not just the experience of strong emotion. How our emotions serve to redistribute and realign our energies.

Certainly the fragile meat-puppets we nestle inside can get easily knocked out of whack. We can become biomechanically “stuck” in states of post-traumatic red-alert when danger has passed, or bogged down in hopeless inertia when there is the possibility of sustenance meaning or pleasure within reach. And when we are locked into complex neurobiological feedback loops that are no longer effectively calibrated to negotiating our environments we often, appropriately, see ourselves or others as needing “treatment” in some form.

Sometimes we adjust our thoughts, focus, attention or framing it frees up our emotional lives to reorient themselves to the world around us. Sometimes it is our bodies that require care, our interconnected endocrine, neuro, muscular, and/or vascular systems can all move into states of imbalance, transition, or pathology that can destabilize our mood and distort the lenses of perception. Some will need tend to their bodies with exercise, dietary changes, acupuncture, and/or medicine.

But I am thinking more about what the function of our emotions are when things are operating well enough. Even a profoundly healthy emotional life will necessarily include responsive and anticipatory emotional experiences of significant intensity and duration, tidal waves of terror, mourning, rage, heartbreak, anxiety, ecstasy, expansiveness, despair. We live in a world that has become so alienated from our place in nature that we forget that our emotional lives serve natural functions, and too often consider them to be merely irrational by products of fortunate or unfortunate events.

Usually the lived experience of strong feeling is so overwhelming, so possessing - that we are just trying to contain ourselves (or not). Alternately, we become fixated as to finding (and eradicating) their causes - trying to connect their intensity to historical antecedents that might explain the depth of response to a present-day trigger.

And sometimes all of that is absolutely necessary - but it just might not be complete.

Meditative and contemplative traditions encourage those who practice to simply observe such states as they rise and fall, without being taken over or distracted by them. I’m searching for a different stance: One where I do not feel like I have to meddle with the emotion, I do not have to fix it, or solve its puzzle, or smooth it out or ignore it or devalue it as nothing of importance. I want to let the emotion move through without becoming driven or possessed by it, I want to consider its origins but only lightly. Mostly, I want to trust that the emotion will do its thing and have faith that even when I do not see the purpose, our emotions have a job to do. I just want to tolerate and accept it and let it do what it came to do.

Fear inflates and activates our bodies, leading us to fight, take flight or freeze in the presence of threat. The emotions that come to us after a loss of some kind generally pull our energies inward and down - as we struggle to in-gather our investment in an external attachment that is no longer sustainable. Rage, like fear, inflates us, makes us larger than ourselves and activates the illusion of invulnerability readying us for confrontation. The expansiveness of joy demands that we find a way to share some form of abundance with the wider world. Depletion, despair, sorrow might be seen as the body’s call to stop, slow down, release our external focus and rediscover compassion for ourselves.

Maybe we don’t always have to obey our emotions, discharge them, or investigate them overmuch, solve them like a riddle, or fix them like a problem. Maybe, when they are working roughly as they should, and we aren’t overwhelmed, too interfering or dismissive - they are actually taking care of us, solving our riddles, fixing our problems.

What if we embraced and respected the function, and not only the content, causes, or the felt experience of our emotions? What if we could sit with some detachment but also deep respect for the job our emotions perform for us - directing our energies, attention and focus in and out, up and down, redistributing our psychological resources as we move across an ever-shifting landscape?