More & Less Than Our Feelings

The emotional complexity of human experience.

In my last piece, I spoke about connecting with oneself. One of the suggestions I made was an invitation to explore artistic expression in whatever way seems intuitively appealing – or at least to begin there. I realized there’s a further point I didn’t make explicit why artistic exploration would be so beneficial for self-connection before I address the topics of connecting with others and the world.

Art is merely a means to the end of accessing the full spectrum and intensity of emotions. This seems particularly relevant given current trends in AI, as our artifacts strikingly outperform us across domains we previously believed to be evidence of our humanistic uniqueness. While Aristotle and other ancients declared rationality to be our defining characteristic, this seems to be in question. Despite much of antiquity castigating the ‘passions’, emotionality is a rich and defining feature of the human experience that is at the root of much of our dysfunction and flourishing. 

To wit, is there anything quite as uninhibited as the totality of a toddler’s rage, or the withhold of a sullen teenager? I was both. As our development progresses, we become socialized to the environment of the family and culture resulting in tension between the spontaneous upwellings of bottom-up impulsivity and the nascent top-down executive function clamping down as we learn to self-regulate and finagle the complexity of skillfully navigating our own drives in the context of social situations. 

This developmental process generates the psychological baggage we carry with us into adolescence and adulthood. It’s kind of like Goldilocks – where each of us is some combination of ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’ as we calibrate to our caregivers and peers in a futile search for ‘just right’. And while the circumstances of our wounding is unique, I observe there are recurring patterns that are not particularly special. This wounding is inevitable, as parents are just people, which we all find out sooner or later in our own time; each of us dealing with our own baggage, passing down anything unresolved from generation to generation, like a kind of strange temporal relay race across human lifetimes.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

And what is this baggage, really? As the aptness of the metaphor implies, it could be construed as the sum total of unexpressed emotional energies that linger in the nervous system for any number of reasons. In my view, shame is central. By its very nature, shame conceals. It is the emotion that makes us wrong for being who we are. And so we hide our shame. For example, if the outward expression of anger causes harm leading to negative social repercussions, then the next step is to internalize those negative consequences – shame swoops in like a restraining bolt or governor on our behavior, fomenting internal conflict of competing emotions vying for expression. This was so foreign and invisible to me that it wasn’t until my late twenties I even entertained that there was a problem with suppression as a way of dealing with emotions. If something is suppressed repeatedly enough, conscious suppression turns into subconscious repression — where we find ourselves unable to detect and access certain emotions. Alternatively, one masks another. Anger is often a secondary emotion, concealing a deeper layer of fear. Another example is anger being confused with sadness, or sadness with anger; this is associated with gender display rules, where boys are often shamed for crying, and girls for anger.

I was once asked, “Where do you think this suppressed emotion goes? It has to go somewhere.” This struck me like a psychological parallel to the Law Of Conservation Of Energy. While I may not have been ready to fully receive the message, there was a reasonableness to the query I could not refute.

And while human beings are more (and less) than their feelings, it seems to me that much of our experience, both our triumphs and tribulations, centers around emotional expression, suppression, and repression.