Emotions Series Section 1: Back to Basics

Chapter 1: What are Emotions?

In this chapter I will be discussing what emotions are, what they are not, why they are important, and how they can serve us. This will include taking a look at common misconceptions. Inaccurate cultural messaging. A description of some different ways they can be experienced. Some of the common mistakes people make when interpreting or responding to them. And an introduction to how to listen to and respect them, so that you can benefit from them.  I am not going to be discussing the criteria for diagnosis or methods for treatment for any psychological pathologies. I am not a doctor, or a therapist. Please, if you are experiencing emotions that are negatively impacting your life, or that are impeding your ability to function, or you are in any other situation where you might benefit from medical care, go get the professional care that you need and are entitled to.

What are Emotions:

On the surface this seems like such an obvious question. They’re “feelings” right? But what does that actually mean? In Euro-descended societies and colonized societies impacted by Euro-descendent thought traditions, there’s this divide, this great chasm between these two archetypes. On one side you have the people who believe themselves to be “rational”. They consider themselves not to decide things based on feelings. To compute the relevant data and like a computer spit out the proper, strategic decision. They believe themselves immune to the interference of irrational “feelings”. And by computing decisions like a true child of science, this means to them that they are more correct than other people, more reasonable, and most of the time, smarter. They are the Thinkers. On the other side you have people who are emotionally driven. They’re led about by their heart from one passion to the next. They’re full of feeling and follow their “gut”. They consider themselves to understand matters of the heart in a way that the thinkers can’t. They understand that feeling is more important than raw strategy. They’re more emotionally in tune than other people, meaning they’re more compassionate, and therefore they believe themselves to be better. These are the Feelers. And it’s all fucking horse shit. You’ve got half the people cutting off the circulation to a critical aspect of their senses, and half of the people cutting off the circulation to a critical aspect of their response. And people build their identity around this thing. “No, I really am more rational.” “No, I really am more passionate.” “No, I really am better than the other side.” I will eventually do a series on false dichotomies, but for now let’s push forward and see if we can look at this from a different angle.

At its core, emotions are a form of sensory information. It involves nerves, just like any other sensory signal. A decent portion of the brain, along with nerves damn near everywhere else, just like any other sensory signal. And then we can either react to it without thinking, or think it over and then respond, just like any other sensory signal. What sets emotions apart from the other senses, is the types of internal conditions and external stimuli being reported. The other senses, the ones we respect in our society as legitimate, send us information about concrete objects that can be mathematically measured in some way. If my finger hurts, we can respect that sensory signal, because we can measure how long your finger is. How wide it is. Its volume. Its weight. It is measurable, which means it exists, because in our society, that is the criteria for ontological legitimacy that we have chosen. If I feel a breeze, that is legitimate. You can measure the temperature of the air, or how fast it’s moving. It is measurable, therefore it exists. But how do you measure belonging? Or agency? Or possibility? These are all very real things, attached to very real human needs, but they do not have length or height or color or speed or weight. And they don’t impact anything in a way that would lead us to any such measurement. The only way that we know about these things is through that pit in our stomach, the strength of our bonds, and the wars that we wage.

Many of the realest things in our universe cannot be quantified. It doesn’t mean that they are less real. It doesn’t mean that they are less important. It doesn’t mean that they are less substantive or impactful. It doesn’t mean that the sensory information you receive about them is dismissible, irrelevant, outdated, or a misfire. What it does mean is that if we only derive knowledge from that which is measurable, we will not produce knowledge regarding the immeasurable realities, and we will lose the knowledge we once had about how to engage with those realities. It is an epistemological blind spot for euro-descendent populations. And that blind spot is massive and deeply damaging both to the euro-descended and to all of those populations upon which our myopic epistemology has been forcefully imposed. I plan to write on rationalism and on epistemological relativism, but for now, let’s keep moving.

As a result of these things not being measurable, they have been undermined or dismissed. There is now research coming out trying to find those things being impacted by those things that can be measured, the vagus nerve, neurochemicals, etc.,and there’s been a good amount of success actually, but the cultural programming telling us to look away from the immeasurable as if it doesn’t exist has been in place for long enough that people don’t know how to interact with their feelings at all. And even with the new research coming out, the solutions they’re giving us are not about how to address the powerful intangibles, but how to impact the structures they alter. If we’re thirsty, we don’t take a pill to chemically alter the part of our brain that’s telling us we’re thirsty. We drink some fucking water. But when it comes to emotions, we circumvent what it is telling us about our needs and try to chemically or behaviorally override the signals we don’t like. The ones that hurt. The ones that are trying desperately to tell us that something is horribly wrong.

Now, I want to be absolutely clear. This is just as important as, and for some people more important than, all of the rest of the things I will say in this series: Psychiatric medications are a wonder of modern medicine that save lives and give vast numbers of people who need them the opportunity to live immensely better lives than they would have been able to have before those medications were invented. I will eventually write about my personal experiences with mental health, but for now just know that psychiatric medications saved my life. They serve a very important purpose. That said, the needs that our emotions are signaling us about are important. And if we override that signal instead of addressing the need, we run the risk of causing harm.

We were never meant to be a sterile species. We were never meant to live as each man for himself. Individuation is another damaging ideological consequence of only acknowledging that which is measurable. We somehow believe that we are each a separate package contained by our skin, because we can’t measure the ties that move between us. We can’t measure the salve that soothes our heart when we are held. So we hurt all the time. And we remember enough to say that we feel alone, but we have forgotten too much to understand why, or what to do to help it. We feel so separated, and the distance only feels greater when we are in each other’s presence, because when our skin is close the excruciating absence of that critical bond that we were taught had no substance is even more obvious. I plan to write about self, community, and meaning, in which I will discuss the myth of individuation, but for now, let’s keep moving.

Because we don’t remember the wisdom for how to interact with our feelings, and because those sensations are powerful, and often painful, people frequently react by either panicking and doing whatever the emotions make them feel like doing (usually the Feelers), or panicking and cutting themselves off from the emotions so that they don’t have to feel them anymore (usually the Thinkers), which means that almost nobody is listening for what their feelings tell them without panicking and then making strategic decision based on their actual needs. Even when someone does try to listen to their feelings and then decide what to do, they don’t know which feeling to listen to (there tend to be several at a time) or precisely what the feeling is trying to tell them. And even if they do figure it out, a lot of times in our society the thing that they actually need just isn’t available in any healthy way, because it’s something that can’t be measured, and, therefore, everybody’s either worshiping it, shaming it, repressing it, or otherwise trying to pretend like it doesn’t exist. I will be writing a series about basic human needs, including a section covering what I call “the forbidden needs”, why they are legitimate, how to identify them, how to determine how to address them, etc. But for now, let’s keep moving.

Emotions, then, can be understood as a sensory signal that we receive about a very real bodily need having to do with an intangible aspect of our existence. Most often they are sensory signals about relational issues involving our social context. But they can also be sensory signals about power, or agency, or identity, or infringements upon our personal value system. Ignoring these signals creates a devastating blind spot on a core aspect of the human condition and our own needs. And without these needs being met, we die. Just the same as if we don’t drink water. It might kill us more slowly and more painfully, but it still kills us. These needs are real. And ignoring them has real consequences. If my foot is throbbing and I ignore it, I could lose the foot. Pain signals are absolutely essential to our survival. Pain signals around these intangibles are absolutely essential to our survival as well. But we must interact with them in an appropriate way in order to understand what they are trying to tell us, and make the best decisions to address what has gone wrong. And to do that, we first need to clear up some misinformation around them. I’ve given a very broad summary as to what emotions ARE. In the next section I will be addressing some key myths in order to clarify what emotions ARE NOT.