There's a funny sorta irony within psychology.
Part of it's remit is the study of emotions........ which it does in an utterly intellectual way.
Trying to explain emotions using frameworks and formulations is like trying to understand the experience of awe, or joy, or grief using geometry.
Tbf, the science of psychology seems to be the only way we can attempt to learn about emotions within a classroom. But in reality, the only way to truly understand emotions is to feel them.
It's kinda funny that psychology as a whole does exactly what lots of us do when we want to avoid painful feelings........ we escape into our heads and attempt to science away the feeling stuff.
Avoiding feelings is called many names; defense mechanisms, cognitive bypassing, spiritual bypassing, repression, suppression, rationalisation, intellectualisation, or whatever banana you prefer to pick from the whole crazy bunch.
We avoid emotions for a damn good reason; lots of them are fucking awful. Who in their right mind enjoys feeling sad, or rejected or heartbroken?
To add insult to injury, we are often shamed for expressing our 'difficult' emotions, adding layers of loneliness and self-loathing into the mix. So the stuffed-down feelings remain stuck and unprocessed, and we get to hate ourselves too. Yay!
In this part of the world, we live in a neck-up society. Intellect is honoured over spirit. Empirics are more highly valued than gut feelings. Stoicism is respected over emotional expression.
We are rewarded for cutting ourselves off from our emotions (which we literally feel in our bodies).
By being super-rational, we get to avoid suffering the pain of loss, loneliness, despair or whatever emotional horror you're having yourself. The downside is that we can't cherry-pick which feelings to guillotine off at the neck, so we end up being split off from all our authentic emotions. This is when you hear people say "I don't know who I am".
Short-term this is a handy coping strategy.
Long-term, those pesky repressed emotions manifest as anxiety, depression, autoimmune disorders and unhealthy coping strategies (the usual suspects being alcohol, drugs, overworking, perfectionism etc. etc.). At the risk of being....well.... rational, it makes sense to crash into bed for a few days, feel all the bad shit, cry, wail, gnash your teeth, want to die, hate yourself, hate the world and scream into the void. If you're really lucky, you'll have a loving soul to hold you or buy you ice cream while you go through this, but sometimes we have to do it by ourselves.
But mostly, we are not allowed, or we don't allow ourselves, the horrible luxury of processing our pain.
Then Finian comes along and turns all this on it's head.
He does a neat backflip and sidesteps all the intellectual defenses. He feels all the feels, big and small, as they arise, with savage abandon. Nobody tries to pathologise his grief as depression. No-one labels his anxiety as an attachment disorder. He is not prescribed medication, or instructed to stop crying, man up or get over himself. He is allowed to process his emotions in real time, at his own pace, in his own way. He is not shamed for it.
And then he's grand.
There must be irony in the water, as it's also funny how much we can learn from people with special needs.
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| "now, what page will I find those damn emotions on?" |
