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Here is a cute example of spontaneous emotional expressions - the opposite of freezing.
Babies and small children have intense reactions in part because so many things are new and unexpected. Surprise amplifies all of our emotional reactions and their expression.
Notice how this baby rocks back and forth between diffferent emotions, learning what is okay and what is not okay. This baby is discovering what is dangerous and what is safe; setting expectations for a lifetime.
When emotions go missing, where do they go? We can imagine them "buried", "abducted", "masked", "hidden", or "disguised". What do these terms really mean? We can't say for sure, but let's imagine that your missing emotions have been blocked and then frozen.
Missing emotions differ from other emotions in that they don't fulfill their potential. Our missing emotions fail to do what they were meant to do: they don't prompt action, find natural expression, or even become available to our conscious mind.
Instead they may linger like other physical impulses that are thwarted. Blocked emotional impulses can get backed-up inside us. Deep within our body, our missing emotions can get locked away as failed potentials. Their unspent charge becomes partially frozen and causes us stress.
Frozen emotions may also leave behind the feelings that accompanied them. These feelings can persist in the back of our minds. Here they can refuel our missing emotions, silently pushing for their expression in our fantasies, dreams, musical tastes, and sudden outbursts.
Remember that feelings are the mental accompaniments of emotions. These mental traces - our feelings - can help us know where to search for hidden emotions.
Think about your emotional patterns. Talk to trusted friends. Focus on feelings that are painfully familiar, yet don't quite make sense. Investigating the the meaning of these recurrent feelings is a promising place to start looking for missing emotions - to help begin to thaw.
Sometimes we don't feel our emotions. It is as though they are hidden or frozen inside us. Such emotional detachment may have occured occassionally in your past, for example if there were certain notable experiences in your childhood when you felt nothing. Or perhaps your disconnection is ongoing, and you often fail to emotionally respond to significant events in your current life. Maybe you are a person who has rarely felt your emotions, past or present.
More likely, you have felt some of your emotions, but you have overlooked or been confused about others. For example, if you are easily irritated, or take a lot of risks, you may be disconnected from fear. If you are overly nice, you may ignore your anger.
While some people may see emotional detachment as a blessing or even a source of pride, it's not really natural for human beings and mammals to be indifferent to changes that pertain to their happiness. This is only really normal for aliens from Vulcan.
Humans react to meaningful events with basic emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust or joy. People who don't feel their emotions often experience an inchoate, but pervasive sense of emptiness. This is a common problem in our postmodern society, where so many of us have stopped paying attention to our personal feelings.
The absence of certain feelings can be a clue to a problem, or to what I call metaphorically an "emotional crime." Because emotions are a universal part of human nature, not feeling them suggests that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it is obvious that something is emotionally amiss, for example, when emotional coolness is accompanied by extreme sentimentality. In these circumstances, the excessive emotionality in certain areas of life seems to be compensating for the lack of feeling under ordinary, personal circumstances.
The lack of "normal" emotions in response to certain stressors can be an important clue to missing feelings, one that is easily overlooked. Emotional numbness should be a signal that sends you looking for feelings that have been hidden or disguised. Unless, of course, you are Mr. Spock.
How to lookout for missing feelings?
Learn when to expect emotions so you know what emotions to look for. Certain specific types of triggers reliably prompt certain basic emotions:
Reflect on which of these basic emotions you rarely experience, or which ones you experience regularly that seem somehow "off.". Use your private eye to look inside to uncover your more natural emotions, signals that will direct you to more of your true self.
The more you learn about your emotions and feelings, the more you'll start to notice when they occur inside you. As an Emotional Detective, you will eventually come to see emotions like a carpenters sees nails.
This is the final post in a six-part series overviewing How to Become an Emotional Detective.
A private eye is an apt metaphor for becoming more introspective.
To develop your private eye you must understand how your emotions work and turn your attention inward to start collecting clues. It is important to understand your personal history and existing biases about emotions. To identify your biases, it helps to recognize which emotions are difficult for you to experience, recognize, and express.
Your early memories hold clues that can clarify your emotional confusion.
How to know if you are likely to misperceive certain emotions with your private eye?
Among the five basic emotions (anger, sorrow, fear, disgust and joy):
Think back on your earliest memories of experiencing those emotions that are difficult, uncomfortable, or shameful for you:
Answers are within your reach, but you must choose to look for them.
The other five posts in this series are: Becoming an Emotional Detective, The Right Attitude, Could David Brooks be an Emotional Detective?, Special Challenges for An Emotional Detective, Collecting Clues
This is the fifth in a six-part series giving a brief overview of How to Become an Emotional Detective.
While most detectives look for clues outside of themselves, Emotional Detectives look for clues within.
Focussing your attention inward will help you unravel the mysteries of your emotional life. The clues you will be following are your own emotional responses. It's like applying a magnifying glass to your own reactions so that you can see yourself better.
Find a smallish notebook (like a real detective) and start collecting information about your emotional reactions. It may be useful to keep this pad by your bed or on your desk.
1) Write down your dreams in as much detail as you can. Be sure to include how you felt in the dream and how you felt when you awoke. Make note of the date of the dream and significant events that directly preceded it. Remember that an event can be something that is occurring in the outside world, or it can be something that is going on in your mind or body.
2) Keep track of your intense or bizarre emotions. Make note of events that preceded your seemingly inappropriate emotions. This knowledge may help you discover your idiosyncratic emotional triggers, clues to the source of your emotional confusion.
3) It is especially critical to take note of emotions that may be missing. To do this, write down instances when it might seem natural to have strong emotions, yet when you seem to have have none (e.g. if you are not sad when suffering a loss or frightened when threatened with danger). Notice when you feel "out of it", or numb, or empty and jot down some notes about what was going on beforehand.
The other five posts in this series are: Becoming an Emotional Detective, The Right Attitude, Could David Brooks be an Emotional Detective?, Special Challenges for An Emotional Detective, What is a Private Eye?
This is the fourth in a six-part series giving a brief overview of How to Become an Emotional Detective.
When exploring your inner world, most of what you are searching for has previously passed beneath the radar of your awareness. The so-called crimes you are investigating are ongoing: you, your life, your feelings and perspective are constantly changing. You probably trick yourself about how you feel from time to time. Furthermore, you likely believe things about yourself and your life that are not really true. These conditions make the job of an Emotional Detective challenging, but by no means impossible. Recognizing these obstacles helps you do the job more effectively.
While it is humbling to be aware of your uncertainty, it is also empowering. Awareness of uncertainty makes it easier to learn more. An open mind prepares you for surprises, helping you make new discoveries about yourself and others. All this helps you identify longstanding misconceptions about yourself that have gotten in your way, without your even knowing it.
When investigating your inner life, you can only know what you know now; there will always be more you don't yet know. This is true for us all.
So how to proceed with your investigation of your inner world?
Remember that you could always be wrong about what you believe about yourself.
The other five posts in this series are: Becoming an Emotional Detective, The Right Attitude, Could David Brooks be an Emotional Detective? Collecting Clues, What is a Private Eye?
This is the third in a six-part series giving a brief overview of How to Become an Emotional Detective.
The International Herald Tribune published a great piece by commentator David Brooks yesterday. I have extracted extensive quotes from his article because they mirror so many of my own views while putting them in a broader cultural context. His recent book called The Social Animal describes his ideas in greater detail.
Brooks posits that people in our culture "emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion....
Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view is coming back into view. It is being brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on....
This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships....
We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.
When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people."
Thanks to David Brooks for this wonderful commentary.
In this blog, I will share with you a model that reflects much of this research. Consider me a curator of contemporary ideas about human nature. Please join me as I share insights about life below the surface of awareness, to learn more about yourself and others - to create a more fulfilling life.
The other five posts in this series are: Becoming an Emotional Detective, The Right Attitude, Special Challenges for An Emotional Detective, Collecting Clues, What is a Private Eye?
This is the second in a six-part series overviewing How to Become an Emotional Detective.
Local Cuban artist Elsa Mora suggests approaching introspection with a curious, loving heart which I think is a great approach. Her beautiful drawing visually conveys her imaginings.
Judgments and preconceptions can interfere with our seeing the truth about ourselves.
A stance of humility also befits an Emotional Detective. Remember the demeanor of fictional detectives like Columbo or Inspector Clouseau? These comical characters often appeared clueless, yet a large measure of their strength came from their awareness of their own ignorance. When it comes to your inner emotional world, the same is true for you: it really helps to be humble.
No matter how hard you try to be objective, you will always have biases about your emotional life. There are inevitably going to be certain emotions that you overlook or distort. This may only happen at certain times or with certain people, but it is sure to happen on occasion. For example, you may not be aware of when you are sad, even though everyone else can hear it in your voice and see it in your face. Or you may react with anger, without recognizing it in yourself. Or you may come across as angry, when you are really sad or frightened.
No matter how hard you try to learn the truth about your own reactions, there will always be plenty of your own emotional reactions that you miss. Some of your blind spots come from biases that you have learned as a child. Think of these biases as stemming from your personal myths about emotions that you learned when you were young. These biases may sometimes make it hard to see certain emotions in yourself and others.
How can you look inside yourself and see clearly?
The best antidote to confusion about yourself is to:
This is the most productive attitude for an Emotional Detective. Keep in mind that it can be hard to bear so much uncertainty, especially when it is about yourself.
The other five posts in this series are: Becoming an Emotional Detective, Could David Brooks be An Emotional Detective? Special Challenges for An Emotional Detective, Collecting Clues, What is a Private Eye?
This is the first in a six-part series on How to Become an Emotional Detective.
The Emotional Detective is a metaphor for investigating your own emotional processes, especially those that pass under the radar of your awareness. Focussing your attention on your emotions allows you get to know your true self and start playing with a full emotional deck. The artist Elsa Mora drew an image of what emotional introspection and investigation might look like.
Understanding how emotions operate, and what purpose they serve makes introspection much more constructive. For example, it helps to know that unanticipated frustration leads to anger, even if you aren't accustomed to seeing yourself as someone who gets angry. Research has increasingly shown the pervasive influence of emotions on motivations, behavior, and perception, regardless of our level of awareness (check out book suggestions in Resources).
For example, you may have learned to hide your anger long ago, even from yourself. Knowing that you are unexpectedly thwarted you are probably angry, even when you don't "feel" it, can be very useful. It can clarify a situation that might otherwise remain quite muddled.
It is now abundantly clear that emotions are the underlying motivators of our lives: they guide much of our outlook and experience of the world. Understanding emotions helps you chart your course in life more effectively. The next five posts will briefly discuss your attitude to your inner world, techniques for getting started, and overcoming common obstacles.
Becoming an Emotional Detective means acquiring accurate information about your inner world. Specifically, it entails paying attention to your emotions and feelings and learning to make sense of them -- especially those that occur beneath the surface.
Getting Started:
Approach your inner life as if it were a crime scene in which you are both the victim and the perpetrator (as well as the detective).
The so-called emotional crime went something like this:
Certain of your emotional reactions have been forbidden expression, disguised, or misunderstood. Some were originally hidden when you were very little, often without your knowing it. Babies and children mask their emotions to accommodate others, to keep loved ones close. They instinctively defer to their caregivers because of their dependency. This type of emotional accommodation happens automatically, as part of human nature.
Changing yourself to suit others without knowing it is confusing. Unfortunately, this emotional subterfuge can lead to problems if it becomes habitual. Emotional masking can cause mental problems both large and small. It causes problems that restrict your options in life. These problems can be uncovered, investigated, and understood.
Unlike most crimes, you already know the broad outline of what has transpired. The purpose of this investigation is to uncover hidden truths, not to find anyone guilty of a real crime.
How to begin a process of self-discovery, while avoiding self-blame?
Developing the appropriate mindset is critical to becoming a successful Emotional Detective. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
Understanding more about human nature, including how emotions work, makes it easier to apply this approach to yourself -- to gain control, become freer, and grow. Becoming an Emotional Detective is about unmasking who you really; discovering your true self will most easily happen by developing the habit of investigating your emotional life.
The other five posts in this series are: The Right Attitude, Could David Brooks be An Emotional Detective? Special Challenges for An Emotional Detective, Collecting Clues, What is a Private Eye?
