Emotional Detective

Spring Un-Cleaning

This is the first segment in a three-part series on Tidying Up Emotions

Spring is here and tips on spring-cleaning are popping up everywhere.  While getting organized and streamlined for the new season makes sense in our exterior lives, for an Emotional Detective, mindlessly boxing up or tossing out the odd, forgotten or unused stuff in our interior closets is a terrible waste of good material.  And it's counter-productive.  Before clearing out any emotions, you have to first survey your old mess.  So I propose you start with a spring un-cleaning: a deep exploration and sorting of your buried “stuff.” 

 

 

If we could just rewind a video of our life and re-examine our earlier influences, family, culture and individual experiences, it would be much easier to understand how our messy feelings and reactions got formed. 

Sadly, that’s not possible; but you can build a timeline, anchored by moments or events in your life that were significant to you.  Constucting a personal timeline with some commentary (click for a free  timeline tool) can help you examine what has been laid down in your emotional past. 

For example:

 

Personal Timeline        

Event                                                       Comment

1970 Born in LA                                                   Healthy

1975 Parents Divorce                                           Threw-up, but said nothing

1977 Appendectomy                                             Scared, sad

1982 First Kiss                                                      Excited, happy, confident

1988 College                                                        Excited, scared, curious

1993 Hired by Newspaper                                     Overwhelmed, determined

1996 Married                                                        Excited, hopeful, nervous

1997 Promotion at work                                        Proud, excited, confidant

1999 Stillborn Child                                              Sad, scared, hopeless

2001 First Child                                                    So happy, scared,

2007 Mom Died                                                     Sad, scared, alone

 

Why is it important to dig through the past when you are really most concerned about the present?  The reason is simple: your emotional past is etched into your memory -- even if you don’t remember it correctly, or at all.  Unconscious memories persist in people like data in a hard drive.   Even when we can’t readily access them, emotional memories linger inside us and effect our perceptions, experience and behavior.

 

Imagine opening your emotional “closet,” and pulling out and trying on things that have been hidden or saved for years and years.

Make a timeline including major physical, social, and intellectual experiences in the order in which they occurred.  If you don't want to do this online, you can draw it on paper (rolled paper from an adding machine works well).

Consider including:

• Your accomplishments and achievements (athletic, academic, interpersonal, or artistic)
• Painful changes (losses, traumas, major conflicts, moves, developmental delays, health problems and other struggles)
• Intense moments of closeness, aloneness, betrayal or conflict
• Solitary moments of revelation, joy or pain
• Significant landmarks for you and your family (births, deaths, divorces, crises or key events)

Now that you have selected which events to include, add a brief comment about how you think you felt at the time of each event.  Finally, look for photos from the time period of the events you choose (you can add these to your timeline online).  Or draw some pictures that seem right to you.  Add any details or notes to your timeline that seem important (emotions, scents, tactile memories, odd details).    

Looking honestly at your past emotional experiences can be painful, but it's a great way to get ready for what is to come: interpreting what you’ve chosen, reconsidering old narratives around these events, thinking about the characters and roles they played, considering new ways to see the past (next week's post). 

In other words, get ready to try things on and see what still fits, and what you’ve outgrown. 

Ah, spring!
 

Celebrity Gossip

Last in a three-part series on Gossip.

When my daughters became teenagers, I decided to dip a toe into their culture.   I purchased slightly trendier clothing and allowed myself to curse, on occasion.  After shunning celebrity rags like People and Us my entire life, I started perusing them so I would know what my girls were reading.  


It really surprised me how much I enjoyed these trashy magazines, especially while on airplanes.   Despite knowing that the stories are salacious and inaccurate, I got sucked in.  Despite loathing paparazzi who probe intrusively into people's lives, I liked the photos.   Clearly I am not alone in feeling the pull of these publications.  It seems that the whole world is fascinated by the personal lives of celebrities, politicians and the very rich. 
What is so compelling about the private lives of perfect strangers?

There are good evolutionary reasons why the alpha (top) members of our tribe might fascinate us.  It is usually adaptive to understand the motives and behavior of the leaders in your pack since they make critical decisions about your world.  These days, however, our pack is the whole world, thanks to telecommunications and the media.   Information about the personal lives of our leaders and stars is mostly useless; these people are too far removed from our lives and daily decisions.   Nonetheless, we may be hard-wired to be curious about the people at the top (in terms of intelligence, talent, appearance, ability, success, wealth, power, etc).  And of course, we are fascinated when they fall. 

Years after the TV show Friends ended, seeing the characters still felt like seeing my friends.  Passively watching people on TV, or reading about them in celebrity rags, does create a sense of community, however false and one-sided.  We never see, touch, or communicate with our celebrity “friends” and they never respond to us or help out, but they are familiar.   Unfortunately, following media gossip and having celebrity or TV character “relationships” is artificial – it does not bring the same health benefits as having real relationships.  In fact, these pseudo-relationships do harm when they take the place of  real relationships. 

How then can you use your intrinsic interest in the noteworthy and notorious to benefit yourself?

Your interests in celebrity gossip can teach you about yourself.  

First, consider what sort of celebrity gossip you like:

• Who do you follow in the news? Who fascinates you most?
• Are these people politicians (power brokers), actors (appealing specimens), artists (creative types or special talents), or sports heroes (physical stars, role models from your youth)? 
• Are you interested in their biographies, personalities, current behavior, or accomplishments?

Next, look for themes in your interests:

• Do you identify with victims, perpetrators, loners or power brokers? (I am fascinated when successful people give into outrageous primitive impulses and “let themselves go”– it is hard to imagine giving myself permission to do something like that.)
• Are you interested when "good" people do "bad" things?  Or when "bad" things happen to "good" people?  (Which position do you relate to most often?)   
• Are you riveted by the antics of the “bad” boys and girls in our culture?   (I am tickled when a public figure loses it entirely, like when Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s sofa.)
• Do “good” works (acts of heroism, selfless hard work) capture your attention?   

Now take it a step further:

• What might your gossipy interests mean about you and your self-image? (For example, do you root for the nice girls who struggle and then get what they want?  Is this how you see yourself?)
• Do the objects of your gossipy interest represent a part of your Self?  (Of course they do!) Perhaps they represent a missing part of your Self (your aggression, compassion, etc.,) – a part that you would like to reclaim.
• Do celebrity downfalls make you feel better about your own situation?  (Schadenfreude – taking pleasure from the misfortune of others -- is satisfying in part because, by comparison, we become elevated in our own minds.)
• What does your interest in these strangers mean about your hopes or dreams? (Perhaps I’d like to feel freer to indulge “unacceptable” parts of myself?)
• How do your gossipy interests reflect your past experience and fears?

All of your interests, no matter how seemingly frivolous, tell you something about yourself.   (And you thought Tom Cruise was just another pretty face.)