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Emotions. People don’t like to name emotions. Don’t like to talk directly about them. For example, nowadays, people say things like “She has feelings for him.” When I hear that, I want to ask…which feelings are you talking about? Although I’ve figured out that the word feelings is used as a synonym, most times, for the word love.
It annoys me when people aren’t direct about their feelings. I do understand that when you name them, you become vulnerable in a sense. Still, I have to ask: Are people afraid to name the emotion love? Maybe. Love is powerful, named or unnamed. It is a force to be reckoned with. But it’s a good force, I think. So why are we afraid of the good?
Last night, I read about feelings. A quote from John Bradshaw: “When out E-motions are not mirrored and named, we lose contact with one of our vital human powers.”
Yes. I understand why naming them is important. When you ignore them as if they didn’t exist, it can get you in trouble. They don’t like to be ignored or rendered invisible. The mirroring part of the quote I had to think about for a while. I think when my parents, my mother, to be exact, would not acknowledge ( read “mirror”) certain emotions I had when I was growing up, it did some not-good things. For one, it can make you crazy when your caregiver doesn’t acknowledge/mirror/validate that you have feelings whether those feelings are “approved of” or not.
The point is not to approve of them, I think. The point is to acknowledge. Without shaming or negative judgement. What I remember is being told that certain feelings, like anger or dislike, were “inappropriate.” The message was that I had no right to feel the way I did because my mother didn’t approve of a particular feeling that I was feeling. Situations like that are shaming. What happens is that emotion gets hooked into the shame feeling so you struggle not to feel it because the shame part eats you alive.
I read once that emotions have no label in actuality. That we label them “good” or “bad” and in all the places in between. I read that emotions simply exist and we weigh them down with the baggage of our experiences. The weight that we give them translate into the labels. But those labels are false faces. A mask. Or perhaps a delusion.
Anyway.
I didn’t know that our emotions are vital powers. What a fascinating thing to contemplate. How can emotions be powers? Much less “vital” powers. Power is a force, energy. Synonyms for “vital” are: vibrant, life-supporting, invigorating, alive, indispensable. If emotions give us fuel to act then I suppose they are powerful. This makes me think of emotions as powerful “magic.” Is that possible? I don’t know, but why not?
Also I read that emotions—for instance, sadness, fear, guilt, shame, joy, anger—give us fuel to act.” Power, again. Energy. Fuel. Propulsion. Do we act from the fuel of emotions? Well, it’s easy to point to anger and say that it fueled my actions. But what about guilt? What about shame? What kinds of behaviors do those things fuel in me? In us?
Many people think of feelings, of emotions as things that make you weak, vulnerable, leaving you without defense. Or they think of emotions as things uncontrollable, or things needing to be controlled and tamed… wild things. Things needing to be imprisoned.
But if emotions are powers—vital powers, then they shouldn’t be imprisoned. If emotions are vital powers… life-giving, invigorating powers, then they are gifts, it seems to me.
What do you think?
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