What Do Emotions Mean?

After reading my September post "Up Close and Impersonal," a good friend of mine sent a very eloquent response with some questions. It was too long to fit in one of the comment boxes, so I'm going to reproduce some parts of it here and respond to them over several posts. His questions touch on issues that often come up in conversations I have with other friends about the ideas in this blog.

My friend comments on the kind of detachment (feeling emotions but not judging them or taking them personally) that I describe, wondering whether this way of approaching emotions would be appropriate in all situations. Aren't there some situations, he asks, where emotions  should be taken personally?

"As a Holocaust historian living in a century of modern crises, I wonder if non-emotional responses to these subjects, even 'should I care to contemplate them in equanimity,' would be fully human or even [as] valuable as full human responses of thought and feeling. Detaching the two from each other seems an enervating separation of the composite components needed for a full-throated response."

I'm pretty sure "non-emotional" here is my friend's summation of what I variously describe in the post (and many previous ones) as letting emotions be, not taking them personally, not getting them caught up in a story, neither grasping nor avoiding them, etc. My own preferred umbrella term for these things is "disidentification." (The problem with "non-emotional" is that it implies that detachment = not having feelings, whereas the opposite is true: feeling my feelings is a prerequisite for learning not to take them personally.) So my friend is asking two questions about disidentification with (or detachment from, if you prefer) emotions, at least in certain situations: Is it "fully human"? And is it as "valuable" as emotional responses with no detachment (where emotions are taken personally)?

In this post I want to address the first question, which seems to me to have to do with ethical judgment. I mean, "human" is obviously metaphorical, since detachment would not make me cease to be a biological human. So the question is: if I am thinking about the Holocaust and I feel pain (or anger, sadness, disgust, guilt, curiosity) but I am also sufficiently detached from that feeling to make a deliberate decision about whether and how to act on it, am I behaving less than ethically?

I don't think so. I make ethical evaluations of my behavior on the basis of three things: my intentions, my actions, and my awareness of consequences. I believe that it is necessary for me to acknowledge (at least to myself) and experience my emotions in order to make the evaluation. It would be impossible for me to fully understand my intentions, for instance, if I were denying my feelings.

But I don't think it's useful to judge the emotions themselves. In fact, in my experience, holding judgments about my feelings is precisely what leads me to start denying or suppressing them. When I was younger, believing that I shouldn't feel angry meant that I suppressed anger when I did feel it, which in turn resulted in stress, depression and occasional inappropriate and hurtful outbursts of rage.

The fact that we can't determine our emotions (influence, yes; determine, no) suggests to me that it is not appropriate to judge someone (including oneself) based solely on what emotion s/he is feeling in a particular situation. Once in my early twenties I had a very odd experience. I was attending a weekly spiritual study group (not Buddhist), and one of the other participants (there were about half a dozen of us) told the group that she was upset and preoccupied because her (adult) son had been threatening to kill himself. Later that week I was talking with her on the telephone (we had previously made plans to do this), so I expressed my concern about her and her son and we talked about the situation for a little while. Then, a couple of weeks later, she confronted the group at our weekly meeting. No one except me had expressed any concern or even asked her about her son after she had shared the story. She pointed out that I was the only one to respond and told the other members how angry she was with them for not following up on this.

Now, here is the odd thing that happened. While she was telling the group how she felt, I had an uncontrollable urge to laugh. It was the most inappropriate emotional response possible. To this day I have no idea what prompted it. It seemed like an almost purely physical reaction, because I did not have any thoughts that her pain and anger or her son's suicide threats were funny or pleasant. I managed not to laugh out loud, but I couldn't completely control my face and I know I was smiling crazily with suppressed laughter. I believe she saw this because she gave me a look of pained puzzlement at one point. But neither she nor anyone else ever asked me about it, and I don't know whether the others noticed at all.

(Since that time I have known one or two people who compulsively smile when they are feeling deep discomfort or displeasure, sometimes fear. So if I had to guess I would say that the laughter was somehow triggered by the intense embarrassment or discomfort of the situation. But that would only be a guess, because I was absolutely unaware of any motivation at the time.)

Certainly I was embarrassed about my urge to laugh. I did my best to control it, and if the woman had asked me about it I would have apologized and given her what explanation there was, which wasn't much. But even then, and certainly now, I don't take the laughter personally in the sense that I don't think it means anything about what kind of person I am. And since I know from that experience that it is possible to have an inappropriate emotional reaction that one can't control, I don't use the presence or absence of specific emotions as the basis for ethical evaluation of behavior.