W. FEELINGS ARE A MIXED BLESSING
Feelings can sometimes motivate good and responsible actions, but they can also impede good actions or motivate irresponsible ones. Feelings need to be felt and understood so that they can become our servants rather than making us slaves.
Just as the Age of Reason was a reaction against tendencies toward unthinking superstitions and careless religion, there came to be a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment as well and it was called Romanticism. It affirmed that the human being is more than just a thinking head. Humans are also able to have strong emotions and capable of expressing them in personal relationships and in the arts.
In the past three decades or so there has been a resurgence of appreciation for the importance of "getting in touch with our feelings" and expressing them in appropriate ways. All sorts of therapeutic techniques and movements have emerged that have helped us recover this "lost dimension" of our humanness, despite the critical caricatures that refer to such endeavors as being "touchy-feely."
Mark Twain said, "A lot of feeling goes on in the name of thinking," and there is a difference. I can think of two ways in which emotions can interfere with clear thinking. One way has to do with how human emotions can be multiplied in a crowd setting to move one beyond rational behavior. A crowd then becomes a mob.
All of us have had distressing experiences of various sorts. There's no way to avoid them entirely; it comes with the territory called "life." A lot of things have angered us or frightened us or made us cry. Unfortunately, most of us haven't raged or trembled or cried enough when those times came. We were surrounded by many well-meaning people giving us quick comfort to quiet us down or distract us to happier thoughts, or even threaten us with a "fatherly", "shut up or I'll give you something to cry about!"
The result has been that our natural tools for dealing with distress–– crying, raging, trembling, even giggling–– were not permitted to function sufficiently. They were short-circuited. So we "stuffed" the distress feelings with the expectation that they would just disappear. But that's not the way we're built. Distress feelings that are not expressed ("discharged" is a term often used because the feelings have a certain internal power), are "stored" and can be easily re-stimulated when a similar situation arises in a person's life.
As a consequence a person's freedom to respond appropriately to each new situation as it arises is limited to some degree by the left over distress. If a person involved in a horrendous car accident doesn't have sufficient opportunity to talk about it and rehearse the feelings associated with it until the memory is no longer upsetting, that person can be irrationally hesitant ever to get into a car again. Women who have been raped have a lot of "discharging" to do to someone offering loving attention if that experience isn't to interfere with her having a normal and loving sex life.
The point is that feelings, even distress feelings, are not our enemies. They serve a worthwhile purpose. We should have fears about some things. We do well to get angry about some things. It's normal to express grief for ourselves and sympathy for others. What is not good is when feelings out of a previous distress interfere with our present decisions and actions.
There's another debilitating result from undischarged distress and that is that the experience may file some misinformation in our memories. Children who were painfully embarrassed speaking in front of a class, for example, can develop a "pattern" of thinking that she's not made for public speaking and will never be caught in that situation again. You can think of dozens of illustrations of how a painful experience imposed a false limitation on a person's thinking and behavior. Such a person needs an opportunity to undo those restrictive "patterns" thus expanding their freedom to be their whole selves and live a whole life.
In the light of all this, a style and theory of counseling has been developed called Re-Revaluation Counseling. Since this counseling is usually done by a pair of people taking turns being "counselor" and "client," it's also called Co-Counseling. It requires a few weeks of training The process involves discharging whatever pains there are, identifying the patterns of attitude and behavior that have grown out of that muck and contradicting those patterns and ultimately eliminating them. The process becomes the best and most efficient bag of tools I've ever encountered for "keeping clean" of new distresses, flushing out old ones and taking increasing charge of my own life.
[Editor's note: Bob Holmes was the one who introduced this system to Montana in the 70's.]
Whether or not you ever make use of these tools, there are at least three insights derived from this theory that can serve you well in your relationships with people:
(1) If someone is doing a hurtful thing to you or others you can be sure that that person is in some sort of pain. It's not normal to hurt another unless we're hurting, which suggests that the most productive response is not one of revenge, but understanding. Someone has said that if we could read the secret history of our "enemies," we should find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all brutality. How I wish the world on all its battlefronts knew this.
(2) When you are verbally attacked or otherwise offended by another person, you may not really be the target at all. You just happen to be there to receive the blow intended for someone else (even though the perpetrator may not be conscious of who that real target is.)
(3) YOU CANNOT CHANGE THE PAST. BUT YOU CAN CHANGE THE IMPACT OF THE PAST ON THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE! (Check our earlier distinction between determinism and freedom.)
In a nutshell the point is this: We are meant to be (created to be) rational human beings, capable of positive feelings of all kinds and able to deal responsibly with negative ones. Nothing is to be gained by holding on to distress feelings beyond their proper time. There is no way to avoid all painful experiences, but there is a way to acknowledge them, deal with them and move beyond them.
In the light of what I've said here, I suggest another Rule for the Road:
BE KIND TO EVERYONE YOU MEET. HE'S HAVING A HARD TIME.
EXTENDED READING;
The Human Side of Human Beings, by Harvey Jackins, founder of Re-evaluation Counseling.
TOOLS AND APPROACHES - W
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