March 25, 2008

• Inner Pieces, Volume 3

  What is an emotion?

  The dictionary defines it like this:
  1) an affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness.
  2) any of the feeling of joy, sorrow, fear, hate, love, etc.
  3) any strong agitation of the feelings actuated by experiencing love, hate fear, etc, and usually accompanied by certain physiological changes, as increased heartbeat or respiration, and often overt manifestation, as crying or shaking.
  4) an instance of this.
  5) something that causes such a reaction.
  [1570-80, <MF esmotion, to set in motion, move the feelings]

  These aren't wrong, but they aren't really going deep enough for my purposes.

  An emotion is a full-body bio-chemical response to a conscious or unconscious thought.

  Not every thought provokes an emotional response.  Many thoughts are neutral, or at least should be.  I mean, we've all seen people emotionally overreact to thoughts that seemed neutral.  But they responded emotionally because they had information or experiences (possibly obsolete) that, to them, made the situation more serious than we knew.  Sometimes when we discover those additional reasons, we understand their reaction and may even share it.

  The old saying, "Time heals all wounds," is somewhat true -- strong emotional reactions to past events do tend to fade over time -- but it isn't absolute.  Some old hurts never heal completely.  When we think of them years later, they still provoke an emotional response.

  Often though, it's not time alone that is doing the healing, it's gaining new understanding or perspective on the event, i.e. new information or experiences that change the way we think about the situation.

  We each have a certain degree of power over our thoughts.  I'm not sure anyone acheives 100% perfect control over all their conscious and unconscious thoughts, but with practice we can 'change our minds' about many of the thoughts that provoke emotional responses.  I learned this while in a cognitive behavior therapy group a couple years ago.  We can become more cognizant of our thoughts and thereby interrupt the process that triggers emotional responses that interfere with our enjoyment of life.

  By the same token, however, we can provoke within ourselves whatever emotional response we'd like to experience by dredging up thoughts that trigger those emotions.  There are plenty of things in the world, in my own personal experience or in history or in the news, to get sad or mad or glad about.  If I want to feel angry, all I have to do is dwell on some big nasty injustice that has happened.  Then if I want to feel happy again, I can put it out of my mind and think about things that make me happy.

  Why would anyone dwell on thoughts that create unpleasant emotions?  Well, if we never had unpleasant emotions, we'd wouldn't get nearly the number of wonderful inventions that make our life more pleasant.  Necessity isn't the mother of invention, unhappiness is, and it's the human desire to avoid unhappiness and make ourselves more comfortable, happy, and satisified with our existence that has sparked such things as indoor plumbing, central heat and air, civil rights, the woman's right to vote, etc and so forth.

  Also, artists of all ilk, but actors in particular using a technique called Method Acting, draw on their own emotional experiences to perform their art. 

  In writing, it's oft-repeated advice that the main character must want something.  Happy, well-pleased characters don't want anything (and they're boring to read about); they aren't feeling anything unpleasant which is spurring them to change or go on their journey.  And content, well-pleased writers might have a harder time depicting their character's discontent on the page without dredging up at least a little of the discontent within themselves.

  And some of us do better dredging up a little angry energy as motivation to write in the first place.  After all, a happy contented writer may feel no need to create anything.  She's happy and content sitting back with her feet up.  A little bit of angry energy (or fear, or sadness, take your pick of emotions) gives her something to say, a reason to move, and somewhere to go with it.

  Now, I'm off to think about something really un-happying so I finish my collage.

  • 8:39 am
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