Good Emotional Hygiene

Events happen in our awareness and the emotions which arise for us give us information about how we are being affected and supply us with the energy to respond in ways which move us toward what we need. Or at least, that is how it might be for us. But our training has not generally prepared us to be so creative. Instead we are either unaware or reactive and end up doing things which create the opposite of what we need. How might we begin to be as healthy as possible with the emotions which are so strong that they come into our conscious awareness?

To have good emotional hygiene (that is to practice principles which promote and preserve emotional health) there are three sets of skills we need to master. We have to know what we are feeling, we have to know what is causing the emotions to arise, and we have to act in ways which create the qualities we need when these feelings occur.

When a conflict grows to sufficient intensity it will break through into our conscious awareness. We may discover it by noticing that others are not doing what we want or they are expressing discontent about our behavior. But if we are going to respond creatively we have to move into our own interior awareness and discover what we are feeling. As we identify what we are STEWing about we gain greater and greater familiarity with what the event is teaching us.

When Joe looked down and saw that the gas gauge was on empty he was angry. When Joe saw Jane come into the living room and change the channel as he was watching TV, he was angry. But under the anger he found many other emotions. He was scared and hurt and sad and guilty, too. The more emotions we can discover, the more data we are getting by which to figure out how to creatively respond.

Whenever a feeling rises to conscious awareness we can gauge whether we are feeling the full feeling or part of it is going into the emotional stuff sack. Or perhaps some of what we are feeling is not about the current incident. Maybe we are pulling some feelings out of the sack.

When, for example, someone makes a choice which hurts us and we are not angry, where did the anger go? When someone doesn't generously let us into the line of traffic as we would like and we begin to yell at them, where is the anger coming from.

One of the men in the Building Healthy Relationships class, I'll call him Ted, went into a tirade one night about his daughter's inattention to her driving. She had borrowed his new truck and as she was backing it out of the garage, caught the rear view mirror on the garage door jamb and ripped it off the truck. He was furious.

A couple of weeks later I asked if she had gotten the truck repaired as he decided to insist from her. "No," he laughed and shook his head. "She borrowed it again last weekend and drove it into a ditch and rolled it. She totaled it. At least she is okay."

He was so angry about the mirror that he didn't leave himself any headroom on his anger. When she destroyed the vehicle he couldn't possibly be angry in proportion. So he just stuffed it all.

Was the anger he felt when she damaged the mirror all about the mirror? Probably not. But he never really figured out what it was about. A part of it was that he didn't feel like she was careful with and thus appreciative of all of the things he gave her, but a part of it was probably his guilt at not being more available to her as a father. He knew he wasn't doing a very good job of raising her but those feelings never really came to the surface in a way that they could guide his choices.

Once we know what we are feeling and where the feelings are coming from, we can act in ways that move us toward what we need. We can design actions or strategies which allow us to be in relation to others such that the qualities we need are created.

Joe can notice that he is angry at himself for not paying attention to the car and its care and set aside some time to give it a tune up. He can use the energy from his anger to get himself to do the work.

Joe can notice when he snaps at Jane for changing the channel that he is burnt out and can discover that he feels really distant from her so he can ask if they can just turn off the TV and talk.

Or Ted can let his daughter know that he doesn't have the relationship he wants with her and can they plan to do some activity together every week.

Each of these is a strategy which moves them towards what they each need. But discovering how they feel, what they need, and what they could do to approach what they need is going to take a lot of work. This may be just too hard to do. Where are they going to find the energy to do all this work?

It is in the emotion that arises out of the conflict that the energy to address it lies.

In Appendix A of Daniel Goleman's book, Emotional Intelligence, he notes that many researchers in the field of emotion suggest that there are certain core or basic emotions upon which all of the other emotions are derived. He uses the analogy of colors or of vibrations as physical correlates of emotional energy. Just as we can create other colors from the basic colors of red, yellow, and blue; so are emotions a blending of the primary feelings. For example, jealousy is a mix of anger, fear, and sadness.

There are many consequences of not being sufficiently connected to and expressive of our emotional life. Alexithymia is the technical name for a condition in which one has difficulty naming ones own feelings. This can be the consequence of a neurological disability or past trauma or just from lack of training and support in knowing and expressing ones feelings. The consistent consequence of this disconnection with ones own interior awareness is a failure to create and sustain intimate relationships. Nearly all of the men I have worked with in my program for men who batter could claim a diagnosis of alexithymia.

The good news is that, except in the rare case of neurological deficits, almost everyone can increase their ability to know and name and express their emotions. It just takes practice. The bad news is that the emotions that are most helpful to feel are the very ones we most don't want to feel.

Still, we are not good about knowing what we feel. Even when we know we are feeling bad, we may have little idea what the source of the bad feeling may be. Isn't there an easier, perhaps more immediate way to know when we are not getting what we need? Yes, indeed. Instead of looking inward, we can look outward upon the many relationships in which we find ourselves. Whenever in any of those relationships we are not getting what we need, we experience conflict. The conflicts we have with others, especially with our most significant others, and most especially the ones which arise over and over, are always a reflection of the conflicts we have within ourselves.