Speaking the language of emotions …

We’ve all seen it. Something is said or written, and someone will go off. I mean off. Rage, hatred, or both at once.  A fight starts, and maybe these intense emotions get handled between two people, or maybe they don’t (online interactions specialize in the maybe they don’t category).

So the raging people invite allies to share (and justify) their intense emotions, and a flame war starts. If this blowup isn’t dealt with, the behavior goes unchecked, and people learn that it’s okay to allow their emotions to explode. Moderate people may try to address the emotional issues, but once alliances are formed and people share their emotions in groups, the blowups start to look justified, and not like emotional decisions at all … they become incontrovertible facts, and emotional awareness is lost.

In my book, I call intense emotions like rage and hatred (and panic and the suicide urge) the raging rapids emotions, because if you don’t know what these emotions are supposed to do or what gifts they contain, you can very easily get caught up in their rapids, pulled underwater, and smashed repeatedly against the rocks! You can become a puppet of your emotions instead of their partner.

The trick in dealing with big, powerful, or troubling emotional states is to understand first that emotions are always true (about something), but they’re not always right.

As action-requiring neurological programs, emotions give you crucial information about every aspect of your world; you can’t think, reason, learn, decide, or interact without them. However, when your emotions are very intense, you should insert cognitively moderated pauses between having your emotion, feeling it, and expressing it.

With rage and hatred, those cognitive pauses need to be looooooong because you can really hurt yourself and other people if you’re unskilled with your rage and hatred — or if you don’t even know that you’re feeling rage and hatred in the first place.

But before those necessary cognitive pauses can occur, you have to understand the difference between an emotion and a feeling.

Emotions, feelings, and the difference between them

Someone asked me about the difference between an emotion and a feeling last year, and my answer was that emotion is a noun, and feeling is a verb. I didn’t really understand why the distinction was important, but I’ve thought about it a great deal. I really wondered what the confusion was about — I mean, you have an emotion, you feel it, it’s identified, bing. Right? Then, because you know what emotion it is, you know exactly how to work with it. Right? Why, it’s so simple, a child could … oh.

Thud.

I realize that it’s not so simple for many people.

So I went back to the books, and after re-reading Antonio Damasio’s books (Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and Looking for Spinoza), some sociology of emotion (How Emotions Work by Jack Katz) and some neurology of emotion (The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux and On Being Certain by Robert Burton), I finally figured out what’s up.

It’s the difference between having and knowing

An emotion is a physiological experience (or state of awareness) that gives you information about the world, and a feeling is your conscious awareness of the emotion itself. I hadn’t really understood why the distinction was such a big deal, because I don’t experience a huge gap between emotion and feeling. I mean, if there’s an emotion going on, I feel it. Bing.

But this isn’t true for everyone. Many people are honestly unaware that they’re having an emotion. For them, the emotion and the consciousness of it are not strongly connected, and they don’t even realize that they’re fearful, or angry, or depressed. Their emotional state has to become so persistent that it drags them into a severe mood (or is pointed out by someone else), and then they can realize, “Oh, I guess I’ve been really sad about my mom, or afraid about money, or angry about work.”

For many people, there’s a disconnect between emotion and feeling; there’s no consciousness of the emotion at all. They have the emotion, but they don’t know about it. The emotion is certainly there, and their behavior displays the emotion (to others at least), but they aren’t feeling it properly.

Maybe they need a chart to show them what emotions look like! Thank goodness the Department of Lolcatz has provided us with one!

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It’s here! Our online course is here!

Starting on Tuesday, March 13th, 2012, you’ll be able to join me in our 8-week online course Emotional Flow: Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions. I’m so looking forward to meeting you there!

Your emotions are absolutely essential to every aspect of your intelligence and perception—yet few of us were ever taught how to work with them skillfully. Join me as I bring bring together new findings from sociology, psychology, and neuroscience, plus my own in-depth work to help you access and flow with every dimension of your emotional life.

First, you’ll learn how to identify your current areas of emotional mastery and difficulty. Then you’ll learn five core Emotional Mindfulness practices to ground yourself, create healthy boundaries, and free yourself from unhealthy emotional behaviors. With this foundation, you’ll be able to engage gracefully with every emotion you have—and learn effortless ways to bring emotional flow and empathic intelligence to every part of your life.

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Let’s Get Emotional! Embracing Your Empathic Genius

Sunday, February 12th thru Friday, February 17th, 2012 with Karla McLaren at Kripalu Retreat Center in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts!

A quiet grove at Kripalu

People are always telling us not to get emotional, but did you know that your emotions bring you the gifts of intuition, clarity, decisiveness, the capacity to set effective boundaries, the ability to communicate and relate with others, and the ability to amend unworkable behaviors and heal deep psychological wounds?

In The Language of Emotions, I introduce you to the genius of your emotions and teach you specific skills to help you identify, welcome, and work with all of them. In this week-long retreat, you and your emotions will experience a safe and welcoming “empathic sleepover camp” where emotional awareness, deep relaxation, and healing laughter will help you translate the language of your own emotions into tangible and useful wisdom.

You’ll learn empathic mindfulness practices to help you define, ground, and center yourself in a hectic and non-empathic world, empathic relationship practices to help you increase empathy and deepen communication with your loved ones, and specific ways to skillfully engage with every emotion you have. Special activities include:

• Emotion Theater, a fun opportunity to explore emotions with the help of other empaths

• A Shadow Walk to help you learn to deal brilliantly with hatred, and

• A Grief Ritual to help you mourn your losses

Come and explore your emotional awareness and your empathic genius … safely, enjoyably, and with lots of support!

A lovely original building on Kripalu grounds

At Kripalu’s gorgeous Berkshires retreat center, you’ll find healthy organic meals, wonderful views, and the opportunity to relax, get back to nature, and take excellent care of yourself. Kripalu is a nationally celebrated center for yoga and health, and every day’s schedule includes space for free classes in yoga, dance, movement, and health awareness. Kripalu also has wonderful spa treatments, massages, facials, and more. It’s a place to visit every year — or even more than once a year — to renew, restore yourself, learn new skills, eat healthy food, meet lovely people, and recharge your batteries. Heaven!

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2012 is almost here, and this exciting and troubling 2011 is almost over. I hope you’re warm, safe, and well, and I wish you a Happy New Year!

As we head into a year that is being promoted by some as either the end of the world or the beginning of a new dawn in human development, I’d like to take an empathic, historical look at prophecies that foretell the end of the world, the end of an era, or the beginning of a new, Utopian society.

The never-ending story of the end of the world

Though end-time beliefs and prophecies may seem unusual in our post-Enlightenment age, they’re actually very, very common. Humans have written down end-times prophecies since the beginning of recorded history, and these prophecies continue to be a central feature in many communities. In fact, the end times are a basic tenet of Christianity on the religious side of things, while some form of end-times theorizing (the eventual supernova of our sun, for instance) is a basic tenet of astrophysics on the scientific side of things. Environmentalists and climate scientists have yet another series of end-time or dark-time scenarios.

The idea that the world will end and that humanity will cease to exist — this is a very common idea. What seems uncommon is the specificity we’re seeing these days, where people swear that the end is going to occur on a specific day (remember Harold Camping’s May 21st prophecy?), through a specific event (the Supermoon of last April), or in a specific year (2012).

But in fact, these end-times prophecies are made constantly, regularly, and almost predictably, as this centuries long list from the Frontline story of Apocalypse shows. End times prophecies are absolutely everywhere, and they’re actually sort of addicting, because once these terrifying and ecstatic prophecies get into you, it’s really hard to let them go.

Consider the Millerites, a group of nearly 100,000 Americans who believed the prophecies of Baptist lecturer William Miller, who told them that Jesus would return (and end the world as they knew it) in December, 1843. Though the world was supposed to end in 1843, Miller’s followers were promised a life in Paradise with Jesus. Miller’s prophecy filled his followers with terrible fear and glorious hope; the Millerites were a deeply devout and deeply emotional group of believers.

December 1843 came and went with no apocalypse and no sign of the Messiah, so Miller returned to his prayers and re-prophesied the return of Jesus for March, 1844. When that didn’t happen, Miller re-re-prophesied the return of Jesus for October of that same year. That third failure is now known as the Great Disappointment.

But even after two failures and a Great Disappointment, the Millerites still had enough members to form a series of Adventists groups, including one splinter group that would eventually become the Seventh Day Adventist church, which is now an established church with missions in over 200 countries. The Adventists, like all other churches, still form splinter groups to this day (a recent Adventist splinter group, formed in 1955, was the Branch Davidians, many of whom died at Waco Texas in 1993).

More recently, many people in the Jehovah’s Witnesses believed that Armageddon would occur in 1975, but that didn’t happen and the church is still going strong. Harold Camping, who was behind the May 2011 end-times prophecy, previously predicted Judgment Day and the return of Jesus on September 6th, 1994, but when that didn’t happen, he realized that he had gotten his math wrong.

Camping then re-prophesied Judgment Day, first to 1995, and then to May 2011 — and in May, when the apocalypse still didn’t happen and Jesus didn’t return, he re-re-re-prophesied the end times to October 21, 2011. Yet the failure of Camping’s prophecies, and the endless centuries of failure of every single end-times prophecy that has ever been prophesied have very little effect:

Christopher Lane, author of The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty notes. “Thirty to forty percent of Americans report believing that the end times are coming eventually, so while most reject the teachings of Camping, there is a strong strain of this kind of thinking in this country.”

So for some, anxiety spurred by the recent natural and economic disasters makes apocalyptic thinking more appealing, he says. “It becomes easier to convince people that things are getting worse and that the answer will come through divine dispensation, rather than have them face the fact that humanity must fix its own problems.” From Doomsday Psychology: The Appeal of Armageddon at ABC News.com

As we head into the overly prophesied, highly publicized, and internet-intensified Year 2012 doomsday scenarios, just remember this: End times thinking is an absolutely normal and expected part of human nature — as is dreaming of Utopias.

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As I’ve been working with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s definition of emotions as action-requiring neurological programs, I created a flowchart to help you understand the difference between feelings and emotions. This is my simplified flowchart:

An emotionally evocative stimulus occurs → The stimulus evokes a specific emotion → You utilize your ability to feel that emotion → You name that emotion → You act on the information the emotion provides

As we all know, this flowchart can break down at any point in its progression. First, a person can misinterpret the emotionally evocative stimulus. Second, the evoked emotion may be unstable (for instance, some people move to rage, depression, or anxiety whenever any problem, large or small, occurs). Third, a person may not be tuned into his or her intrapersonal capacity to feel emotions — and may not know which emotion has been evoked. Fourth, a person may misidentify the emotion or ignore it completely. And fifth, a person may act on the emotion without thinking.

The work in The Language of Emotions exists to help you become more intelligent in each step of this process, from stimulus to emotion to action. But because there can be such trouble in the emotional realm, I’ve inserted a crucial step between the naming and the acting, which is cognitively questioning the emotion in a way that supports it. With this step, you become able to behave in truly rational ways that make you more intelligent about and with your emotions. When you question your emotions, you don’t fight with them. You turn toward them, and you work with them:

An emotionally evocative stimulus occurs → The stimulus evokes a specific emotion → You utilize your ability to feel that emotion → You name that emotion → You question that emotion → You act on the information that emotion provides, or you decide not to act because the stimulus is invalid

This might look like an involved process, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very quick — and it helps you learn to work with your emotions in focused and rational ways.

Becoming a stimulus for other people

In social relationships, we often work to evoke specific emotions in other people. For instance, in the area of happiness, I’d like you to think about the amount of time and energy you spend trying to make other people feel happy. If you think about this, you may be struck by the absurdity of the situation, because if you try to make someone else feel happy, you almost have to stop being a person in order to become a happiness-evoking stimulus.

Your needs and your private life sort of have to be set aside as you focus on the needs and emotional states of other people. This is, of course, a part of belonging to a social species. If you don’t pay any attention to the needs of others, you will become a socially unsuccessful outcast.

However, you can benefit from looking at your need to make other people feel specific emotions, because while we can assume that being surrounded by upbeat and contented people is more comfortable than being surrounded by angry, anxious, or depressed people, I’d like to question that assumption. That assumption treats the emotions of other people as something we need to manage or control. In fact, it treats the emotions of other people as our personal liability; it treats the emotions of other people as a part of our work.

Understanding emotion work

In her excellent 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Hochschild described what she termed “emotion work,” or the way that our emotions and emotional states are a part of what we offer (and what is expected from us) in the workplace. For instance, flight attendants must not only understand the intricacies of their physical work on airplanes, but they must also display an open and welcoming demeanor to passengers. Even when passengers are bad-tempered or clingy, part of the work of a flight attendant is to continually offer a calm, helpful, accepting presentation of self that is intended to evoke happiness and contentment in others (unless Alec Baldwin is on board; then all bets are off).

This concept of the presentation of self is important in sociology, because it identifies humans as skilled behavioral performers in our various social worlds. Especially at work, we all learn to adopt a type of behavioral performance that is quite different from the performances we give at home, with our family, or with our friends. In each different social world, we learn to behave differently: we speak, dress, interact, gesture, and emote differently depending upon the demands of each social world we inhabit.

Hochshild’s concept of emotion work really helps us look at the behavioral rules that are expected in the workplace (but rarely stated outright) – at how we must manage our own emotions and intentionally evoke or soothe the emotions of others in order to get our jobs done.

For instance, if airline passengers are rude, a good flight attendant won’t generally snap at them or ignore their requests – as he might if his friends or family treated him rudely.  In fact, his normal human reactions would be frowned upon by the airline; therefore, part of his job description (though it may not be written down in black and white) is to deal with rudeness and bad behavior in unusual or even counter-productive (to him) ways. When a passenger does something that normally evokes frustration, anxiety, or anger, a good flight attendant will not display those normal human emotions. Instead, he may ignore his own emotional state and actually work to evoke calm and happiness in the offending passenger (some frequent flyers understand these unspoken emotion-work rules and behave inexcusably on flights because they know they can usually get away with it).

This is emotion work. It’s a part of our social contract with each other, and though it’s not given as much importance as other areas of a job description, emotion work is possibly the most important job skill you possess.

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