Project Emotions

I have a strong belief that life is enriched with projects. I also have an equally strong trust in self-awareness. However, my self-awareness has been fairly well entrenched in the rational and historically scant of the emotional.

Therefore, over the course of the last month, I set out to become more aware of my emotions. I have been doing this by keeping a journal specifically devoted to the exploration of my feelings, reading books on the topic [1,2] and undertaking a course of 12 sessions of psychotherapy, of which, at the time of writing, I have completed two.

I expect to make many profound (to me) realizations about myself, but I want to share with you, one counter-intuitive discovery so far.

Being "nice" isn't fair. In the name of playing "nice", many good relationships have been ruined. Relationships with real people in the real world are not ideal. This point is probably so tautologically obvious it needs no further exposition. When people get mad, they can feel hatred. But this hatred is not incompatible with love. Quite the contrary, it is just another side of it. We sometimes think that if we swallow these feelings of bitterness, our relationship will be more "ideal". I have swallowed negative feelings often hoping that it will be a boon for my relationships. What one learns though, upon reflection, is that the non-expression of the negative eventually leads, quite naturally, to a non-expression of the positive.

The great lesson of psychotherapy is that the converse is also true. By expressing negative emotions from past events, positive feelings return. Rollo May has this to say about it:

"A curious thing which never fails to surprise persons in therapy is that after admitting their anger, animosity, and even hatred for a spouse and berating him or her during the hour, they end up with feelings of love toward this partner. A patient may have come in smoldering with negative feelings but resolved, partly unconsciously, to keep these, as a good gentleman does, to himself; but he finds that he represses the love for the partner at the same time as he suppresses his aggression." [2]

May goes on to note that this denial is typical in "our bourgeois society." The prognosis for people suffering from such emotional repression is not good - leading eventually to a "feeling [of] no connection and no vital drive toward the other person".

As I promised at the outset of this blog, I expect to update you on my life and my evolution as a person, and I look forward to those updates in the future (as I hope you do). And I plan to follow the first rule of Project Emotions: "to project emotions" (in blog or in relationship). Please remember, this relationship - if that term is appropriate - must be reciprocal to survive, so please let me know what you think!

[1] Irvin Yalom "Love's Executioner"
[2] Rollo May "Love & Will"