January 22, 2023
By Bill Faw
My outline is quite simple: An emotional episode begins as we make snap, gut-feeling or rational judgments that a person, thing, or situation is threatening or rewarding in some way. Our emotions then change as our judgments change. Our judgments change when the external situation changes, or when we clarify an ambiguous situation, or when we place the current situation into the context of past experiences, present concepts, or future expectations. As we look at some of these ways that we do this in our daily life, notice how several familiar proverbs are designed to moderate emotional responses.
First: Changing or Leaving a Situation Changes our Judgments, which Changes our Emotions
We are constantly changing situations to make them better and to decrease our negative emotional responses: everything from cleaning the house, to trying new work procedures, to apologizing for our thoughtless comments.
Of course, many changes are out of our control: especially the death of a loved one, which brings dramatic changes to our mood and emotional responses. In ‘grief work’ we change back our mood a bit, by reminding ourselves of pleasant and humorous episodes involving the loved one, by finding new activities, and by establishing new relationships which somewhat replace the loss.
In addition, adopting Tennyson’s perspective that, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” can temper our grief by the consolation that we grieve so deeply – why? — because we loved deeply, and that deep love and grief somehow give meaning to life and deepen our character.
More generally, being able to affirm that “what I have gone through has made me who I am”places our sorrows, disappointments, and guilts within a wider ‘judgment’ which mellows the emotional pain of those sorrows, disappointments, and guilts.
In addition to changing situations, many times we moderate emotions by leaving a troubling situation. We may escape a violent situation and let the emotion of ‘relief’ drain out of us the emotion of “fear”, when we get to safety. Or we may walk away from an embarrassing or humiliating or even just boring situation. Or we learn to avoid situations which we judge as uncomfortable, frightening, sad, or anger producing. On a longer time-scale, we might leave a job because our boss is rude to us. Leaving a faith commitment, marriage, sexual orientation or identity are more extreme forms of this.
All of these changes are made to a large extent to change our patterns of moods and emotional responses.
Sometimes, when we cannot physically walk away from a situation that makes us mad, we can psychologically distance ourselves by “counting to 10 before responding in anger”; which is kind of a home-remedy form of slipping into mindfulness when our emotions are getting out of control. Psychological distancing gives us time to apply other emotion-regulation strategies, and to take deliberate actions.
Of course, psychologically distancing ourselves cannot undo our initial quick, automatic snap anger or sadness responses, but may make us able to mellow our follow-up responses. Partners who live together need to learn to accept some of these immediate emotional responses from the other (including stares and glares), and must learn to honor the other person’s efforts to control their follow up responses.
Now, escape and avoidance work well if a person or situation or work- or marriage- or faith-commitment or sexual orientation or identity is really threatening to our safety or to the integrity of our being; but escape and avoidance can easily become habits keeping us from forming deep and lasting relationships. Do not slip into Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave a Lover”! But, in any case, a first way to change our emotions is by Changing or Leaving a Situation.
Second: Clarifying Ambiguous Situations Changes our Judgments which Changes our Emotions
Even when we remain in a troubling situation, we may change our judgments and resulting emotions by clarifying ambiguities in the situation – and most situations in life are ambiguous! –by relating what is triggering our emotional response to other aspects of the current situation.
To give an obvious example: you might be walking in the woods at twilight, when you see a long slender curved shape in the dark path ahead. Your instant judgment that that might be a “rattle snake” triggers “shoot first” emotional responses, as the snap-judger grabs your attention and passes the ambiguity-resolution to the “ask questions later” gut-judger circuit. Then, investigation, from a safe distance, might determine it to be a harmless black snake or, even better, only a curved stick. The object remains the same, but resolving the ambiguity changes the emotional responses. If the investigation, instead, confirms that it is a rattle snake, then the snap-judger activates more snap-responses, while the gut-judger enlists deliberate action circuits to run backwards or something.
Our basic personality helps determine how we are inclined to resolve ambiguity. I was recently in a discussion in a different setting, where one married woman identified herself as being a ‘pessimist’ and her wife as being an ‘optimist’. Optimists are (by popular definition) inclined toward positive interpretations of ambiguous situations (the ambiguously-described glass is ‘half full’), while pessimists are inclined toward negative interpretations of ambiguous situations. But, since reasonable optimists tend to be happier – and generally more successful in life – than pessimists, any of you who are pessimists might want to deliberately try to ‘put on a happy face’. So, the second way to change our emotions is by clarifying ambiguous situations.
Third: Relating This Current Situation to Past Experiences, Present Concepts, or Future Expectations Changes our Judgments which Changes our Emotions
If the ambiguity which needs to be clarified is to see how this current emotional event relates to past experiences, or to our present concepts and self-talk, or to our future expectations, then our gut-judger works with our mental-time-travel system to resolve the ambiguity – a process known as “reframing” or “reappraisal”.
We spend nearly all of our time in some kind of mental activity: but most of that is not ordered rational thought, but wandering interior monologues: running mental commentaries on yourself or on persons and things you encounter: such as thinking:
‘that person is fat’, ‘she’s so smart’, ‘I’m such a loser’, ‘people who look like him can’t be trusted’, or ‘wow, that car must be expensive. How can HE afford a Lexus?’ Note that we make such mental remarks based on our concepts of our own or others’ physical, mental, or moral attributes.
And our very mental commentary about a person or situation can itself trigger emotional responses in us, on top of any snap and gut responses to the situation. For instance, say you were offended initially by something a church friend said or did, but then you have this thought: “I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt” because he is usually friendly; or perhaps because you are a Unitarian and believe that you should assume the best of everyone.
Or perhaps you were not offended at first, but then you think about his previous rude behavior, and suddenly his ‘innocent’ words or deeds take on new possible meanings, and your thought turns to: “Knowing him, it was probably deliberate”. These are two opposite ways of changing your mental talk about the same ambiguous situation.
Mental commentary can be a response to past, present, or future events. Ruminating is being in an endless mental cycle about the past. Worrying, being in an endless cycle about the future. Differing from both ruminating and worrying is ‘problem solving’ mentation. We think of ‘problem solving’ as dealing with present or future situations, but we can ‘problem solve’ regarding the past by trying to make sense out of the past. Many lingering emotional problems arise from not ‘resolving’ past events.
Self-talk regarding the future involves ‘expectations’, which themselves, trigger emotional responses: ranging from joy and excitement to worry and dread. Slipping into states of joyful expectation, we can temporarily counteract a present negative mood. Think about that exciting event coming up…. In the other direction, deliberately reducing our expectations helps reduce the sharpness of disappointment. “Hoping for the best” minimizes worry; while “preparing for the worst” is problem-solving to soften the blow of disappointment.
Related, is a statement I heard on Labor Day as I was helping sell chicken BBQ lunches at an outdoor event in Oakdale Park. A man came through the rain to buy a chicken lunch from us, only to discover that we had just sold out. He quickly commented out loud: “Oh, you don’t have any more chicken? Well, the person who got the last of it probably needed it more than I do.” Notice that quick change of judgment, from “I am disappointed because it is all sold out” to “I can be happy for the other person – perhaps even feeling charitable and pleased with myself for wishing that person well”.
The AA Serenity Prayer is: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” “Courage to change the things I can” is a call to change a subset of your worries into problem-solving steps. “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” is a call to ‘psychologically withdraw’ from the rest of your worries – asking for serenity in that process.
Stoic and Buddhist Detachment is in its minimal form the ‘serenity prayer’: attempting to ‘detach’ or ‘psychologically withdraw’ from the worries you cannot control. Related is the simple statement of resignation: “Well, it is what it is!” But in its maximal form, Stoic & Buddhist detachment is seeking to withdraw from any negative disappointment resulting from unfulfilled expectations – by having no expectations! In this maximal form it is the opposite of Tennyson’s line; more like: ‘tis better to never have loved at all”.
Thus, we see that our emotions change because our judgments change when we change or leave an external situation, or when we clarify an ambiguous situation, or when we place the current situation into the context of past experiences, present concepts, or future expectations. And there are many more ways in which we moderate our emotions – which I do not have time to mention. But…
But I would like to end with a sobering final story: Sometimes something inside of us leads us to increase the sadness, the sense of humiliation, or (dare I say it?) the self-pity.
Years ago, when I was a rehabilitation counselor, one of our sons fell out of a tree, or from our second-floor back porch, into our back yard and had a concussion. The doctor suggested that our son might have had a seizure while in the tree or on the porch, so they kept him in the hospital to run some tests regarding seizure activity. While I was still uncertain regarding possible seizure activity in our son, I went to work the next day, but told my supervisor about our son and asked if I could just stay in my office or walk outside most of the day and wrestle with this. My supervisor cleared my schedule.
I sat and stewed, but then took a long walk and bought a pound of fudge from a deli nearby. While walking and then stewing back in my office I ate the whole pound of fudge, and felt even more numb and sad and anxious. But it helped. Increasing the sadness and anxiety might be a case of the gut-feeling circuits demanding an increase in the length and intensity of experiencing the sadness, to match the personal importance that the loss or threat of loss represents. Moving too quickly to relief or normalcy would be to belittle the importance of the loss or threatened loss.
I end on that less than cheerful note! Thank You.