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Sin, passion, affect — is there a difference between them and who to turn to for help if we cannot cope with our strong emotions? The psychologist answers.
Behind every passion lies a loss of contact with oneself
First, it is necessary to define the concepts. From the point of view of a secular person, «passion» means a strong emotion, a time-sustained grasp of some idea or intention. For example: «She was passionate about music.»
Of course, from this example a little smells of the past. Today they would say: «he got hooked on …», and instead of the ellipsis, you can substitute anything — from an art form to culinary preferences.
In other words, passion in this case means a strong, deep emotional passion for something, covering a person.
But there is another concept of passion — religious. In this case, passion means a temptation that stands in the way of a person’s salvation. In general, the Greek word «passion» (παθος) comes from the verb — πασχειν — «suffer» and means such an abnormal state of a person, which is caused by some unnatural influence that causes suffering.
By the way, this is where the concept of pathology, which is widely used today, came from. One of the holy fathers of the Orthodox Church, Ignatius Brianchaninov, directly said that «sin that has taken possession of a person is called passion.»
The opposite of passion is dispassion. In this case, we are not talking about insensitivity, but about freedom from passions — the acquisition of that initially harmonious, integral state of a person, as the Creator intended him to be.
Broken harmony
Passions concern almost all areas of the psyche: mind, will, feelings (emotions), words, memory, imagination, attention, and so on. However, any passion, influencing a certain sphere of the soul, nevertheless embraces the whole person, this happens through self-love, conceit, self-satisfaction, self-confidence. The holy fathers said: “Do you want to get rid of passions at once? “Renounce the mother of passions—self-love” (Abba Thalassius).
Any person, even not related to religion, knows the main passions that take possession of a person — this is fornication, gluttony, love of money, vanity, pride and despondency. With all their diversity, they have some common essential features. Behind any passion lies a person’s loss of contact with himself, with his own integrity, mental and spiritual health.
Modern man prefers to live on the surface, not particularly plunging into the depths. It seems to him that the outer life with all its various attributes is what he exists on this earth for. However, not only believers, but also many psychologists of various directions state that such a superficial life will inevitably give rise to deep unconscious anxiety.
It is from her, from this deep anxiety that a person tries to hide, to run away.
He is looking for new entertainment, but the noise of life cannot drown out the existential call of his soul. Only by consistently answering the question: “Why do I live?”, a person begins to gradually move in the direction of spiritual values, which open up other horizons and scales of being for him.
If this does not happen, then the person displaces this anxiety before life into the unconscious, creating a “noise” curtain of all kinds of addictions, which sooner or later develop into passions. But we all know very well that any repression into the unconscious layers of the important challenges of life leads to a break with reality.
A person either hides from the world, because the world frightens him, or seeks to conquer this world in order to free himself from fear, which still lives in his soul, but is forced out, not realized. Both of these strategies — the winner and the loser — are false, dead ends, they protect a person from the world, but with the same force they protect him from himself.
Psychologists do not fight passions
The way out of this impasse is for a person to consciously and freely take the step of moral choice. And in this most serious personal choice, a huge role is played by the degree of self-awareness by a person.
Metropolitan Anthony of Surozh once said to his parishioner, who was constantly in severe despondency regarding his imperfection: “They will not ask you why you did not become Saint Peter, they will ask you — did you become Petya?”
And at this point, the teachings of the holy fathers and the psychological view of the personal nature of man coincide — the choice in favor of the good is not a choice against the individual in man, this is not a war with the unconscious. On the contrary, an attentive look at oneself, fearless, honest and impartial, allows a person to see what is hidden in the depths of his soul, including in his unconscious part.
If a person manages to realize the hidden reasons that push him towards passion, he can resist its influence, and ultimately defeat it.
Of course, each passion has its own «face», and in the experience of the church there are finely developed methods of dealing with each of them. However, if we talk about psychology, then it does not fight with passions — this is not its task. Psychology has its own language, its own terminology, its own conceptual apparatus.
When a person comes to a psychologist, he does not come with the problem of fornication or gluttony, especially with pride or despondency. He comes with his pain, with his suffering, and the task of a psychologist is to work with a person, restore his peace, inner harmony.
But — let us remember — this is not the finale, but only a possible stage on the way to revealing a special spiritual space in oneself, without the discovery and proper filling of which a person will not be able to find his face, hidden so often under the masks, layers of passions that have taken possession of him.