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It is generally accepted that emotions reflect our true attitude towards objects and phenomena, other people and ourselves. However, in reality, it is often emotions that prevent us from being ourselves. Let’s try to figure out how and why this happens.
In Western culture, trusting emotions and feelings has not been accepted for a long time. They were treated as something secondary – in comparison with reason, intellect, logic. “It was only in the middle of the last century that science paid attention to the feelings and experiences of a person,” says psychotherapist Sergey Baklushinsky. — Today, many psychological trainings and courses teach you to develop sensitivity, to understand your emotions. We no longer see them as a danger – on the contrary, we are convinced that only by trusting them, one can live a true life. It is generally accepted that emotions never lie – and how could it be otherwise, because we feel exactly what we feel. However, in reality, some of them have nothing to do with us – they have become a part of us against our will.
4 facts about emotions
- They can be hidden. Some emotions are false and only mask our true feelings.
- They can be taught. The child, whose personality is being formed, is influenced by the emotions of the people around him.
- They can be invented. Some emotions refer not to real, but to imagined experiences.
- They need to be listened to. Unreasonably strong or, on the contrary, stereotyped emotions can signal a hidden problem.
We live in other people’s feelings without even noticing it, and therefore it is very important to learn to recognize them and not allow them to influence our lives.
We learn to feel
Emotions enter our lives from birth. Children feel joy and impatience, love and tenderness, sadness and pride, but, unlike adults, they do not see a direct and unambiguous connection between the situation and the emotion it generates – in other words, they do not know how to interpret their own feelings.
The simplest example: the child stumbled and fell, it hurts. This feeling can be followed by a variety of reactions: perhaps the baby will be frightened, angry, burst into tears, or even smile. “What emotion will eventually be associated in his mind with pain, how exactly he will express it, depends on other people,” explains Sergey Baklushinsky. The child is learning this. He carefully observes his mother to understand her reaction, and imitates her. If the mother is worried, he begins to cry, if he smiles, he answers with a smile. These are very important lessons, during which patterns of choice of emotions are laid for life. The child “reads” facial expressions, posture, gestures of an adult, determines his reaction by the pallor or blush on his face, even by a change in heart rate. So he learns to understand the emotions of adults and choose his own.
7-year-old Dasha was terribly afraid of getting sick with something. She refused to go for a walk, at school every now and then she ran to wash her hands. But even very clean toys frightened her – it seemed to the girl that they were literally teeming with germs. “During psychotherapy, it turned out that Dasha’s mother, a doctor, a domineering and tough woman, constantly talked with her daughter about the dangers of various diseases,” says child psychologist and art therapist Natalya Arkhangelskaya. – As a child, she herself was sick a lot and did not want her daughter to repeat her fate. The microbes in Dasha’s drawings looked like aggressive monsters – we had to work for several months before they turned into good-natured animals.
When parents actively react to some situation, no matter how hard they try to hide their emotions, children will still remember and learn their lessons. “We may not speak out loud about our fears, but children always feel our state and unconsciously copy the emotional reaction to this or that event,” comments psychologist Maria Maksimova. “A child learns that cars are dangerous, not from a cartoon about the rules of the road, but by how the hand of an adult who leads him across the street tenses up,” adds psychotherapist Ekaterina Mikhailova.
From early childhood, we receive from our parents a certain “set” of emotions, which we will unconsciously use in the future.
Own or imposed
Sometimes people around us simply force us to experience certain feelings. This happens when a child is obliged to enjoy a trip to a strict grandmother or a weekend spent with a stepmother or stepfather, whom he does not like. Afraid of disappointing loved ones, the child so often and so defiantly shows his joy that in the end he himself forgets what he really feels.
“One of the most common situations in which imposed emotions arise is the arrival of a newborn brother or sister in the house. Often for an older baby – a competitor, stealing from him a part of parental love, – says Sergey Baklushinsky. “That’s why older children so often experience anger and aggression towards younger ones, while parents stubbornly insist: you love him. It was then that situations arise that grown-up patients tell me about: “I loved my little brother so much … I just dropped him all the time.”
“When we encounter conflicting feelings (for example, love and hate for the same person), a sharp internal conflict arises,” adds Maria Maksimova. “To resolve it, the emotion that causes the most tension is automatically driven into the unconscious, so that the person ceases to feel it.” This psychological mechanism is called “repression”. On the one hand, it helps to maintain inner balance. On the other hand, repressed strong emotions serve as ideal soil for the emergence of neurotic disorders.
Save your priorities
“The best way to avoid someone else’s emotional influence is to listen carefully to yourself and analyze your own feelings,” says psychophysiologist Evgenia Shekhter, candidate of psychological sciences, lecturer at Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov.
Psychologies: How are our emotions arranged?
Evgenia Shekhter: Emotions are a complex structure. Their “stuffing” is actually a feeling, our unique and unique inner experience. This subjective experience is accompanied by a whole range of physiological reactions – for example, when our hearts are pounding with happiness, and goosebumps run down our backs with fear. To externally express our experiences, we use facial expressions, gestures, and voice.
This body language is the “shell” of emotion, its most independent and arbitrary component. After all, the feeling and the way we express it do not always coincide: an outwardly imperturbable person may well be overwhelmed with anger, and irritation and hostility are sometimes hidden under ostentatious benevolence.
To accurately determine whether a person is happy, upset or angry, we do not need to know him well. What is the principle of recognizing other people’s emotions?
We understand each other’s facial expressions and gestures so well because this language is the same for all of humanity, as are the emotions that gave rise to it. Joy, fear, surprise, grief, anger – these basic feelings all people experience and express in a similar way. Explaining this phenomenon, the largest American psychologists Carroll Izard and Paul Ekman suggested that some feelings do not need to be taught – they are given to us from the very beginning.
By the time of birth, the baby’s brain has already formed the simplest neural networks that allow him to experience and show basic emotions. The stable neural structures of the brain are also responsible for the “body language” of feelings. When expressing emotions, any person spontaneously fires the same set of muscles.
If the basic feelings are so universal and inherent in all people without exception, where do the imposed, “borrowed” emotions come from?
We easily read the emotions of another person, which means that we can just as easily “get infected” with them. Since we are naturally capable of experiencing the same emotions and expressing them in the same way, it is not surprising that our state can be consistent with the emotional state of another person. Emotions resonate – that is their property. And this means that they can be imposed.
Are there methods of protection against foreign influence?
Each of us has our own priorities. It is necessary to understand whether the situation we are worried about is really so important, and, therefore, whether our experiences correspond to its real meaning. Listening carefully to yourself, relating our feelings to the events that gave rise to them, is the best way to avoid the trap of other people’s emotions.
They seem truer than they are
False emotions have led to a series of lawsuits brought in the United States by adult daughters against their already elderly fathers and other male relatives. All of these women were undergoing psychotherapy and, during the sessions, “remembered” sexual abuse they allegedly experienced as children. Each of them was convinced that they were right, because they could recall such strong emotions and vivid physical sensations in their memory that it was impossible not to believe. Moreover, their psychotherapists unconditionally believed in the fact of incest, but later during the trials it turned out that in most cases there was no violence.
One of the features of emotions is that they can arise in response not only to a real, but also to an imaginary situation, which in no way affects the strength and sincerity of experiences. “We believe that the brighter the memory of childhood, the more true it is. But it’s not. For a child, there is no clear boundary between the real world and fantasy,” Sergey Baklushinsky explains this psychological phenomenon. “Our fantasies are also accompanied by very strong emotions.”
“A child goes through a stage of love for a parent of the opposite sex in his development,” continues Maria Maksimova. “Returning to the past in psychotherapy sessions, these women passed off their secret childhood dreams as reality. On the other hand, most likely in childhood, these patients were really abused by adults. Let not physical, but no less painful – emotional.
Children living in a family where there is some kind of reticence or secret always feel it. “For some reason, the expressions of the parents’ faces change, a seemingly innocent conversation suddenly ends, and the child immediately gets the feeling that something is wrong here,” says Ekaterina Mikhailova. Children often tend to attribute the stress and negative mood in the family to their own account, and therefore the painful feeling of understatement can lead the child to attribute to himself what he did not do.
Sergey felt shame and guilt all his life: he was sure that he had once committed violence against a little girl. At the age of 36, he decided to talk about this with his mother and found out that there really was a victim of violence in their family – his aunt, and his father acted as a rapist. These events took place a year before the birth of the boy, and no one ever mentioned them in his presence, but the family drama left its mark on family relationships. As a teenager, Sergei felt that something bad was being hidden from him, and decided that a dark family secret was connected to his personal history.
“The child perceives and appropriates the emotions of parents and loved ones, and then builds on their basis their own versions of what happened. Our past is transmitted through emotions that we perceive in childhood, and later consider our own, says Ekaterina Mikhailova. “That’s why it’s so important to be careful in evaluating long-standing events: emotional certainty about a trauma may indicate that such an event really took place, but it does not necessarily mean that it happened to us or even in our memory.”
You can get rid of “foreign” emotions
We consider all the emotions that live in us to be our own because they accompany us all our lives and we are used to them. But “borrowed” emotions have their own distinctive features. “One of them is excessive brightness, too sharp a reaction to a seemingly trifling situation,” explains Maria Maksimova. – The second feature of “alien emotions” is clichédness and stereotyping: getting into the same situations, a person always reacts to them in exactly the same way. And finally, their third sign is illogicality: when we cannot explain the reason for outbursts of anger, fear, feelings of loneliness, but we regularly experience these emotions, most likely they are imposed on us.
Smile is the mirror of the soul
Aside from humans, the only creatures that can smile are primates. By showing their teeth, they make it clear to their relatives that there is no aggression in their actions. According to the Dutch ethologist Jan van Hoff, this “smile” is purely ritual, functional and has nothing to do with feelings.
Psychologist Decher Keltner from the University of Berkeley (USA) is convinced that people can smile like that too. His research showed that almost any person has at least two types of smiles, which differ from each other in a number of formal features. With a smile of the first type, only the muscles that raise the corners of the mouth act. This is how flight attendants smile when they meet passengers. “Falseness is not necessarily hidden behind it,” the scientist explains. “It just serves more as a courtesy than a reflection of our condition.”
The second smile is named Duchenne, after the French neurologist who first described it in the XNUMXth century, and expresses our true emotions. In a person smiling with a Duchenne smile, along with the oral muscles, the periocular muscles are also involved: as a result of their involuntary contraction, the lower eyelids rise, and wrinkles form in the corners of the eyes.
The development of these two types of smile occurs at a very early age: as early as 10 months, most babies smile in the first way when meeting a stranger and Duchenne when communicating with their mother.
The temptation is great to shift the responsibility for our own “wrong” and “uncomfortable” feelings onto others and declare them “foreign”, having nothing to do with ourselves. “But the emotional “profile” of a person is a complex interweaving of innate mental characteristics, personal history, upbringing, models of interaction with people,” explains Maria Maksimova. “Over the years of his life, he changes and becomes unique. So our emotionality is equally influenced by experience and genetics.”
It is in our power to get rid of experiences that do not really belong to us. Having rethought the event, changing the angle of view, we also change our attitude to the situation, which means that it begins to evoke completely different feelings in us. What we choose – anger, fear or calmness, depends solely on us.