Emotional identify and emotional inheritance.

From The Book of Life, on emotional identity:

... Emotional Identity, the characteristic way in which our desires and fears manifest themselves and our personalities respond to the behaviour, negative and positive, of others. There are four main themes around which our Emotional Identities are structured and it is their particular dosage and arrangement within us that decisively shapes who we are. To get to know ourselves is – in large part – a question of coming to understanding the configuration of our Emotional Identity.

Those four main themes are listed as self-love, candour, communication and trust.

For me, reading the self-love section is prickly, since I know how it's a very difficult subject for me. The page includes a simple test - and I clearly have a very high score for "lack of" self-love.

The chapter also discusses what it calls Emotional Inheritance:

What creates Emotional Identity? Why do we have the emotional identity we do and not a different one?

 A big modern response looks to genetics. We’ve got a specific genetic inheritance and (via many complex processes) this inheritance shapes our adult personality. We’re not saying genetics are irrelevant. But we want to focus attention on another kind of inheritance: Emotional Inheritance.

Developed mainly in early childhood, it plays a major role in our most basic character traits:

Psychotherapists have developed a special term to capture what we inherit emotionally from the past: they call it our ‘transference’. In their view, each of us is constantly at risk of ‘transferring’ patterns of behaviour and feeling from the past to a present that doesn’t realistically call for it. We feel a need to punish people who aren’t to blame; we worry about a humiliation which isn’t anywhere on the cards; we’re compelled to betray as we were once, three decades before, betrayed.

So how do we navigate knowing what we're pre-disposed to?

Maturity involves accepting with good grace that we are, of course, involved in multiple transferences, along with a commitment to try rationally to disentangle them. The job of growing up means realising with due humility the exaggerated dynamics we may constantly be bringing to situations and to monitor ourselves more accurately and more critically so as to improve our capacity to judge and act in the here and now with greater fairness and neutrality. We need to see how the people and situations in our past that have given rise to habits of mind that lead us to see current events in particular ways. The idea is to grow a little wiser as to where our troubles are coming from and around what areas of our lives we will therefore need to be especially careful.

Lastly, three benefits are listed as being the result of this type of self-reflection:

Firstly, we become aware of ways in which we are a bit crazy (that is: puzzling to others and inappropriate in our responses). We can catch ourselves before we do too much damage. But we also grasp why we are like this. We don’t have to hate ourselves, we can become more sympathetic to the way we’ve had some awkward legacies – and have learnt a few somewhat counterproductive ways of coping.

Secondly, we can more calmly explain ourselves to others. Even if we can’t entirely change, we can flag up what might be challenging about living around us. If we understand ourselves better we can help others understand us more sympathetically too. 

Thirdly, we begin to see that we have a degree of freedom and opportunity to change (to a limited but useful degree) the difficult parts of who we are. We don’t have to keep on repeating exactly what we’ve been doing. There are other options.

A worthy read, a lot to unpack.

Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay.

Just finished reading Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. I already follow her on twitter, she's a great cultural critic. I've read pieces of hers here and there, but this is the first of her books I've read. I've already pre-ordered Hunger as well. She has a novel called Difficult Women scheduled for release in January 2017.

It's a nice collection of current-culture feminist critiques.

From Blurred lines, Indeed:

It’s hard not to feel humourless, as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you’re not imagining things. It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening: it’s that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly. (Page 189)

Here she's discussing the pervasive misogyny we see daily in popular culture, but she's also projecting past that, it's everywhere, all the time. She's also referencing her feeling like a nag/debbie downer by her pointing out this sexism all the time, how it makes her seem humourless. This is something that's often on my mind, since stand-up and humour are very dear to me, but so is the resistance to bigotry.

From The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion

I don’t believe in safety. I wish I did. I am not brave. I simply know what to be scared of; I know to be scared of everything. There is freedom in that fear. That freedom makes it easier to appear fearless-to say and do what I want. I have been broken, so I am prepared should that happen again. I have, at times, put myself in dangerous situations. I have thought, You have no idea what I can take. This idea of unknown depths of endurance is a refrain in most of my writing. Human endurance fascinates me, probably too much because more often than not, I think of life in terms of enduring instead of living. (Page 152)

Gay comes to this passage through a critique of the concept of "safe spaces" and trigger warnings. I understand what she's saying, but I see no harm in using a trigger warning when creating something you know to be a representation of traumatic space.

If I'm down, and having a hard time, and I see a movie has trigger warnings regarding a lot of sexual violence I might choose to opt out of seeing the film, and keeping it for a day when it won't kick me while I'm down. A trigger warning is the option to say no, and to walk away. I absolutely understand that the world does not adhere to this type of nicety, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have it's value, or what it isn't at least an attempt at recognising the trauma of experience.

I relate to Gay's passage immensely. I also think there are parts of me that lean towards masochism. There is a way that trauma can dull certain synapses, in equal measure. Sure, maybe I have a high pain tolerance, expanded empathy, and deep emotional intelligence, but I also have a low understanding of romantic love and low level trust in men.

I live in pain-reduction so much, it limits my choices. I have nearly zero ambition these days. I'm always in crisis mode - in limiting my stimulation. I'm tired of enduring, but I have no reference for what living looks like.

Gay's framing of a bad feminist is based on what has traditionally been a white-upper class version of feminism. I'd argue that with millennials, there is more of an understanding of the fluidity of identity, and that like many things, it exists on a spectrum.

Feminism is the fight against patriarchy. More than that, it's the notion that women are people, and as such deserve the same unalienable rights as men. Furthermore, they deserve person-hood and autonomy.

Gay is a great feminist. There is no such thing as a bad feminist. You can be a racist feminist. You can be an elitist feminist. If you're "bad" and believing in equality - you're just not a feminist.

There is no one right way to be feminist. As there's no right way to be Canadian,  American, female, male, or queer.

So Gay might be a bad feminist of her own identifying. I'd argue she's a great one. But identities, especially those that hold on too tightly to a narrative, tend to alienate. And a reading of her work understands how she came to that title.

I recommend her book.

The End of Empathy.

Just read The End of Empathy by Stephanie Wittels. It actually took me a minute to realise she's Harris Wittels' sister. It took the mentioning of an entertainment rag announcing his death for me to make the link.

Her piece talks about the seemingly impossible existence of empathy on the internet, especially in comment sections.

She's right. I'll often write something relatively benign on the Atlantic's comment feed and get a bunch of "Millennials are the fucking worst" and non-related rants about Muslims or Feminism. It's just, the worst.

Usually, I'll try and stay away from comment sections, but the masochist in me sometimes just can't resist.

I try and offset that type of rage or ignorance through simple, kind reactions. It usually works.

This one time I also just replied:

It was an honest reaction, and my sensitive, empathetic nature was worried about his blood pressure / rage haemorrhoids.

I don't think empathy is dead, but I do think emotional intelligence is a spectrum, and that crap people love being crappy on the internet, where they can rage-out and be ridiculous with impunity, and without getting confronted/called out or punched in the face.

I actually find empathy a great tool in confronting outlandish reactions. Especially in confronting anger/shittyness.

"Are you alright, you seem really angry."

And when people need to answer with how they feel, or why they feel that way, they change their angle.

Then again what do I know. I'm a liberal man-hating queerbones baby butthole - or whatever.

Rising Strong.

I just finished reading Rising Strong by Brené Brown. I’d seen Brené on Oprah a few times, but I was especially drawn to her Super Soul Sunday episode where she talked about her book, and specifically about shame.

There are things that bugged me about Rising Strong. Mainly the language she uses to list steps to dealing with your emotional processes. I find it too cutesy and it irritates me. Overall her work on emotional intelligence and effective communication is great, I just think it’s done a disservice by over simplification in order for it to be approachable. I feel like the book needs more meat.

Her work is interesting though, as are some of the points she brings up. 

The following quote had me add Alias Grace to my goodreads list:

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

- Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

There's something about narration these days. I find myself narrating section of my life, or internally describing myself and situations in lyrical language. It's odd. I have found though, that the blog has helped me a lot. It's been successful for what it was initially meant for, as a record of sorts. As a way of externalizing my frustrations and fears. But it's also been more than that. It's been a little part of me. I've written from memory, I've chronicled, essayed, some of what I do is part book review and lit review from what crosses my path, but it's also had creative pieces. It's had free thought word associations. It's had dreams cast out onto paper - where I can get them out of my head. Stories and patterns help.

Robert Burton, a neurologist and novelist, explains that our brains reward us with dopamine when we recognize and complete patterns. Stories and patterns. The brain recognizes the familiar beginning-middle-end structure of a story and rewards us for clearing up the ambiguity. Unfortunately, we don’t need to be accurate, just certain. (79)

It's the satisfaction of a film like Momento. It's the satisfaction of a job well done. A period. milestone. A benchmark. A check-list. Boy do I love a check-list.

Jonathan Gottschall examines the human need for story in his book The Storytelling Animal. He explains that there’s growing evidence that “ordinary, mentally healthy people are strikingly prone to confabulate in everyday situations.” Social workers always use the term confabulate when talking about how dementia or a brain injury sometimes causes people to replace missing information with something false that they believe to be true. (81)

Gottschall argues that conspiratorial thinking “is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience.” (83)

One of the many ways we can dip out of the norm and into too much. What is it about narrative? What is it about wanting an explanation to everything, wanting to understand it all? We stand guilty of it as an entire race! 

What part does the ego play in understanding, or thinking we understand something to our satisfaction? What kind of entitlement comes with that? Why does it comfort us so much? Does getting lost in trying to explain and understand help?

James Pennebaker, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Writing to Heal, has done some of the most important and fascinating research I’ve seen on the power of expressive writing in the healing process. In an interview posted on the University of Texas’ website, Pennebaker explains, “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don't just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are - our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.” Pennebaker believes that because our minds are designed to try and understand things that happen to us, translating messy, difficult experience into language essentially makes them “graspable.” (87)

Language is indeed a mold in-which to smush the complex ingredients of our ego, our id, our dreams, our context, and ultimately our intangible experiences. So much happens to us in a moment, in a day, in a lifetime. If what any of us want is to minimize discomfort and pain while we're here, it makes sense that we'd want to understand what it is that causes us pain and discomfort, in order to possibly avoid it in the future.

If there is one thing that failure has taught me, it is the value of regret. Regret is one of the most powerful emotional reminders that change and growth are necessary. In fact, I’ve come to believe that regret is a kind of package deal: a function of empathy, it’s a call to courage and a path toward wisdom. Like all emotions, regret can be used constructively or destructively, but the wholesale dismissal of regret is wrongheaded and dangerous. “No regrets” doesn’t mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe you have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with your life. (210)

This section of Brown's work I appreciated significantly. For a while in the 90's there was a lot of "no regrets"- t-shirts and pop culture paraphernalia. As I got older, I got increasingly irritated by them. I've always felt regrets weren't necessarily negative, as long as you understood them. Brown expresses what I feel well here, since reflection is a large part of the last few years of my life. I do regret situations where I was shitty, or blind, or disconnected, but I am also able to look at those times and understand why I did what I did or said what I said. She quotes George Saunders, in a 2013 commencement address at Syracuse University:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded. . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.” (211)

Brown goes on:

I believe that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves. For that reason, regret can be the birthplace of empathy. (212)

I think regret can indeed lead to empathy. As can most difficult, painful emotions. Courage can be hard. Even little pieces of courage. It seems some days all I can do is just minimize my interaction with the world in order to hold on to what little energy I have. For some, just getting out of bed is courage. I've had those days. I've had years of my life, lost to a cloud of disinterest and introversion. 

Brown also has a few paragraphs on nostalgia I found interesting. For a while, during the worst parts of my depression, nostalgia was a big part of my shame triggers. It was a lie though. It seemed glossy and young, happy and energetic, but there was also frantic bits, bits I feel in my guts when I sit with too long. 

It's so easy to romanticize youth. Perky tits. Hormones. The energy. I had so much god damn energy. So much naive hope about - everything.  

I can understand why nostalgia has become such a cultural cliché - the prom king and queen, the "good old days" - because it's an easy place to go to - a memory. And if we aren't careful, of course we could re-visit that place with rose-tinted glasses, but if you do have the propensity to look a little longer than is comfortable or to dig a little deeper than is (seemingly) necessary you revisit those memories and you notice the little things. The discomfort here and there. The limitations. The assumptions we made. How we didn't know any better. How dumb we maybe were. How much hormones made him seem greater than he actually was. How location and context made friendships happen. How much you had to learn. How naive you all were. But we now know better, don't we? 

Brown quotes The Great Beauty, a film by Paolo Sorrentino:

"What’s wrong with feeling nostalgic? It’s the only distraction left for those who have no faith in the future.” Nostalgia can be a dangerous distraction, and it can underpin a feeling of resignation and hopelessness after a fall. (243)

I think this actually further compliments what I was saying about my own experiences. I was deeply depressed, and a nostalgia trap made sense. I had no hope for myself or the future, and if what I was feeling was shame and frustration, it makes sense to then explain that shame and pain through blaming myself for how much I fucked up what was.

I think Brown's work could be helpful to a lot of people, and in a lot of different situations. She discusses her work with corporate spaces and teams. Implementing effective communication strategies can really revolutionize a corporate culture. It's an ongoing issue in nearly every place I've worked. To varying degrees of shittyness. 

She talks about the stories we tell ourselves, and how we interpret situations in ways that are often skewed in just an infinite amount of ways. How our interpretations of any given situation can be totally different than that of our partner in that situation. 

Throughout her examples, honesty and a conversation work wonders. This isn't news to me, but I can understand how her research can be considered revolutionary to those less feely, especially in a corporate culture. 

It's a lot of work, to be aware of how you're feeling, your reactions (both verbal and non-verbal) and your interpretations. I guess it's through practice that these things become habit. And I hope more comes of this kind of research because I'd like the terminology of emotional intelligence to become part of our everyday vernacular. Effective communication changes everything. It can diffuse so much.

I walk away from Brown's book with something she uses often throughout Rising Strong. She uses specific language to talk about interpretation: The story I am making up is ...

This acts as a took to facilitate conversation with a friend or loved one, openly. It's not accusatory, it's a peak into someone's brain. She uses personal examples, as well as professional ones.

In my experience, being direct about these things, in a loving way, has totally diffused situations that were uncomfortable or potentially unpleasant. Especially when it comes to my mother, who tends to be passive-aggressive and huff loudly instead of using words. I've yet to use it with friends, since we see each other so little these days it's not been an issue. Overall my friends are pretty supportive and great anyway, we're like, pretty emotionally intelligent (ie: depressed). lol. 

It becomes difficult when processes are so different. Someone needs to cool off where someone else needs to think about things where someone else wants to mind-vomit all over you. Being a person is weird. It's hard you guys! Why are we so neurotic! 

Anyway, check out Brene's Brown interview with Oprah on Super Soul Sunday if you can (OWN shows are hard to get online), if you're into it, check out her book. 

Lady GaGa and the Emotion Revolution.

A little after the 8-minute mark Gaga talks about her struggles with anxiety and depression, and her being medicated. She has been unable to wean off of her meds (sounds familiar to me, and is an issue for many of us).

She also lists all the things she's tried (acupuncture, cupping, meditation).

It's an interesting conversation overall as well, the new research and conversations revolving around emotional and emotional intelligence is not inly interesting but encouraging.

On emotional intelligence.

The Atlantic has an article up called The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence, which they define as:

the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions.

I'm not 100% on managing, but I’d say I'm practically a sharpshooter regarding the first two. The article goes over how emotional intelligence should not be assumed to be a moral characteristic, and how as a form of intelligence, it can be used for both “good and evil.”

There was no relationship whatsoever between emotional intelligence and helping: Helping is driven by our motivations and values, not by our abilities to understand and manage emotions. However, emotional intelligence was consequential when examining a different behavior: challenging the status quo by speaking up with ideas and suggestions for improvement.

Emotionally intelligent employees spoke up more often and more effectively. When colleagues were treated unjustly, they felt the righteous indignation to speak up, but were able to keep their anger in check and reason with their colleagues. When they went out on a limb to advocate for gender equity, emotional intelligence helped them keep their fear at bay. When they brought ideas for innovation to senior leaders, their ability to express enthusiasm helped them avoid threatening leaders.

This was the part that stuck with me, since the friends I value as being extremely emotionally intelligent are also the most likely to notice when something isn't fair, or is inappropriate at the workplace. We’re often quick to notice work-policies we feel to be counter-intuitive or lacklustre.

I would argue that it’s a sensitivity to environment, and to the lived experience of policy and procedure. Especially in a working environment, where we live daily. It’s also a way of reading people I’d say is akin to instinct. Reading certain cues is a way of communicating that is mainly lost to us, but was a way of surviving for thousands of years. Similarly to the way in which a cat twitches a tail in annoyance, seeing someone purse their lips or grind their teeth can signal a similar state.

I wouldn't really say it’s my ability to “express enthusiasm” that allows for a smooth description of a problem to a boss, I would say it’s a navigation of their ego, explaining a basic logic and also trying to express the benefits of the idea.

I think emotional intelligence also involves an understanding of context and environment. External factors are always at play, no matter how enthusiastically you pitch more vacation time.

And, as always, there's also power at play. There are power-dynamics and hierarchies. When we describe emotional intelligence as being a major root to standing up to the status quo, we can't ignore the way in which identity politics and privilege inform our relationship to that structure.

I can't help but think of "emotional intelligence" as a classed term. There's privilege in it. It's academic. Also, considering the original researchers define emotional intelligence as:

focuses on the individual's ability to process emotional information and use it to navigate the social environment.

"Oh, you mean be a fucking human who feels things and notices stuff?"

Maybe the reason old, white academics needed the term is because they don't understand human fucking experience the way anybody who doesn't carry the privilege of white maleness does.