Emotions
Contents
Definition
Applications
A Therapist’s Observation About Emotion
One of the thing I have noticed about being a therapist is that if someone is manifesting a lot of emotion and it is not bothering me, then it is a good hint that there is something wrong, that it’s not real, there is something about it that’s not exactly right because it doesn’t seem to hook into your empathic system the same way.[1]
Articulating Emotions in Words Helps in Reducing Their Ill-effects
Everything that makes you emotional – those are things that aren’t dealt with yet. They’re not fully articulated. You don’t have a strategy, you don’t have a fully developed representational system. That’s why it’s still emotional. So it’s like your body and your mind come up with emotional representations first and only as you work through them, which means talk about them essentially, strategically. They don’t even turn into words until you do that. And that’s where I think Freud went wrong. Those things aren’t repressed (although they can be). They’re not repressed. They just never made it all the way up to articulated representation. And lots of things are like that. When you’re in a bad mood, it’s like “I’m in a bad mood!” Well, what does that mean? Well, you don’t know. Why don’t you know? Are you repressing it? No, you’re just too stupid to figure it out. And so then you’ve got to talk to someone. You know, “I’m in a bad mood!” well, you know, “How are you feeling?” and they’ll get all spiteful and tell you how they’re feeling and then to differentiate it and maybe they remember something that happened at work and then you can kind of map out the mood. And that starts to loosen it.[2]
Interpretations
See Also
