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Communication is an art form. People get very little training or practice with communication in this culture. In fact, feelings are not even recognized as something good or natural. Oftentimes, in Western culture, people are told that not feeling is the best thing, which is really too bad because a complete human being has a number of different inputs in which to ascertain reality. There’s an intellectual input, which consists of thinking and taking in what the world is saying, and coming up with concepts about what is happening. There are also feelings which give incredible information, and actually, energy. So emotions are about energy.
What I want to focus on is how to be assertive, to communicate, and deal with conflict resolution in an appropriate way. That is only possible by establishing good boundaries. Assertiveness is about people standing up for themselves and communicating without putting somebody else down. The body is in homeostasis or balance, and that’s where people like to operate from as human beings. There is an inter flow that happens, so when people breathe in, they go out of balance. When they breathe out, they re-establish balance. Emotions operate in the same way. One feels an emotion and if it’s not expressed, the person will not return back to homeostasis. The energy from the feeling has to go somewhere and it often gets funneled into a somatic symptom such as a stomach ache, or builds up in the system in some other way.
Percolator Effect.
A common example of this phenomenon is called the percolator effect. For those who are under 30 and don’t know what a percolator is, it’s an old style coffee pot that you put on a stove or plug into an electrical socket, and the pressure builds and the water circulates and it brews the coffee. The example I’m going to relate is a very traditional 1950’s example that is unfortunately still common today. Imagine the following scenario; a guy who goes off to work, and he misses the bus. He is angry about that, therefore the energy has taken him out of balance, but he doesn’t really know what to do about that. Now, if he believes that he needs to be perfect and in control, which a lot of people in this society believe, his tendency will be to take that energy, push it down and try to just “handle it”.
Essentially, that energy and feeling get dissociated or separated from the conscious mind. The person really thinks he has taken care of the emotion, but it is still within his body and therefore, it is still affecting him. He could blame somebody else, even though there’s nobody around at that time, but even if he could displace the emotion it would not really dissipate. He is late for work, and the boss yells at him, but our fellow doesn’t realize it’s not a black/white situation. In other words, he could turn around, at most jobs, and tell the boss that he didn’t like the way he was treated because of the boss’s tone of voice, but that he was sorry that he was late and there was no excuse for that. What our guy does is just stuffs the feeling one more time. Now instead of one bit of energy, he’s got two bits of energy that are stuck in his body, doing some damage, and wanting some kind of discharge.
Later on in the day, a co-worker doesn’t do what he wants, so underneath his breath he curses at her, just enough for the woman to hear, but not enough for her to hear distinctly. He thinks he’s gotten out some of the anger. However, unless it’s done in an assertive way, clean from mind altering chemicals, one-to-one, and directly, no energy really dissipates, just a small amount leaks out the side in a passive-aggressive way. Now he misses lunch, traffic is heavy so he’s late getting home, and at each stage, he’s pushing emotions down. He gets home, he says, “Honey, where’s dinner?” She says, “It’ll be about fifteen minutes,” and he blows up and yells and screams, taking the opportunity to get all this out on his wife and his kids. This is a very traditional thing that tends to happen in this society, unfortunately. It is called inappropriate expression of anger, or displaced aggression. The person is really angry at one person, but he takes it out on someone else because he can’t hold on to it anymore, or he subconsciously thinks it’s safer to show it with family. It is not safe with the family. That’s the most cherished part of anyone’s life and the one a person should want to be most careful about.
If a person acts in this kind of a fashion on a day-to-day basis, what tends to happen is they remain chronically out of homeostasis or balance. The person feels a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress. Psychosomatic illnesses are more likely to occur. The body and the mind are connected, they’re not separate. Therefore, if a person feels sad or some other emotion they have a physical manifestation for that particular emotion. Oftentimes, people use substances to try to “handle” the emotion, to keep it down a little bit more. However, using alcohol or drugs block the expression of real feeling and the energy remains. Eventually any unresolved emotions, especially anger, turns against the self and becomes depression. Millions of people are walking around in a state that is out of balance emotionally.
Primary and Secondary Feelings.
Feelings are neither good nor bad. They’re neutral. When something important occurs in a person’s world he or she is going to have both a thought and a feeling about what has happened. If one is angry, that’s a perfectly natural emotion. That recognition of being angry allows the person to take care of themselves. It allows them to establish good boundaries. However, the way that a person shows anger might be good or bad. If a person is angry at someone, and hits them over the head with a 2 X 4, that is bad. But if a person just tells the other person that he is angry, in an assertive appropriate way that actually is helpful. There are hundreds of different feeling states. If we look at anger, which is often one of the most difficult emotions for people to express and get over, one starts out feeling perturbed or irritated. In the middle of the continuum, a person might be angry, at the end, they might be irate, or homicidal, or livid. Each emotion has several different gradations. Unfortunately, in our culture, the emotions that are commonly discussed are few. People say they feel okay, bad, good, or upset. That doesn’t really communicate anything meaningful. I don’t know if a person is upset because he or she is angry or upset because of feeling hurt. With the acceptance of therapy, people more readily talk about feeling anxious and depressed, but don’t do well talking about the gradations of emotions. And usually, people don’t talk about much more than anger or sadness.
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