Emotional Steampunk

Certain types of problems can be hard to spot. They hide just outside our peripheral vision; there, but somehow blurry, indistinct. And yet, they can blind us, limiting our ability to act effectively, like blinders on a horse.

The type of problem I’m talking about is metaphorical misunderstanding.

Let me share a story:

My son has struggled to manage his emotions lately. When he gets angry, he lashes out or hits his brother, or punches a wall.

He's young and all that's expected. Still, we tell him that no matter what someone says or how you feel, you don’t get to hit them. You can't hit, throw, or break things at home just because you're upset.

“But when I have an emotion, I have to let it out!” my son often replies. “Otherwise, the feeling stays in your body and that isn’t good for you.”

What my son is expressing in this moment is actually the current predominant understanding of emotion in our culture: that our emotions are a substance, and must be released.

Why must emotions be released? Because they will cause damage otherwise. They hang out in the body and cause stress, or inflammation, or ulcers, etc. Bottled-up emotions have a corrosive effect on our bodies.

Where does this model of how emotions work come from? It isn’t cognitive or behavioral science.

No - this understanding of emotion is metaphorical.

Not just any metaphor, either - it’s Freud’s metaphor. Sigmund Freud, writing in the 1800s, lived when steam technology was the great breakthrough of the day. Like many writers, he used the hot new technology of his time as a metaphor for understanding the mind, thus likening emotions, thoughts, and feelings to steam that would build up pressure and erupt.

To stop this build up of pressure from exploding, Freud posited that we developed ways of unconsciously releasing some of this tension, such as unknowingly acting out our emotions in a different context, or with a different object. When my son says he has to do something to release the feeling, otherwise something bad will happen, he is unknowingly expressing this viewpoint.

None of this is based on the actual physical processes which underlie our emotions. During an emotion, our brain predicts a threatening event and a variety of different bodily systems: the amygdala integrates emotions, the insula is linked to feelings like disgust and pain perception, the periaqueductal gray in the brainstem modulates pain and defensive behavior, autonomic nervous system activation increases our heart rate and breathing.

When we “feel” these systems lighting up is when we start to “have a feeling.” The sensation of these varied processes is labeled as “an emotion.”

These systems and processes are always active to some extent. When we say we are “feeling” a certain way, what we’re really observing is an increase in activity - a pattern.

Like all patterns in a healthy biological organism, emotional patterns come and go, depending on our circumstances. When we run, our rate of breathing increases; when we rest, it returns to normal. We don’t need to “release” our increase in breathing rate, nor do we need to “express it” or refrain from “bottling it up” - it isn’t anything other than a deviation from a mean.

In the same way, emotions do not need to be “released” or “expressed.” Studies actually show that acting out emotions, like hitting a pillow or wall, doesn’t reduce the negative emotion but actually makes it stronger. That’s because there was never any “thing” to be “released” in the first place - simply a pattern of neurological arousal (which gets reinforced and strengthened when we actually engage in arousing behavior).

Our ideas about emotions are just one example of a metaphorical misunderstanding. If we understand an emotion as a thing, material, force, or energy, then certain properties follow, namely that force or energy must be released. It all makes total sense!

This is not just a linguistic point. Metaphor is critical to our worldview.

Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson popularized the idea that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical in their 1980 book, "Metaphors We Live By." They argued that our conceptual system is structured like a pyramid, with the most concrete concepts, such as physical objects (e.g., rocks, trees), forming the base. Concrete, literal concepts serve as the foundation for the more abstract concepts higher up.

That’s not a problem, necessarily. There’s no problem with us believing “better” is “up” (“things are looking up!”) or getting healthy after a disease is like a war (“You’ve got to fight!”). But it’s important that we don’t forget these things are metaphors, because metaphors imply a narratives (if cancer kills me, did I “lose the battle”? Did I “not fight hard enough”?). If business is a battle, that implies a certain set of acceptable tactics. If I consider business a dance, however, the implication is very different.

Metaphor unconsciously structures much of what we see, hear, and feel; forgetting that fact can lead us to very strange places, with very limited courses of action available to us.

So be careful which metaphors you use. One of these days, they might just come back to bite you.

Yours,

-d