What's a good way to think of one's own emotions?

July 29, 2018 7:05 AM

Sometimes people say you have to "master" your emotions or that you not become a "slave" to them. The master-slave metaphor doesn't seem quite right to me because of its implied violence. What's a healthier way of thinking about emotions? Looking for succintness and clarity.
posted by storybored to Health & Fitness (33 answers total)

Emotions are the spies to your head of CIA.

They give you information about the world you're operating in. They can be wrong, but they can be incredibly valuable and give you information you could not possible access otherwise. Ideally you take their reports into account along with supporting information. You cannot control them absolutely but you can influence them.

They inform you. They walk into your office and give their report, then they go away. If you are a healthy CIA director with appropriate boundaries, they don't follow you home and hang out over dinner and then stick around when you watch the news and then follow you to your room and watch you fall asleep. Probably not a good idea to date or marry your spies.
posted by bunderful at 7:13 AM on July 29, 2018 [52 favorites]

Thinking of President Lincoln's Cabinet, they are your advisors, not the president. You should listen to what they say, sometimes delegate to let them proceed but you need to stay in charge of the ultimate course.
posted by metahawk at 7:16 AM on July 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

I feel like in mental health contexts one's emotions are often a metaphorical big dog or elephant - trying to be helpful, but impulsive and sometimes confused (cars are dangerous, vacuum cleaners aren't). They're yours and you have to pay attention to them - and also stop them trampling the rest of your life and rolling in dead things.
posted by bagel at 7:43 AM on July 29, 2018 [20 favorites]

I think of them as roadsigns that point me to things I need to either address or appreciate. This way I don't need to have a ton of judgement about the existence or intensity or my emotions- they're never the problem- the thing they're pointing at is the actual problem.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 7:44 AM on July 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

— “The Guest House” by Rumi

(I tend to think of emotions as information, with varying degreee of urgency, but on my best days I can maintain this kind of generous attitude. It’s really helpful.)
posted by elephantsvanish at 7:46 AM on July 29, 2018 [44 favorites]

"Master" has more meanings the just being an owner of slaves.
Maybe "mastery of your emotions" sounds better to you?
posted by falsedmitri at 7:49 AM on July 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

For some reason, emotions and possession/ownership are often interrelated metaphorically - you already brought up the master/slave thing; "a man possessed" etc.

I suppose it's problematic as well, but I always liked "own" your emotions. In the sense of "you own that, it's yours," but also in the sense of "that's on you."

Your emotions are one of the few things that are truly yours and yours alone.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:49 AM on July 29, 2018

Emotions are like books: you can read the words and understand the ideas, but it's still very much your call as to how you interpret and apply them. The Master/Slave comparison, while distasteful, fits well descriptively: emotions themselves have no agency. You do.
posted by cirgue at 7:54 AM on July 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

I think that analogy is purposely negative because one should not be a slave to their emotions since they are unreliable. I like the old chestnut “feelings aren’t facts” to relate to mine so I can examine what is really going on and react in a reasonable manner.
posted by cakebatter at 8:25 AM on July 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Emotions are like clouds, while the calm “inner you” is like the blue sky. Even when it’s completely cloudy, the blue sky is always there, and the clouds will eventually float on by. (I got this from the Headspace app, which I highly recommend.)
posted by Weeping_angel at 8:33 AM on July 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

They're your kitchen cabinet, your circle of informal advisers. And it's your kitchen, so you get to make the rules.
posted by MonkeyToes at 8:42 AM on July 29, 2018

Emotions are how we experience our karma. Our actions and intentions are the cause and the emotions are the effects. Cause & effect.

Emotions are the color of our perception, the color to the canvas of our conceptual experience.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:45 AM on July 29, 2018

Do you ever watch any wilderness survival shows or movies?

So many of them are hyped in previews as HUMAN VS NATURE and CONQUERING THE WILDERNESS! But when you watch them, pretty much any survival show, you see that it's not really about conquering anything, really. The people who thrive aren't the ones who are taming the wilderness or even fighting the wilderness at all -- they're the ones who learn to work with nature, understand it, and find ways to navigate through the challenges and find bounty and beauty in it.

And I think emotions are a lot like that. Sometimes you might find yourself in a storm in the dark with howling beasts circling your camp, but if you give yourself some time and some breath and try using the resources around you, nature will also yield what you need to build a warm shelter, find food, and build a fire to keep the beasties away. There might be some rough nights, though, as you build and fail and learn. And as time goes on and you learn more, and as you navigate through more challenges, it becomes easier and you can build a super sweet little Swiss Family Robinson hut and live there quite happily.

Emotions have the power to destroy or sustain us, but you have to learn to work with them and not against them.
posted by mochapickle at 10:35 AM on July 29, 2018 [8 favorites]

Feelings are part of your inner compass. It's your job to understand your feelings each time and thereby get to know yourself, in order to be able to use them for direction.
posted by Litehouse at 10:35 AM on July 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Emotions should be in the passenger seat - neither let them drive nor lock them in the trunk.
posted by eyeofthetiger at 10:37 AM on July 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

Or: your feelings in combination with your ratio (knowledge, understanding of facts, built up experience) are your wisdom.
posted by Litehouse at 10:38 AM on July 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Feelings are powerful. One way to counter their power is to block them. This doesn't really get rid of them but just makes you less aware. A better way is to engage with them but not let them bully you.
posted by Obscure Reference at 11:07 AM on July 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Emotions are the lens that we see the world through. If you just ignore them, you start forgetting that they’re the lens and thinking that they ARE the world.
posted by svenx at 11:27 AM on July 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

i view 'em as another facet of your soul (sorry if this comes off as pretty woo) ..like your intellect, intuition & emotions are sort of like how your body has the senses of taste, touch, smell and so on to navigate life by. emotions are there to kind of flesh out how you experience the world and decide stuff etc. like you need a combo of different kind of info to live life.
posted by speakeasy at 11:42 AM on July 29, 2018

Emotions are the ocean and reason is a surfboard.
posted by hishtafel at 11:57 AM on July 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

None of these things are how I experience emotions at all, ever (see my previous questions). I experience feelings like bleeding--they're a reaction to external stimuli. I don't understand the idea that we can internally control our emotions. The idea that we should be the master of our emotions is laughable to me--you might as well say you could choose not to bleed if you are cut.
posted by Violet Hour at 1:07 PM on July 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

Several years ago someone told me about a concept that actually all of the emotions are always with us, but we experience the ones we focus on. I think they said this was a Buddhist idea - I have no idea.

I feel like there must be more to it, but sometimes if my emotions are being driven by rumination it's useful to remember that I can shift my focus and have a different experience.
posted by bunderful at 1:24 PM on July 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

Emotions are the weather and each of us is a town or city. Depending on what kind of city you are, certain weather patterns may be more likely than others; depending on a number of internal and external factors, a storm or heat wave that renders one city helpless might be only a passing inconvenience to another. The city of you may or may not have lots of money for infrastructure or lots of connections for disaster aid; your terrain may quickly absorb a surprise deluge, or it may be overwhelmed with a flash flood.

I am a city where it admittedly rains at the drop of a hat, and the mercury sometimes goes up and down without warning. I do what I can to prepare for these inevitabilities. I’m trying to curtail behaviour that triggers my climate to change for the worse, and resisting some habits that push me to extremes. I’m working on the strength of my infrastructure, and the ethics of my leadership.

Still, the weather in neighbouring cities will affect me sometimes, for better or worse. My husband is higher altitude and drier and slightly more freeze-prone, for instance, which has cascading effects for me. (We both insist the other is responsible for most of the wind. Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

No city can prevent every possible drought or blizzard or cyclone. The ones that brag most about their ideal climates tend to be located in their own blind spots.
posted by armeowda at 2:22 PM on July 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

It's weather for me too, an internal climate. My body is a terranium for my mind! One of my favourite books is a child's board book Dr Seuss poem about feelings as colours, where you are a wonderful multiple shifting rainbow person, shading browns and greys to yellows and pinks. My youngest daughter grew up on that book and calls her feelings colours still.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 4:21 PM on July 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Emotions are a system of very *efficient* (quick) but blunt guides and alerts, that sometimes need correction. They help us pursue goals, stay safe, and remain connected with other people. Without emotions as guides, how would you choose a partner, a career, a hobby, a meal, a bedspread? Why would you bother investing time and effort in friendship or family? They help us respond quickly to threat, and identify activities worthy of effort.

But they’re imprecise tools with a decently sized error rate - because information that went into programming them to begin with was incomplete, and filtered by cognitive biases, and by other people with similarly imprecise tools (parents, friends). Sometimes we seek apparent rewards that are bad for us, or fear benign things.

So every now and then, the alert or guide signals that are wonky need to be overridden by another program - a quality control program - that evaluates information and predicts possible actions with a more quantitative, pros/cons over the long-term approach.

Over time, with consistent quality control - which can lead to more effective guidance of action & experience, which feeds back into the alert system, correcting false alarms and making better predictions - the accuracy and effectiveness of the alert/guide system itself can improve.
posted by cotton dress sock at 4:48 PM on July 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

So, from my DBT training:

I was given the toolkit of rational mind, emotional mind, and wise mind.
Rational mind is all about telling me facts - like, the sky is what I've been told "blue" looks like.
Emotional mind is all about pattern matching - letting me know about things that have happened in the past that look like right now, and screaming warnings.

Wise mind is using rational mind (things are fine right now because this reason) to acknowledge what emotion mind is saying, and accept that, yes, this emotion is legitimate and real.

This ties into the metaphor I was given: Emotions are a train coming in to a station. I can't control them coming in to the station - they will happen. But what I can control is whether I get on the train - or, if I've gotten on already, whether or not I get off the train.
posted by aurynn at 5:01 PM on July 29, 2018

Emotions happen. You choose how to react.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:08 PM on July 29, 2018

Emotions are data, information about your body and its instictive reactions. Just like what you perceive with your senses is information you use to inform you on how to act. You don't (usually) just do stuff because you saw or heard or smelled something; emotions are the same kind of information (gathered and delivered in the same way) only they're about you rather than the outside world. For example, when you feel anxious you perceive this via your 5 senses - there's haptic information (tightness in the chest, for instance) that informs you of the anxiety. Happiness is the same - you can feel yourself smile, for instance. That's part of why there's one word that covers the tactile/haptic sense and having emotions : feel.
The nice thing about conceptualizing emotions in this way is it eliminates hierarchies and also doesn't minimize them.
posted by eustacescrubb at 6:23 PM on July 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Seconding cotton dress sock. I don't remember where I saw it, but the notion that has stuck with me is that emotions are a kind of quick, heuristic mode of thinking that's useful because so many of the situations we encounter as human beings are too complex for us to sit down and weigh all the pros and cons of the various ways that we might proceed. For that same reason, they can be wildly wrong, because they're snap reactions, but that doesn't mean that they're not valuable.

It's really easy to let them consume your decision-making precisely because of how immediate they are, but if you can step back a little (not so much that you discount them, because that isn't feasible or healthy) and consider them as a powerful voting block among the parts of your mind without granting them veto power, you can hopefully make decisions in a more holistic way. That's the metaphor I tend towards, pretty much the same in spirit as metahawk's.
posted by invitapriore at 6:52 PM on July 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

I can't believe no one's brought up the analogy of the charioteer yet. Basically, you are a charioteer, directing the horses of your divergent desires and emotions into a useful course.

I particularly like this painting, of a horse and rider with an inscription translating to "and so desire carries me along." You need to respect your desires, and sometimes follow their direction (the horse is physically larger/stronger than the rider - it can ultimately overrule him if misused), but when and how to do that is a decision you make consciously.
posted by momus_window at 7:08 PM on July 29, 2018

I believe the analogy of the charioteer originally came from Socrates / Plato.

I always found it interesting that many ancient cultures and even Western culture until recently regarded emotions as infections that came from outside one's body and took over the self. There was no sense that it was "you". The emotion came from a God or some otherworldly origin. This really isn't so different from modern psychology, except now one's Eros or Thanatos or whatever is considered as emanating from one's mind. This works well with the Buddhist emotions as clouds analogy made above.
posted by xammerboy at 12:20 AM on July 30, 2018

They are things you experience. You acknowledge that its happening, and you decide what kind of weight to give that experience.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:32 AM on July 30, 2018

What's a healthier way of thinking about emotions? Looking for succintness and clarity.

Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures who feel: biologically, we really are feeling creatures who think.

- Jill Bolte Taylor

It's a demonstrable physical fact that different brain regions are responsible for processing and generating different facets or aspects of our lived experience. It can be very useful to let go of the idea that any such region should conceive of itself as in charge of that experience, because the brute physical facts are that the only region actually capable of conceiving of itself in that fashion is the neocortex, which none of the others actually need in order to stay good enough at their jobs to keep the whole organism alive in the short to medium term. The world is full of examples of completely viable feeling creatures who don't think. Hell, millions of them voted for Trump.

The neocortex is a biological johnny-come-lately, the only control it has over the rest of us happens via delegation, and if it chooses to treat the rest of us as in some way inferior, well, we have ways to spit in its food. But once it's learned a bit of humility and is prepared to value the skills that the rest of us bring to the party, it can do a hell of a job at working out what the most useful things to pay attention to next are going to be, even allowing for the connectivity limitations that leave it generally too slow and remote to do much of that in the moment.

The physical structure of our brains is such that the thinky thinky parts only ever get to find out what's going on in the parts of the world outside our brains by consulting the feely feely parts. Emotions are, in the most literal possible sense of the word, filters for experience.

What many describe as mastering our emotions does not involve learning to remove the filters, because that's straight-up physiologically impossible. Can't be done. We're simply not wired up that way. Brains have a lot of plasticity, but not so much as to be able to physically stuff their outside parts down into the middle where the I/O ports are at.

But what we can do is improve our understanding of how the filters work and what they're doing, and learn to compensate for that in the way our thoughts respond to experience, by applying something like a reverse filter whenever doing so seems appropriate.

We can also learn to avoid using the thinky thinky parts in ways that trigger so much unhelpful activity in the feely feely parts that unhelpful activity becomes their normal habit.

The master/slave analogy remains somewhat useful, though it needs flipping over. The proper purpose of a thoughtful life should not be the gaining of mastery over our emotions, but the losing of slavery to ourselves.
posted by flabdablet at 12:52 AM on August 13, 2018