The Value of Emotions
Pain, I’ve come to learn, is information. Just as physical pain communicates to you that some part of the body requires attention, emotional pain signals that some aspect of your inner world is asking to be tended to. We’re like gardens: without careful attention (even to the weeds!), sunlight, and water, we cannot thrive. It’s even commonplace for emotional pain to manifest physically—a tension headache from anxiety or stress, fatigue from grief or sadness. But these emotions—anger, resentment, anxiety, loneliness, to name a few—are often viewed as something inherently negative, something to either ignore or tolerate while we try to free ourselves from them as quickly as possible. We might think they aren’t as important to our growing gardens of self as “positive” emotions like happiness or gratitude. And rarely, as award winning author and social science researcher Karla McLaren writes, do we see our emotions as deserving of honor. Generally speaking, the societal attitude toward emotions is that there are good emotions and bad emotions, and you never want to be known as too emotional of a person.
McLaren has a different idea. Quoting from her website, McLaren’s “empathetic approach to emotions revalues even the most ‘negative’ emotions, and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy” (karlamclaren.com). Much of McLaren’s work is centered around her grand unified theory of emotions—essentially, all emotions have intrinsic value, even the “bad” ones. They’re versatile, ever-changing forces that not only help us survive but carry important information within them—about ourselves, about others, and about our experiences.
In her 2010 book The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings are Trying to Tell You, McLaren writes, “Emotions help us protect and heal ourselves at all times—including before, during, and especially after trauma—and…they create vital, connecting links throughout the psyche. They help people reassociate, certainly, but they also help people think more deeply…and become physically secure and aware” (25). Anger, for instance, has a “special relationship” with the healing of personal boundaries, and fear (which in its “flowing state” McLaren equates with intuition) is even necessary for a healthy psyche.
Emotions, then, are paramount to our very survival, socialization, and humanity. They help us create boundaries and relationships; they help us make decisions; they help us genuinely connect not only with others but with our truest selves. It’s natural, though, to dissociate from unwanted emotions arising from uncomfortable situations. We may escape through daydreams in moments of sadness or check out of reality when feeling overwhelmed, an experience many survivors of trauma know intimately. Much of McLaren’s work focuses on building an empathetic relationship with our emotions in the effort to experience them fully and without an excess of discomfort; it’s the experience of them, she believes, that allows us to feel freedom and relief. She details a host of empathetic exercises in her book, many of them echoing the practice of RAIN mindfulness: recognizing the emotion, allowing the experience (or emotion) to exist as is, investigating with kindness and empathy, and natural awareness (which comes from not identifying with the experience).
Personally speaking, in moments of frustration and anxiety I’ve begun to try and slow down through the experience rather than frantically rush my way out (a deep breath usually helps with this), asking myself one surprisingly simple question.
What is this feeling showing me?
And though the physical or mental experience of the feeling may be somewhat uncomfortable, it is actually bearable, and it typically shows me something I want to see—a healthy, growing garden.
