“Being Human” — Emotional Projection
Emotional projection thinking feels like classical reductive thinking. Maybe just since the words are so familiar to start, but it also feels like something maybe genuinely inextricable from humanity. “Emotional thinking” immediately conjures an idea of some acting “emotionally.” Images of raving mobs, hysterical people, or tantrums appear instinctively.
That’s not wrong, but also… that’s a really small definition of emotional. And it doesn’t even particularly make sense. I have more emotions than anger or sadness; what happened to happiness, surprise, fear? If “emotional thinking” connotes acting in overtly mad, sad, or just plain bad ways, what do we say when someone is acting happy, or joyful, or interested?
Beyond the colloquial understanding of it, “emotional thinking” more accurately refers to how we might act on our emotions or treat our emotions as facts. Those sound like the same thing, but there’s definitely nuance. Acting on our emotions doesn’t necessitate that we believe our emotions, and treating our emotions factually does not equate to acting on them. The formal definition considers the full gamut of emotions, and focuses more how how the emotions facilitate the individual.
Acting on our emotions is perhaps easiest to consider, because it does fall in line with the common adjectival usage for “emotional.” Someone is expressing their emotions outwardly — maybe laughing, or crying, or pacing. It’s reasonable to believe they are channeling a genuine emotion in a physical medium. However, someone crying does not exactly mean they are sad. Even for someone physically acting on their emotions, body language is not a perfect translator for emotions. Tears can come from joy, surprise, and fear in addition to sadness. Even more complicating, when I see someone crying I have to correctly interpret the physical cues which requires me to have a similar physical vocabulary to the crier. This unfortunately cannot be well navigated without a good deal more specificity but it does showcase how there’s a good deal of mindfulness to be found in such a simple human case.
Now, just considering the individual there is still more to dissect. In cognitive behavioral therapy, there’s an intentional differentiation between thoughts or feelings, emotions or moods, and behaviors or actions all placed within the individual’s perspective and locus of control. The timeline is roughly:
- Stimulus occurs.
- The brain has a reflexive thought/feeling as a reaction to the stimulus.
- The thought or feeling is interpreted through the lens of the individual’s experience. The interpretation is an emotion.
- The individual acts on the interpretation.
As above, colloquially emotional thinking focuses on others’ interpretation of the individual’s actions. That’s all a post-mortem of the process I just outlined though. There’s certainly space for adjustment after step four, but mindfully there is a conceit that I (or any individual) cannot genuinely control how I am interpreted by others.
The other notions against emotional thinking then lie within this four-step process. Step one is almost always out of our control; there are occasion where we choose the stimulus and therefore build a self-fulfilling, emotional feedback loop. More basically though, the stimulus is out of our control and step two occurs as a reflex. That’s to say, step two is also something that is not within the individual’s control. That’s a central assumption of this model — we cannot control our basest response to various stimuli. We gain control in the third step, upon interpretation of the reactionary thought. Our interpretations are informed by our experience (which here perhaps even includes genetic/generational trauma). I have a visceral discomfort around large dogs because of my interactions with large dogs as a young child. I am immediately fond of certain smells given the prevalence of those smells in my familial memories. My story up until now provides the backdrop for how it continues to unfold.
Commonly, that’s enough for most individuals to take action. I know this stimulus, I know this feeling, I will proceed accordingly. But, there is definitely space there, and a central conceit that can be made. Truly, despite my experiences thus far, I don’t know exactly everything I see or will see. Separately, even if I genuinely know something I still have autonomy and can choose new or different actions across multiple instances. Just because it’s Wednesday doesn’t mean I have to do the same thing as last Wednesday. My mom saying “I love you,” doesn’t make me feel the same way every time it happens. Ahmaud’s death does not incite the same response as Treyvon’s.
Things change, and the emotional response changes too. The mindfulness of it is recognizing that I have a role in how it changes for me. I do not control the stimuli or the feelings, but I do have the choice to take action on those feelings and in light of the stimuli. The mindfulness is specifically a claim of autonomy in this process. The mindful assertion is that there is time between the stimulus and the action. Time to think, time to choose. By acknowledging the time, and practicing engaging it, I can claim more and more control over my actions separate of my feelings.
As I practice it more, the dissonance I am charged to resolve seems fairly consistent. I am prone to a stimulus, and I feel a certain way about it. Something rustles behind me, and there’s an innate feeling of fear. I am literally coping with an unknown though, and the only tool I have to decide and act upon is an admittedly flawed memory. From my perspective, even if I know and admit my memories are biased, they’re all I’ve got and there’s dissonance in that those memories do not describe the current situation exactly AND that I don’t know the current situation wholly. Even if I could treat my memory as completely factual, I am forced to submit to the idea that it does not match up entirely with the current situation because — at the very least — I am not the person in my memory. Time changes the narrator. Moreover, I don’t have all the facts of the current situation. All of that evidence amounts to:
“My reactionary thoughts and feelings do not inform factual emotional responses.”
Or, more commonly heard these days — feelings are not facts. Instead, the seed of mindfulness to carry is exactly that I can’t completely trust my memory and that every situation is new and nuanced in a way that demands some intention and attention.
- Expression is symptomatic. Symptoms are a language, so they are necessarily not exact.
- Emotions are an interpretation of events and feelings. It’s a choice to act on them.
- Since emotions are an interpretation, they are also a language and therefore subject to “necessary sloppiness”. They can’t be Facts.
In the ideal, we act on the Facts. That’s to say, when I am faced with a stimulus there’s an intentional differentiation between my feelings and emotions (informed by my accrued experiences) and the observable evidence of the situation as it occurs.
It’s an appreciation that the wide majority of stimuli don’t present a life or death decision so I can (and I’ll argue gently ‘should’) consider more fully before acting. There’s a caveat there, given the context of the real world and the inherent inequity in our systems. It’s relevant to this idea, but another long story on it’s own. The short is that there are definitely groups of people who are faced with life and death stimuli more frequently. As a white person, I try to extend kindness wildly knowing that my own life/death frequency is lower in this world.
That’s all.
- Breathe.
- You don’t know everything.
- Your memory is flawed because you’re human.
- You have time to think before you act.
- Your actions are choices.
- Your feelings are necessarily not facts.
Sincerely Not Mad About It,
August
