IIC 7: The Huge Mistake We Make with our Emotions in a Crisis

We examine the one huge mistake people do or don’t do with their emotions in a crisis, why that mistake happens so often, and the costs of that mistake.  Then we go through an experiential exercise to help us counteract that mistake and to aid in getting to know ourselves better.

[00:00:01] Let’s get right to it. Today we are discussing the one huge mistake that we human beings tend to make with our emotions when we are in a drawn-out crisis situation. One major mistake that we are all prone to make when we are stressed. And today, we’re not just going to discuss that one major mistake, but we’re going to discuss the remedy to that one common mistake. We’re going to practice that remedy as well. I’m going to walk you through an experiential exercise to help you rise above that common mistake. And to help you get to know yourself better. So stay with me. Here we go. Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where together we embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth during this pandemic, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski with Souls and Hearts. Thank you for being here. This is episode 7, The Huge Mistake We Make with Our Emotions in a Crisis. What is the great mistake that many of us make with our intense emotions in a crisis? In one word, the answer is neglect. We neglect our emotions. We disregard them. We don’t pay attention to them. We avoid them. We defend against them so that in an emergency, they don’t keep us from being able to act. And that’s actually helpful in the short run. I want you to imagine a fire fight in a battlefield where a soldier’s legs are wounded by shrapnel and he can’t move.

[00:01:40] His buddy comes in, he works quickly and efficiently to stop the bleeding. He carries him back to the medical station for care. It would not help his buddy to get overwhelmed with emotion or fear, or a sense of loss or grief or, you know, any of that in that moment. He needs his head clear. He needs to be able to focus. He needs to be able to temporarily keep out of his conscious awareness all those memories and all that emotion, to be able to focus on the demands of the moment. And that capacity is a gift from God. We naturally have defenses that keep at least some of our internal experience out of conscious awareness, so that we can function when we’re under stress. We call them defenses because they defend us. They protect us. They protect us against internal experiences that otherwise would overwhelm us, against emotions that could swamp us with their intensity. Some clinicians call these defenses coping mechanisms. So what are these defenses? You’ve heard of many of them. Denial, repression, avoidance, dissociation. I have a list of about 50 of them that I consider when I’m doing psychological evaluations. The function of all these defenses is to protect us from being overwhelmed by our internal experience, particularly intense emotional experiences. The problem is that over time, these defenses all have costs.

[00:03:09] There’s always a price to pay for using a defense, and the cost is often part of the defense itself. For example, a man who drinks in order to stay away from his emotional pain could wind up with a hangover in the morning. That’s a cost that’s inherent to the defense. But a cost common to all defenses is that we are not as in touch with our emotions. In general, people only deal with what they consciously experience. They assume that that’s all there is. If I’m not feeling it, it’s not there. If a defense is working effectively, it actually does keep all or at least part of an emotion out of our awareness. And when we don’t know what we’re feeling, we’re at a disadvantage. For example, we can’t share the experiences that we’re disconnected from with other people. We can’t bring them to God in prayer. We’re not integrated. We’re not connected. So let me make a comparison to the human body. There are some people with a rare genetic condition who cannot feel physical pain. It’s called congenital analgesia, and it’s thought to be related to a genetic mutation that interrupts the normal functioning of pain messages in the central nervous system. These people with congenital analgesia don’t feel it when they burn their mouth with hot coffee. They don’t feel pain when they injure themselves at all. Some people might actually wish to have this condition. To live a pain free life sounds really appealing to those who suffer with chronic pain. But people with congenital analgesia have short lives.

[00:04:49] They don’t have a warning system to protect themselves, and they usually die of some kind of accident. Sometimes, for example, they know that they’re burning their hand on the stove when they smell it. So let’s take a look at an example in the psychological realm. Let’s say that you are angry with your spouse, but you’ve defended against that because it’s not a good time to be in full awareness of that. It’s likely if you stay disconnected from that anger, that it’s going to come out in your behavior in ways that your intellect and your will can’t address as effectively. We call that an enactment or acting out. It’s a way of discharging some unconscious emotion through an action. So let’s think about this. Have you ever had the experience where you were pretty sure that someone felt something towards you, but that person wasn’t aware of it? How about the guy that insists in a frustrated, angry tone that he is not angry? I’m not angry. Why do you keep telling me I’m angry? Often people in that situation believe what they are saying in those moments. They’re just not in touch with their experience. So they sincerely don’t know that they’re angry, even when it’s very clear to many of the people around them.

[00:06:12] So now we’re several weeks into this pandemic. It’s dragging on. We’ve had time to build up emotions about it and about all that’s tied into it. The lockdowns, the quarantines, social distancing, all the preparations we have to make. We’ve had time to build up emotions. The problem is not that we have some temporary disconnect from intense emotion. Like I said before, sometimes we need that. Sometimes to experience emotion in its intensity in the moment isn’t helpful. The problem is when we don’t seek to understand ourselves, when we choose to stay disconnected from what we’re really feeling. That’s when problems come in. So you might ask, Dr. Peter, how can my emotions influence my actions when I’m not feeling them? It’s like this emotions signal important things that are going on within us. They inform us about our experience. And when those emotions are kept out of awareness by defenses, there’s a God-given pull for the trouble to come to the surface. The more we repress and refuse to acknowledge an emotion, the more that emotion tries to get to the surface. It’s like trying to keep a beach ball submerged under the water. Think about it this way on the flip side. Have you ever been in the presence of a compassionate person and then all of a sudden had an insight about what you’re really struggling with? Some kind of realization. Somehow being in the presence of that person, a person who cares about you and who loves you, allows those defenses to dilate.

[00:07:55] It allows that material that was too threatening before to come to the surface. It created a space for you to be able to experience and to feel what’s really going on inside. Happens all the time in therapy. So to wrap up this first part, the number one huge mistake we make with our emotions in a crisis is to willfully neglect them. It’s to plow on with never looking back, just being caught up in the demands of the moment and not taking the time to really inventory what’s going on within us. It leads us to be disconnected from ourselves. It leads us to be out of touch with our internal experience. The consequence of that is to be prone to behavioral enactments. That’s when we act out, because these emotions and their experiences that drive them are not being acknowledged. So like all the experiential exercises that we do in this podcast, this is not therapy. Nothing in Souls and Hearts that we do is therapy. It actually also sounds really simple. You might hear this and say, that just sounds so simple. It’s effective because it is simple. I don’t want to make it complicated. So what we’re going to do is a very important aspect of heartset.

[00:09:13] This is that willingness to look inside and own what is going on within you. It’s to slow down. It’s to take the time to really look inside. Seek and ye shall find. You can find out what’s going on within you if you create the proper conditions. Now, if this seems frightening to you or overwhelming, there’s likely to be some kind of trauma history there that really may benefit from you seeking professional assistance. And I would recommend that you do that. But for many people, it’s really a question of focusing attention inward. I’m going to invite you to adopt a mindset where you accept all of your internal experiences. This is owning the emotions that you have, not shuffling them away, not driving them into the unconscious. If we look, we’re going to see things that we don’t want to see. There’s going to be certain impulses or desires or attitudes, but especially emotions, that we find distasteful or troubling in some way. It’s really important that we make a distinction between things that are merely uncomfortable and threaten us, and things that are actually morally wrong. Any emotion, any impulse, any desire that you experience are what are in moral philosophy called first moral acts. A first moral act is something that arises spontaneously and it’s outside the purview of the intellect and the will. Comes up spontaneously, it feels like automatic. The moral weight comes in when we make a decision using our will, bringing in the intellect about what we’re going to do about that impulse, that emotion or that attitude. That’s where the that’s where the moral weight comes in.

[00:11:19] So to have a feeling of anger, even to have a feeling of anger at God, which is so common, that’s not sinful. It’s not sinful unless you act on it in some sinful way. Anger at God is disordered, right? Because God actually never commits injustices against us, but we often have ways that we perceive him having been unjust when something happens, often in a crisis, that we don’t understand and that we think reflects a lack of love for us. So that anger is always a response to at least a perceived injustice. The saints were the ones that really were most in touch with their internal experience. And do saints talk about how they’ve reached the pinnacle of human experience and about how well they have themselves together? No. They talk about their wretchedness. They talk about the ways in which they’re disordered. They’re not more disordered than the rest of us. They’re just more in touch with their internal experience. And they’re able to be in touch with it, I think, because they have a deep sense of the love of God for them anyway. That love of God, the compassionate sense that God is with them, allows them to be able to know themselves.

[00:12:44] Otherwise it would be too much. Going back to the exercise, I’m going to ask you to set aside time. Create a quiet place. This is a time to feel and a space to feel, and also to be gentle with yourself in this space, to go into it with that mindset of acceptance of whatever comes up. Just that it comes up, just that it exists, right, that doesn’t mean that we’re endorsing something that may be disordered, like anger at God. It’s not saying that that’s great, that we want to keep that. It’s merely acknowledging that it exists. Because once we acknowledge that it exists, we’re in a much better position to use our intellect and our will to work with it more effectively. Note your reactions as you create that space to be gentle with yourself and to look inward and see what’s there. You might draw or doodle. You might write down what you’re experiencing in a journal. This is really good to put your thoughts and feelings into words. It allows the will and the intellect to engage in symbolic thought, which is really important. Let me know how that exercise goes for you. Email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. Let’s stay connected. And if you sign up at soulsandhearts.com for this podcast, you’ll get the Wednesday morning email with extra tips and insider information, including sneak peeks about what’s coming up.

[00:14:22] I’m going to send everybody that’s on my email list, a list of the names of the 50 or so defenses that I consider in evaluating clients. You can just have the list, one after the other, of what all those defenses are. Also, I’m really going to encourage you to reach out to your psychologically-minded friends that are invested in the faith. This podcast is focused on a small segment of the population. It’s focused on those who are committed to their faith and who really want to understand themselves and others better from a psychological perspective, in the service of being able to love them better. And in a crisis like we’ve got now, we need people that are self-aware. More and more people are getting more and more disconnected from themselves. We’re seeing distress levels go up all over the place. Calls to crisis lines here in Indiana have increased 25-fold. This is an opportunity. This exercise that I’m describing to you is an opportunity for you to be able to step it up and to get connected with your own stuff. Nobody can do that for you, not even God. God can’t even connect with your experience instead of you, right? So let me know how it goes. Email me. Let’s stay in touch. And let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. Mother Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.