The first episode of This Emotional Life was dedicated to happiness, and how to make it happen.
The second episode is about the barriers to happiness, such as fear, sadness, and anger.
In “Facing Our Fears,” we hear everyday people talk about their experiences with anger, depression, phobia, and PTSD.
The complexity of the dark emotions
These are sensitive issues, and we have long way to go in refining how we research, treat, and understand these conditions. The take-away point is that there are no easy answers or fixes, and we must keep learning as much as we can, building upon what we already know.
For instance, depression is complex. Host Daniel Gilbert concedes that there are individual differences in how people are predisposed to depression, which can be triggered by a major life event.
The need for a more complex look at the dark emotions
But what’s interesting to notice is the researchers interviewed keep depression simple. It’s named as a clear brain disease, signified by hippocampal volume decrease.
It’s left at that.
No delving further into how or why the decrease occurs.
No further inquiry into how thought processes themselves might play a role in emotional and thus physical changes in the brain. (Which mainstream science well avoids.)
You watch as a young girl with a severe case of clinical depression goes through intensive electroconvulsive therapy before she can resume daily life and start college. But you don’t know why her twin sister didn’t develop depression. And you don’t know how her college years will go. Or if an emotional trigger could onset depression again.
These are the questions I wish the episode would have asked.
Not enough searching for the why
There is mention of the thought-emotion symbiosis, as psychologist James Gross introduces the concept of cognitive reappraisal. It’s essentially changing your thoughts to change your emotions. And it’s a major component of emotion regulation, or harnessing emotional energy in constructive ways.
Cognitive reappraisal is also important in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which focuses on correcting dysfunctional thoughts and emotions so that they don’t lead to problems in life. CBT is widely successful, but there’s one shortcoming.
It’s that CBT doesn’t focus on finding out why the dysfunctional thoughts and emotions existed in the first place — which can sometimes be crucial to for real transformation.
This hesitance to delve into the why shows up most vividly with the case of Mary, a young woman with anger problems.
The subtle condemnation of anger
Mary talks about how the anger feels when it wells up, how she wants to hurt someone when the anger takes over, and how humiliated and powerless she feels when it’s all said and done.
Her story is so visceral that her final scene is in tears, because she hates who she becomes when she lets herself act on her anger.
But, her story is not framed in a mobilizing way for This Emotional Life viewers.
In fact, it’s immobilizing.
And it treads nowhere near getting to the root of Mary’s anger or why she has such problems. Instead, you only see the devastating effects of anger gone awry.
And for good reason.
It’s a subtle but surefire way to reinforce the still-existing social stigma surrounding anger.
Even though Gilbert says that, “our brains were designed for survival” and that “the negative emotions they create are vital to that mission,” there was a Freudian slip in the editing room, because anger got the short straw.
The obvious condemnation of anger
Writer Adam Gopnik is caught saying:
“Anger, it’s not a helpful emotion. It’s not always an appropriate emotion. And in the cases in my own life when I’ve allowed it free range, I’ve allowed it action, I’ve always regretted it after. I don’t think of a time when I’ve seen my anger as something that was constructive for me or useful in the world.”
“Facing Our Fears” comes short in facing its own fear of anger, and how to really understand how and why it gets out of control. Which is a shame, because all of our emotions can be used in constructive ways.
Coincidentally, Gopnik says later on that anxiety, on the other hand, “is something you can learn to use.” He even refers to “anxiety cappuccinos” as a way to boost your energy.
Why is he okay with anxiety, but not okay with anger? Perhaps the social stigma again?
It’s this kind of thinking — that any emotion is useless — that won’t get us any further along in understanding how to treat anger, depression, phobia, and PTSD.
Mixed messages about the dark emotions
And as such, “Facing Our Fears” sends a mixed message.
On the one hand, you can fix problems (with treatments like CBT) without having to re-live the root of the problem.
But for other problems, like PTSD, successful treatment may come from prolonged exposure therapy, where the military personnel embrace and re-live memories, until they learn not to fear them any longer.
So which is it?
Go toward your emotions? Or away from them?
Treat the symptoms? Or look for the causes?
It’s not entirely clear what This Emotional Life advises, but one thing’s for certain.
Our dark emotions are complex…
As Gilbert says, “science reminds us that we’re of two minds: a rational brain that’s relatively new and an emotional brain that’s relatively old.”
What this means is that because we’ve gotten so smart, it’s complicated our emotional systems, leading us into some trouble. We can anticipate future pain, fear the past, and fear the irrational.
Primatologist Robert Sapolsky says “we are smart enough to imagine our own deaths” and to create stressful careers that eat away at our health. Our complex human culture allows us to turn on the stress response for “clearly psychological reasons,” which is “not what the stress response evolved for.”
Because we are so smart, we have to work harder to lead emotionally healthy lives. And we have to be mindful of our response ability to all of our emotions.
… So let’s be more careful in how we think about them
Yes, Gilbert’s right. “Sometimes emotion overwhelms and sometimes reason outwits emotion.”
But it’s not that simple.
“Facing Our Fears” captures how we have a long way to go, and many questions still to answer about how to work with all of our darker emotions, which relies heavily in finding out why our dark emotions come about in the first place.
What do you think?
Did you catch the show? What were your thoughts?
How did the segments make you feel about your own ability to work with your dark emotions?
Did it bring you closer to them, mystify them? Or have a different effect altogether?
I would be interested to hear your experiences.
This is the 3d article in the series, “This Emotional Life.”
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Your right, TEL doesn’t really advise one type of therapy over another, it just gives us a description of it’s assumptions, treatment interventions, and goals. Psychodynamic therapy and CBT were the heavily discussed types of therapy because they are the two most prominent types used today. Neither one is better than the other. For some people, Psychodynamic works better, and for others, CBT. CBT has been proven to be effective scientifically among anxiety and depression disorders, but some believe that that may be because it is easier to study CBT (takes less time and is more structured). And at the same time, psychodynamic seems to be a long, insightful, and painful process that may have longer lasting effects. So both forms of therapy are good, and TEL doesn’t reccommend one and not the other because it really depends on the presenting problem, patient, therapist and therapist-patient dynamic.
Whitney, actually, from what I gathered, This Emotional Life seemed to promote CBT over Psychodynamic Therapy — given the way they structured the air-time for both of them, and only really showed CBT “in action.”
You bring up a great point that mental health for the most part tries to retain an objective assessment of assumptions, treatment interventions, and goals. But it’s important to note that this “objectivity” is bound by its social constructivist roots.
This Emotional Life sends conflicting messages about how to work with your emotions, which perhaps represents the diversity of various psychotherapeutic approaches, as you speak of.
If mental health was more unified in its view of emotions and their role in our lives, I think we would see much more response ability overall. And, with cognitive-affective science, that unification is slowly emerging.
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