In the Zone: Managing Impossible Emotions
by Thomas J. Scheff (June 2011)
Just as emotions sometimes cause havoc in our lives, the study of emotions is also in a state of chaos. Until recently, even in social and behavioral studies, it was a very small field compared to the attention given to behavior, cognition, alienation, self-esteem and many other topics. Grown larger in recent years, it is still preliminary in nature, with many different and often conflicting approaches. It seems to me, however, that there are occasional glimpses of clarity and light.
The following, for example, is a precise description of a zone needed for dealing directly with intense emotions, and some of the difficulties. It is focused on a single problem, how fear is experienced in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but it might have wider implications.
Out of Control Emotions
The passage quoted about a healing zone for fear is quite helpful in itself. Yet it also involves issues that are much broader than fear: the references to raw flashbacks (too close), and to dissociation and shutting down (too far). Drama theorists have given little consideration to the nature of audience emotions, only how dramas might be designed to touch them. What is known about emotions that are either inaccessible or out of control?
This statement conveys little, since we are not sure what forces Freud was referring to, nor for that matter, how the ego itself is to be construed (Definitions of the ego and the self will be offered below.) The vast significance of the concept of repression, compared to the meager amount of knowledge about it, makes an enormous gap in psychoanalytic theory.
Emotion Loops
The reference to a healing zone quoted earlier suggests two further questions: how could emotions be so painful that they are either hidden, or so powerful as to be out of control?
My own interest in this question began long ago while teaching the social psychology of emotions. When we discussed embarrassment and blushing in the larger classes, there were often one or two students who complained that blushing made them miserable. They explained that when they became aware that they were blushing, they would be further embarrassed, no matter the cause of the first blush. Often these students implied that blushing about their blush was not only lengthy and painful, but also seemed out of their control.
This recent comment by a 20 year old female student provides an example:
With these kinds of observations as background, I was struck by a story told by the noted actor Ian Holm. On one occasion he had muffed his lines, but when he became aware that he was blushing, he blushed more. The more he became embarrassed by his blushing, the more he blushed and the more embarrassed. This process went on, he said, until he ended paralyzed in the fetal position, requiring that he be carried off the stage.
Shame Loops
Gilligan is referring to a specific situation where shame is a secret.
In a large majority of the cases, Websdale had assembled an enormous amount of material. A few of the cases occurred long enough ago so that only media coverage was available. But most cases were recent enough that Websdale, with the help of many people, was able to gather interviews from persons who knew the families. The findings suggest two kinds of killers. The majority were working class men who had a history of anger and aggression. The cases of these men strongly suggested that they used anger and aggression to hide shame.
There was also a sizeable minority of a different type. Websdale called these killers civic respectable. They were middleclass men and women who had no history of prior aggression or violence, but who had been intensely humiliated prior to the murders. For example, several of the cases were men who had lost their jobs, but hid the news from their family and others. They continued to leave home for the day as if they were still working. But it turned out that during this period, which in some cases was as long as several weeks, they were plotting murder. Some also killed themselves. All of these cases, particularly, suggest how one can get lost in an unending shame loop to the point that murder is chosen as preferable to further suffering.
Emotion Backlogs
The idea of emotion loops not only suggests how overwhelming pain or loss of control can occur in flashbacks, but also the reason for dissociation and numbing. Anticipation of loss of control and/or unbearable pain might lead people to avoid emotions entirely, as in hiding emotions. This kind of avoidance also may have still another kind of looping effect: emotional backlogs. The more avoidance, the more the bodily buildup of emotional tension. The more buildup, the greater the pain that is anticipated, which can lead to a further kind of avoidance loop.
The idea of avoiding grieving because of the anticipation of pain and/or loss of control is a commonplace. It is implied, for example, in this song by Iris Dement (1993):
Well, I stayed at home just long enough to lay him in the ground
The pieces of my heart that have been ripped away from me
In the Zone
This section will expand upon the way the zone (midpoint between avoidance and flashback) might allow for enough safety to experience any backlog of emotion, no matter how seemingly overwhelming. How can one feel safety, and indeed, even pleasure, when experiencing intense emotions that are ordinarily felt as unbearable and/or overwhelming?
Children learn role-taking so early and so well that they forget that they are doing it. The more adept they become, the quicker the movement back in forth, learning through practice to reduce their turn to a span of time unbelievably short. Studies of the length of silences in conversations (for example, Wilson and Zimmerman 1986) help us understand how the forgetting is possible. The 1986 study reported that in the adult conversations recorded, the length of the silences varied from an average of .04 to .09 seconds.
Self and Ego
The idea of automatized responses in conversation suggests a more complex loop than the one described above for emotions. The conversation loop is not simply recursive, a folding back on itself, such as shame about shame. Rather it implies the use of hundreds or even thousands of stock words, phrases, or sentences. But it is a loop because it almost always involves a fixed package of responses, rather than exploring the limits of human response. The reflexive self is capable of providing a unique response to each unique situation. The ego cannot. Ego responses usually are more about the self rather than the other or the situation.
Safety Through Role-taking
An example that illustrates a moment of control in the face of strong emotions comes from my own life. It occurred long ago, the night after my first group therapy session. As I was telling my then girlfriend how envious I was when others were crying during the session, I began to cry myself. This episode lasted some fifteen minutes, and was a huge surprise to me. I was 40 at the time: it was probably my first real cry in 30 or so years. The crying part of my then self was completely unknown to me.
Conclusion
References:
Freud, Sigmund. 1966. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton (1922).
Levine, Peter. 2010. In an Unspoken Voice. Berkeley: North Atlantic.
Scheff, Thomas. 1979. Catharsis in Healing, Ritual and Drama. University of California
_____________2007. Catharsis and Other Heresies. Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, 1 (3), 98-113.
Siegel, D. J. 1999. The Developing Mind. New York: Guilford.
Websdale, Neil. 2010. Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Style of 211 Killers. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wilson, Thomas and Don Zimmerman, 1986. The Structure of Silence between Turns in Two-party Conversation. Discourse Processes 9:4 (October-December): 375-390.
What's Love Got to Do with It?: The Emotional World of Popular Songs (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers) 2011
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