Emotions, Emotional Behavior, Emotional Maturity, and Emotion-Defense Mechanisms
Barry Kort
This paper presents some views on emotions, emotional behavior, emotional maturity, and emotion-defense mechanisms. It concludes with the identification of what I believe to be the most successful emotion-defense mechanism ever discovered.
Positive emotions include love, liking, joy, hope, and pride. Negative emotions include fear, anger, despair, guilt, grief, as well as feelings of mistrust, insecurity and inferiority. It is interesting to note that the Seven Deadly Sins are also the names of feelings: Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth. (In this context, gluttony and sloth may be interpreted as the feelings associated with those two behaviors.) Being interested (or bored) in a subject is also a feeling, indicative of the intellectual maturity of the individual. A person becomes interested in something during the phase in which they are building mental models around the subject matter.
Emotional Behavior is behavior driven by one’s emotions. Thus the Seven Deadly Sins are the direct expression of those seven feelings. They are labeled deadly because when one’s behavior is driven by those feelings, one may end up committing wrongful acts and arousing (sometimes intense) negative feelings in other people, with consequential harmful repercussions.
Emotional maturity is the ability to decouple one’s actions (behavior) from one’s feelings (emotional state). However, once one chooses to behave differently from emotional behavior, one has to have an alternative process for choosing how to behave. For the most part, our learned behavior is driven by a code set down by our parents, our moral, ethical, and religious training, and the civil law. However, there are many circumstances when the our code of conduct fails to instruct us adequately. Then our behavior may include emotional behavior modified by restraints implied by the code.
Let us define an emotional attack as any action or behavior on the part of another person (or group) that arouses within us one or more negative feelings. It could be an overt threat to our well-being, or a simple remark that recalls an unhappy circumstance in our lives. It is a fact that many emotional attacks are only dimly perceived (if perceived at all) by the attacking individual. This is because the direct emotional damage may be invisible to the attacker.
When someone receives an emotional attack, one or more emotion-defense mechanisms may be brought into play. Depending on the severity of the emotional attack, on our personality, on our own sense of well-being, and on our own understanding of the code of conduct, we may choose one of five defense mechanisms: stoicism, withdrawal, anger, intimidation, or communication. We describe each one in turn.
Stoicism is simply ignoring the emotional attack, shrugging it off, and shedding or suppressing the bad feeling. One can shed the bad feeling by engaging in some emotionally draining recreational activity (sports) or by just becoming immune by failing to feel anything. The suppression or non-acknowledgement of bad feelings is common in adult males, and may lead to a general suppression of all feelings — good and bad.
Withdrawal is defending oneself from emotional attack by withdrawing from the playing field of human interaction. It may lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness.
Anger is defending oneself from emotional attack by driving away the attacker (by instilling fear in the attacker). Anger is frequently accompanied by name-calling, a sure-fire way to make the other person feel bad. This method may lead to open hostilities and broken relationships, and may give rise to feelings of insecurity, mistrust and guilt.
Intimidation is defending oneself from emotional attack by saying things calculated to make the attacker feel bad about himself, thereby disarming him. This method may leave one with few friends and a reputation for abrasiveness.
Communication is defending oneself from future emotional attack by enabling the attacker to become aware of the attack behavior and the emotional damage inflicted. It relies on the article of faith that the other person does not want to harm you (which is a reasonable assumption). This method avoids all the pitfalls of the other four methods in that it does not arouse an unhealthy negative feeling in the attacker. It does arouse a feeling of compassion, coupled with a transient feeling of guilt, about behaving badly toward the person receiving the (unintended) attack. But the feeling of guilt quickly subsides to remorse and then dissipates as the offender chooses (of his own volition) to alter his future behavior toward the other person. The transgressor may communicate this voluntary resolution through an appropriate expression of remorse. If the hurt was more than emotional, the transgressor may offer to make amends or otherwise repair the damage. The accepted method of making amends is to carry out a good deed which is "equal and opposite" to the transgression. The result is that both people end up feeling good. When the offender repeats his offense, he automatically conjures up that feeling of guilt, which further motivates him to avoid the undesired behavior.
I would like to conclude with some general comments about the use of communication as the only workable emotion-defense mechanism. It is clear to me that all the great leaders became very skilled at the use of this method. Gandhi is my nominee for top honors as the most effective exponent of the method. In order to use the method, one has to be completely honest about one’s feelings, and be willing to disclose them to others. There are ways that this can be done gradually. One does not have to name the specific negative feeling aroused by the other person’s behavior. One can say, "I got an uncomfortable (or uneasy) feeling when you said/did thus-and-so." One can say, "I never really liked it when you...". In order to make this work, be sure to state as precisely as you can the action or word-sequence of the offender. For example, there is a big difference between saying, "Bring me the newspaper," and "Would you mind bringing me the newspaper?" The offender may not be aware of such distinctions. Also, be sure to state the original behavior and not your conclusions about the consequences or effects of the original behavior. "Why are you laying a guilt trip on so-and-so?" is vastly different from "When you said such-and-such to so-and-so, I got the impression you were trying to make her feel bad about something."