If we can’t get rid of emotions, let’s use them well
The best thing about being a psychotherapist is that I get to hear so many different stories. The beauty of being a client is that you get to tell whatever story you feel like telling. Any therapist can attest to the fact that even though we hear many stories that deal with similar topics, no two stories are alike. Everyone’s experience is granular, specific, and rather unique, determined by the many contingencies in our lives. As diverse as these stories are, all of them contain the same spice – emotions.
More often than not, this spice isn’t well accepted, and I’m beginning to think of that as a manifestation of our cultural condition, a consequence of our emphasis on rationality and productivity, our knack for practical, quick and easy solutions. At least once or twice a week, I will hear a sentence like “my emotions are irrational”, “it’s crazy that I feel this way”, “my anxiety makes no sense”, “shame means nothing”. Even more often, my clients struggle to identify their emotions and often resort to vague and psychologically fairly useless terms like “I feel uncomfortable”. Whenever I encounter such dismissive or reductionist takes on emotions, I try to understand them better. As a therapist, for every theory I ask: what’s the benefit of seeing something in this way? And this usually leads me and my clients down a whole new rabbit hole.
The descent into the said rabbit hole starts with a few simple questions. Before you continue reading, take a few minutes to think about them:
Why do you have emotions at all?
What is your understanding of specific emotions such as sadness, anger, guilt, etc.?
How do you know that you are feeling one emotion and not another?
What are the most common types of implicit ideas I come across working with my clients is beside the point, at least for this article. My goal is not to write about folk theories of emotion, but to offer a different perspective on them, one that I find to be useful as well as practical, and one that can certainly free a person from the unhealthy confines of conventional wisdom about the nature of our emotional lives.
In his personal construct theory, George Kelly doesn’t use the term emotion at all, so one would think this would be a strange place to look for a useful way to understand them, and yet this is exactly where I will look. Personal construct psychology is often, to this day, misrepresented as a cognitive (or a “proto-cognitive”) theory and prominent psychologists such as Carl Rogers have in the past accused it of not taking our emotional life into account at all. Since I’m writing this, it is obvious that I disagree.
The key to properly understanding Kelly and his theory is to actually read him, not just skim through his gigantic two-volume opus magnum. I know, a radical idea - reading. It is true that he doesn’t use the word “emotion” at all; in fact, he begins volume 1 of The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955) with a rather strange pronouncement that “there is no ego, no emotion, no motivation, no reinforcement, no drive, no unconscious, no need.” And if you stop reading there, you may think that he’s gone insane, writing thousands of pages on the human psyche only to dismiss the fundamental psychological terms of his time. When he came up with his theory of personality, Kelly set out to create a whole new language to describe the human experience, a language that would see people holistically, as complicated meaning-making beings in constant motion and interaction with the world. A new psychology required a new language, so he constructed one.
Even though Kelly’s new language isn’t always possible to translate because there are no direct one-to-one correspondences with our conventional psychological ideas, we can say that roughly, when we talk about emotions, Kelly talks about transitions. Transitions are specific psychological states that make us aware of impending or necessary changes in our system of constructs, or its limitations that need to be overcome in one way or another. What’s a system of constructs, I hear you ask? For the sake of simplicity, let’s say it’s an organized collection of all the ways in which you structure your experience, it’s how you see yourself.
Dear Vladimir, make it make sense please! To put it simply, emotions are information about what’s happening inside of you. It’s your psyche’s barometer!
When you turn on the news to hear what’s happening out there in the world, you get the news in whatever language you choose. Emotions are news from the internal world, but unfortunately you cannot choose the language. The news is delivered in a strange series of symbols that most of us have a hard time understanding – heart beating, butterflies in the stomach, pressure in our chest, etc. It’s like listening to the news in Middle English, you can often vaguely understand if it’s good or bad, but most of the details will surely elude you.
According to personal construct psychology, our emotions are not meaningless, and they are not irrational. In fact, I do not believe in irrational when it comes to human psychology. There is always a kind of sui generis logic to our thoughts, feelings and actions, it’s just that it’s easier to dismiss them as irrational than to look deep within and learn about the logic behind them. It’s not just difficult because it’s expressed in this strange language of somatic symbols, it’s difficult because it asks us to be brave enough to potentially have to redefine how we see ourselves, based on what we find out. It’s dangerous.
Our emotions quickly take us to our dark places. What if my subtle unease in the public transportation is actually racism? How can I be racist when I tweet all the right things and I put a black square on my Instagram! Unacceptable! What if that strange feeling in my chest when I go to bed is fear that I’ll have to have sex with my partner? What if my sadness means that I need to let go of my relationship? What if my social anxiety is not about other people, but my fear of being an imposter, not funny enough, not smart enough, average?
Isn’t it much easier to say that it is all just genetically determined, quite irrational neurons gone haywire, and continue to think you’re just fine, a good person, a very special person?
If you think like a constructivist, you may have more courage to dive in and see what’s beneath the surface. George Kelly was a pragmatic psychologist. His goal was to help his clients understand where they are and help them rewrite the narrative of their life. If you feel guilt, it’s not because you’re a horrible person. You’re merely receiving the news that you’ve deviated from how you see yourself in a significant way. Once you get the news, you can either re-evaluate your actions or your self-image and values.
But, in itself, guilt isn’t a sign that there’s something fundamentally wrong with you, it’s just telling you that you’ve broken a rule. What you do with the information is entirely up to you. If you’re anxious, it means you need a fresh perspective, anxiety tells us that we don’t have tools to understand and cope with the current situation. You can waste your time and energy and call yourself weak, but that’s your choice. Anxiety merely delivers the news. It’s much more practical to take the information and then do something with it. Namely, if you can’t anticipate and resolve a situation, then you need to find a different way of thinking about it. Information indirectly contains the solution. If you’re attentive enough, that is.
In constructivism, there is no space for empty moralizing or wallowing in misery and self-judgment. There is also no room for fatalism and hopelessness. The point is not that you’re a failure because you’ll maybe realize that you don’t like your relationship or that you’re not as good at your job as you like to think. The guiding principle behind constructivist psychology is to cultivate a proactive approach to life – you have to accept what you’re like now to be able to see what direction to take to become what you want to be.
Understanding the logic of your emotions is the fundamental first step towards any kind of change and it’s the one topic no one can avoid in psychotherapy. Approaching emotions from a constructivist perspective and understanding them as your internal weather forecast allows you to pinpoint where the underlying issues are, to understand them and even map out your journey towards change. Kelly’s constructivism is fundamentally a compassionate, kind theory. It doesn’t see humans as robots or machines, it doesn’t leave us to be hopelessly carried by the forces from our childhoods, nor does it relegate our troubles to the unchangeable genetic influences. It sees us as active and capable beings who can take charge of their own mind and shape as they see fit. This emancipatory power is why constructivist psychology is both powerful and terrifying. After all, what’s more scary than freedom?
