But, in fact, our emotions always make sense when we’re able to fully understand ourselves, and there’s a treasure in each emotion. Without emotions, we’re not human.
Each emotion, if we know how to embrace it, provides guidance in modifying or celebrating our relationships to others, to life, to our world. Positive or negative, emotions are not experiences we choose. They occur without deliberation in response to our ever-changing relationships to self and others, relationships that manage to regularly get out of balance. The information contained in our emotions, however, can help us recover that balance, repair or refashion our world, and enable us to participate in communities in more fulfilling ways.
A short list of emotions: mad, sad, bad, glad, scared. Every emotion contains a message. Each type of emotion (for example, mad versus sad) offers a particular kind of revelation about self or about the relationship of self to others or the world. What we call negative emotions tell us that something seems off to us and that attempts at improvement are called for. What we experience as positive emotions embody our appreciation or celebration of a good thing. Every emotion suggests particular kinds of actions that can bring the world back into balance or, in the case of positive emotions, can maintain, enhance, or celebrate balance that already exists.
For example, what makes us mad or feel hurt? Every instance of anger or hurt evokes questions such as: How do I believe I deserve to be treated? How should another person or a community of people be treated, or a particular place, or, more generally, the planet? What seems to be wrong with the world? In what way might I be part of the problem?
What we believe we or others deserve is, of course, not necessarily an accurate assessment. The value of the questioning is to help us understand ourselves — our beliefs and attitudes — as well as the moral and social conventions of our people. Sometimes we discover our beliefs are mistaken. At other times our investigation yields confirmation. In both cases, we can learn how to act on our anger and hurt. In particular, we can learn how to respond to others in a way that fosters healthy relationships.
When we’re sad, a different set of questions arises: What do I love, admire, or desire that I’ve lost or fear I’m about to lose? What can I do to keep the loss from happening or getting worse? If it’s too late, how can I mourn what’s been lost? What does my love or desire say about who I am? How might I praise the things of this world?
When we feel bad (guilty or ashamed): What is expected of me? What do I expect of myself? What are the right ways for me to be and to act? What are my genuine values, and which ones have I violated, knowingly or unknowingly? How do I make things right again with others and with myself?
When we’re glad: What makes my world better, more complete? What, in general, do I rejoice in? What does this say about who I am, what I value? How might I praise or celebrate what is good?
When we’re afraid: What is dangerous and therefore to be escaped, avoided, or approached cautiously? What do I need to do to protect myself or others? What degree of risk is tolerable in pursuit of which goals? Given that zero risk can be deadening, what degree of risk is optimal? What is true security? Given life’s inherent risks and dangers, what skills or resources do I need in order to take care of myself and others?
The Four Steps of Emotional Assimilation
In healthy cultures and families, we learn in childhood how to embrace our emotions in ways that serve ourselves and others. In contemporary Western cultures, most people must learn this later in life. Many never do.
Embracing our emotions can be understood as a journey through the four cardinal directions. Ideally, each of the four steps is thoroughly completed before we move on to the next. The first step — a talent of the South facet of the Self — is to thoroughly experience the raw emotion itself, beginning with how it feels in our body, allowing the emotion to express and embody itself through us, using sound, movement, gesture, or posture. In this step, there’s no interpretation, censoring, or sanitizing of the emotion, only the full visceral experience of it. Second, from the mature perspective of the West Self, we explore what the occurrence of that emotion in that particular situation tells us about ourselves (not about others), about our expectations, values, needs, desires, attitudes, and so on. This is intended not as harsh self-criticism but rather as compassionate self-examination. Third, we express our emotions to others, in word and action, in a nonviolent, kindhearted way that makes our social world right again, or that celebrates what’s already right (nurturing action is a North skill). And fourth, we review the entire cycle of the emotional process now being completed, seeing how it fits within the big picture of our individual life’s story, and, hopefully, have a wholehearted laugh with ourselves and perhaps others about this adventure of being human (an East gift). Through this sunwise (clockwise) cycle — from south to east — our emotions support us in bringing our outer world of relationships into alignment with our inner world of experience, and vice versa.
A Full Emotional Response to Our World
When it comes to our emotions, it’s the Wild One — the South facet of our Self — that feels, embraces, and expresses the full range of our responses to our world: from our ebullient joy over the astonishing spontaneities of Earthly life, to our anguish, outrage, and grief over the devastations and deprivations of its creatures, soils, waters, and air. Wendell Berry has expressed his anguish and grief in this way:
It is the destruction of the world
in our own lives that drives us
half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken, our bodies
existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
that we, driving or driven, despise
in our greed to live, our haste
to die. To have lost, wantonly,
the ancient forests, the vast grasslands
is our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief.7
As ecophilosopher Joanna Macy reminds us, we humans are full-fledged ecological members of our world, a world suffering unspeakable losses every day.8 Given our interdependence with the biosphere, it’s simply normal and healthy to respond with a great wailing grief-cry over the loss of species, habitats, clean air and water, of a safe enough world for our children and ourselves. It’s normal and healthy to feel vulnerable, or overwhelmed at times, to experience a shuddering fear for our world, anger and shame over our collective human carelessness, or outright despair over the survival prospects of our biologically diverse planetary ecosystems. Profound feeling is a natural consequence of our deep belonging and participation in our world, our utter dependence on the vitality of the greater Earth community. These emotions inspire and empower us to act in defense of life.
The South Self’s emotionality is mature compared to that of the South subpersonalities — our Wounded Children, which we’ll explore in chapter 7. The emotions of our Wounded Children tend to be reactive (triggered by conflict and frustration), egocentric (self-centered), self-protective, and self- justifying, while the Wild One’s emotionality is more often proactively ecocentric (supporting our life-enhancing contributions to the more-than-
