What I really liked about this book was its accessibility. The whole point of the book is to take complex emotions and separate them out to more narrowly identify what one is actually feeling. It uses the concept of emotional families like a sort of "emotion wheel" to help us narrow down what we actually feel. For example, resentment is not part of the anger family, but part of envy, since we usually feel resentment towards those who have what we want. In my own thinking, resentment is like the other side of contempt. Whereas resentment comes from a place of inferiority, contempt comes from a place of perceived superiority, since you often feel contempt for someone you think is dumber than you, weaker than you, or otherwise worse than you.
Something else that is interesting is that we gain emotional complexity as we grow. Like how children are unable to distinguish between sarcasm and irony (according to some researchers cited in the book) until they are ten or eleven years old. Then, after understanding the difference, it is a few more years (usually) before individuals begin to understand the humor in sarcasm as teenagers.
Another good distinction in the book that stood out to me was the difference between compassion and pity. Whereas compassion feels open, pity sets up separation between the person and the other that they feel bad for. Pity is marked by a sense of distance, whereas being compassionate is about closeness. Pity involves a belief that the other person is inferior, a self-focused reaction, a desire to maintain emotional distance, and an avoidance of sharing in the other person's suffering. Then there is shame, which is focused on the self, compared with guilt, which focuses on the act. We feel shame about ourselves as we are, whereas guilt is about what we've done. Whereas shame is correlated with addiction, violence, aggression, and depression, guilt is negatively correlated with those behaviors. Humiliation, on the other hand, is imposed from another, and is usually undeserved. Embarrassment is imposed by ourselves, and is usually smaller than humiliation.
There is also a lot of very useful advice and some good techniques in this book. Some are good for just thinking about ourselves, and others are useful in relationships. One technique useful just as an individual is self-compassion. Self-compassion uses self-kindness instead of self-judgment, common humanity instead of isolation, and mindfulness instead of over-identification. That means that to be self-compassionate, we focus on forgiveness of ourselves, acknowledgment of the difficulties all people face, and recognition of the emotions passing through us rather than identifying as a person who always feels that way. In relationships, Brown discusses the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" that can doom a marriage or a relationship, citing John Gottman. The four horsemen are criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. But we can convert each of these into something better. Criticism, using "you"-focused language, can be converted to "I" language. So instead of saying, "why do you always make us late?" you can say "I feel frustrated that we keep arriving late." Then, instead of victimizing oneself by being defensive, you can take responsibility. Just apologizing goes a long way where being defensive can aggravate a situation. Then, instead of stonewalling and simply withdrawing from interaction, it can be better to self-soothe, which involves announcing that you need a timeout to calm down. It can be productive to temporarily end an argument and come back to it later. Finally, there is contempt, which is the most dangerous feeling. Instead of attacking your partner as a person, it is better to describe your own feelings and needs, and eliminate the feelings of superiority that can develop contempt.
No comments:
Post a Comment