Understanding the contradictory basis of the negative emotions, and their structural contrast to the positive ones, is revealing in the quest for wholeness. All of the negative emotions studied were comprised of two conflicting impulses, one propelling action and the other inhibiting (i.e., thwarting) that action. In addition, when a subject was “locked” into joy by hypnotic suggestion, a contrasting mood (e.g., depression, anger or sadness) could not be produced unless the (joy) posture was first released. The opposite was also true; when sadness or depression was suggested, it was not possible to feel joy unless that postural set was first changed.
The facial, respiratory and postural responses that supported positive affects are opposite to those seen in depression. There is a poignancy to this truth that was revealed years ago in a simple exchange between Charlie Brown and Lucy (from Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts). While walking together, Charlie, slumped and shuffling, is bemoaning his depression. Lucy suggests that he might try standing up straight, to which Charlie replies, “But then I wouldn’t have a depression to complain about” as he continues on his way resigned, slouched and downtrodden. And what are we to do if we don’t have an ever-vigilant Lucy to elucidate the ever-perplexing obvious? However, as correct as Lucy was in a metaphoric sense, mood changing is not a matter of simply willing postural change (like a proud military stance). Indeed, altering one’s psychological disposition is a much more complex and subtle process that fundamentally involves, instead, the spontaneous and subconscious changing of postural states through body awareness.
The extensive work of psychologist Paul Ekman159 supports the role of facial posture in the generation of emotional states. Ekman trained numbers of subjects to contract only the specific muscles that were observed during the expression of a particular emotion. Remarkably, when subjects were able to accomplish this task (without being told what emotion they were simulating), they often experienced those feelings, including appropriate autonomic arousal states.
In a quirky experiment, Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg, Germany, had two groups of people judge how funny they found some cartoons. In the first group, the subjects were instructed to hold a pencil between their teeth without it touching their lips. This procedure forced them to smile (try it yourself). The second group was asked to hold the pencil with their lips, but this time not using their teeth. This forced a frown.
The results reinforced Ekman’s work, revealing that people experience the emotion associated with their expressions. In Strack’s work those with even a forced smile felt happier and found the cartoons funnier than did those who were forced to frown.
To get even weirder, Richard Wiseman160 posted a series of jokes on a humor website. The basic template of the joke was that there are two cows in a field. One cow says, “Moo,” and the other cow responds, “I was going to say that.” When this joke was modified with different animals, by far the funniest was two ducks sitting in a pond. One of the ducks says, “Quack,” and the other duck responds, “I was going to say that.” It was indeed the “k” sound heard in “quack” and “duck” that was experienced as especially funny. Once again it may have been the facial feedback (as the pencil experiment) that made the people feel particular mirth.
Nikolaas Tinbergen, in his Nobel acceptance speech titled “Ethology and Stress Disease,”161 described and extolled the beneficial effects of a method of postural reeducation called the Alexander method. Both he and his family, in undergoing Alexander’s treatment process, had experienced dramatic improvement in sleep, blood pressure, cheerfulness, alertness and resilience to general stress. Other prominent scientists and educators had also written of the benefit of this treatment. These included John Dewey, Aldous Huxley and scientists like G. E. Coghill, Raymond Dart, and even the great doyen of physiology and earlier Nobel Prize recipient, Sir Charles Sherrington. While admiration from such prominent individuals is provocative, it hardly constitutes rigorous scientific proof. On the other hand, it is unlikely that men of such intellectual rigor had all been duped.
F. M. Alexander and Nina Bull had each recognized the intimate role of bodily tension patterns in behavior. Alexander, an Australian-born Shakespearean actor, had made his discovery quite accidentally. One day, while performing Hamlet, he lost his voice. He sought help from the finest doctors in Australia. Getting no relief, and desperate, he pursued assistance from the most influential physicians in England. Without a cure, and given that acting was his only profession, Alexander returned home in great despair.
As the story goes, his voice returned spontaneously, only to elusively vanish again. Alexander took to observing himself in the mirror, hoping that he might notice something that correlated with his erratic vocal capacity. He did. He observed that the return of his voice was related to his posture. After numerous observations, he made the startling discovery that there were distinctly different postures—one associated with voice and another with no voice. To his surprise, he discovered that the posture associated with the strong and audible voice felt wrong, while the posture of the weak or absent voice felt right. Alexander pursued this observational approach for the good part of nine years. He came to the realization that the mute posture felt good merely because it was familiar, while the postural stance supporting voice felt bad only because it was unfamiliar. Alexander discovered that certain muscular tensions could cause a compression of the head-neck-spine axis, resulting in respiratory problems and consequently the loss of voice. Decreasing these tensions would relieve the pressure and allow the spine to return to its full, natural extension. Attending to this disparity allowed Alexander to cure himself of his affliction. Thus, through better mind-body communication, he was able to recover much of his natural ease of movement, leading to an economy of effort as well as improved performance. Realizing that he had the makings of a new career, Alexander gave up acting and began working with fellow actors and vocalists with similar performance problems. He also began working with musicians whose bodies were twisted and in pain from the strained postures they believed were required for playing their instruments. The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin was one of his students. A number of famous pop stars and actors, including Paul McCartney, Sting and Paul Newman, had received treatments from Alexander method teachers and loudly sung their praises. However, even today, this method remains rather obscure, in part because it requires a demanding and refined focus.§
Alexander’s therapeutic work (described in his book The Use of the Self162) consists of very gentle manipulations, first exploratory and then corrective. It is essentially a reeducation of one’s entire muscular system. Treatment begins with the head and neck and subsequently includes other body areas. There is no such thing as a right position, he discovered, but there is such a thing as a right direction.
Let us now combine Alexander’s observations (of posture’s effect on function) with Lucy’s wise insight into the cause of Charlie Brown’s unnecessary, but self-perpetuating, suffering. What we come to is the profound implication of body-self-awareness in the change process. A direct and effective way of changing one’s functional competency and mood is through altering one’s postural set and thence changing proprioceptive and kinesthetic feedback to the brain.163 Recall that the medial prefrontal cortex (which receives much of its input from the body) is the only area of the neocortex that can alter the limbic system and, in turn, emotionality. Hence, the awareness of bodily sensations is critical in changing functional and emotional states. We are once again reminded that it is primarily through the motivated awareness of internal sensations that the corrosive dragons of negative emotional states can be tamed. Remember how, instead of expressing his habitual rage, the samurai’s personal hell was arrested, exposed and brought into awareness by the impeccable timing of the Zen master. It was only when the brash samurai learned to momentarily hold back, contain and “feel into” himself that he was able to transform his rage into bliss. Such is the alchemy of emotional transformation.
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bsp; Attitude: Reconciling Emotions and Feelings
Just how does posture alter one’s mood and effect a lasting change? Recall how Nina Bull demonstrated that intense emotions occur only when emotional action is restrained. Or said in another way, it is the restraint that allows the postural attitude to become conscious for the attitude to become a feeling-awareness. This is in partial agreement with the well-known neurologist Antonio Damasio’s argument that emotion “is the consciousness of the body.” This perspective is also in alignment with William James’s peripheral theory of emotion, in which “we are afraid because we are running away from the bear.” However, what I believe they both have missed, and what Nina Bull has deeply grasped, is the reciprocal relationship between the expression of emotion and the sensate feeling of emotion. When we are “mindlessly” expressing emotion, that is precisely what we are, in fact, doing. Emotional reactivity almost always precludes conscious awareness. On the other hand, restraint and containment of the expressive impulse allows us to become aware of our underlying postural attitude. Therefore, it is the restraint that brings a feeling into conscious awareness. Change only occurs where there is mindfulness, and mindfulness only occurs where there is bodily feeling (i.e., the awareness of the postural attitude).
A person who is deeply feeling is not a person who is habitually venting anger, fear or sorrow. Wise and fortunate individuals feel their emotions in the quiet of their interiors, learn from their feelings and are guided by them. They act intuitively and intelligently on those feelings. In addition, they share their feelings when appropriate and are responsive to the feelings and needs of others. And, of course, because they are human, they blow up from time to time; but also they look for the root of these eruptions, not primarily as being caused by another, but as an imbalance or disquiet within themselves.
While physical feelings are both quantitatively and qualitatively distinguishable from emotions, both derive ultimately from the instincts. The five categorical emotional instincts described by Darwin are fear, anger, sorrow, disgust and joy. However, feelings, as the consciousness of a bodily attitude, come in a virtually infinite range and blend. These include the bittersweet longing for an absent friend or tender mirth at a child’s spontaneity. The Darwinian emotions correspond to distinct instincts, while feelings express a blending of (sensate-based) nuances and permutations. In addition, bodily feelings embody a relationship between an object or situation and our welfare. They are, in that sense, an elaboration of the basic affective valances of approach and avoidance. Feelings are the basic path by which we make our way in the world. In contrast, (fixated) emotional states derive from frustrated drives or engagement of the last-ditch mobilization of emergency (fight/flight/freeze). With the paucity of saber-toothed tigers, this critical reaction of last resort rarely makes sense in modern life. However, we are compelled to deal with a myriad of very different threats, such as speeding cars and overly eager surgeons, for which we lack much in the way of evolutionarily prepared protocols.
Emotions are our constant companions, enhancing our lives and detracting from them. How we navigate the maze of emotions is a central factor in the conduct of our lives, for better or for worse. The question is: under what conditions are emotions adaptive—and conversely, when are they maladaptive? In general, the more that an emotion takes on the quality of shock or eruption, or the more that it is suppressed or repressed, the more prominent is the maladaptation. Indeed, often an emotion begins in a useful form and then, because we suppress it, turns against us in the form of physical symptoms or in a delayed and exaggerated explosion. Anger and resentment, when denied, can build to an explosive level. There is a popular expression that is apt here: “That which we resist, persists.” As damaging as emotions can be, repressing them only compounds the problem. However, let it be duly noted that the difference between repression/suppression and restraint/containment is significant though elusive. Remember once more how the samurai warrior delicately, but definitively, arrested his compulsion to strike, allowing him to feel his (former) murderous rage simply as pure energy—and ultimately as the bliss of feeling alive.
As the successful parent knows, this strategy works well with children. Rather than suppress the child, encouraging a habit of repression, these parents help the child by providing a timely interruption, while guiding the child to feel his anger and source his needs and desires. This is what healthy aggression is about. On the other hand, we have the permissive parent who lets the child go out-of-control with temper tantrums, as the samurai was about to do but with lethal consequences. The effective parent, however, provides and channels the child’s aggression in a useful way. They do this by both allowing the child to feel her anger and then helping the child to understand what she is mad about.
If emotions are not too extreme and are approached with a certain stance, they can serve the function of guiding our behaviors—even moving them toward positive goals. Here’s an example with which most of us can identify. Bob comes home from work and finds his house in chaos. He is furious and wants to yell at Jane and the kids, but he “stuffs” his rage. By bedtime he cannot unwind and has an acute attack of gastric reflux. His wife, after a trying day herself, wishes to make some contact with her husband. She wants him to share something about his day or how he is feeling and asks if anything is wrong. He utters, “Nothing, I’m just tired,” and turns his attention to the raw, sour, burning taste of gastric juices in his throat. Jane smolders, accusing him of being distant and remote. She laments that she cannot get a feel for where he is at; she complains that she “cannot feel him.” He withdraws further.
Alternatively, they might have an attacking/counterattacking fight that culminates in her remembering something he did to upset her two years ago … To this perceived blaming he replies that he doesn’t even remember what she is talking about; and so far as he is concerned it never even happened. “What is wrong with you?” he murmurs under his breath. He is unaware that (1) when a woman becomes (emotionally) activated, she remains stressed for a much longer time than a man. The woman’s pounding heart and racing thoughts remain stuck. And (2) in her racing thoughts, Jane tries to locate an explanation for her runaway heart, believing that if she can find the cause (identifying it as a real external threat—as is biologically intended), then she could settle down. In scanning her memory banks in this activated state, she stumbles across the time when (she perceived) Bob hurt her. Seizing on this “explanation” for her distress, she feels compelled to act upon it, “throwing it in Bob’s face.” In this way, Jane is doing what her physiology compels while he perceives that “she is blaming him for nothing.” This dance of daggers intensifies his defensiveness and seething anger. Locked in mortal combat, they both reach for a Valium. As the Valium (which relaxes their muscles) kicks in, they both feel better—it seems to both of them that the blowup was over nothing. Bob hopes that tomorrow will be a clean slate, and Jane wonders why in the world she dragged up that two-year-old event, no less beating Bob over the head with it. However, when they awake the next morning, they are disconnected physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Furthermore, research shows that this type of unresolved conflict impairs the couple’s immune system, depressing it and reducing the capacity for wound healing over the next several days.‖
Rewind and replay: Bob comes into the house. Faced with the chaos, he feels angry, but neither suppresses nor explodes. This time, supported by his wife’s centered, calm presence, he attends tentatively to his body. He notices his heart racing, while the muscles of his arms, shoulders, back, neck and jaw are tightening. After sharing his awareness with his wife, Bob has the fleeting glimpse of a bomb ready to explode. He feels the impulse to punch with his fists; his anger intensifies momentarily but then subsides. The vise grip in his tensed muscles begins to loosen. (These muscles had been engaged, as Nina Bull demonstrated, to inhibit the original urge to punch.) Bob sighs in relief as his legs begin, gently, to tremble. He “lets in” his
wife’s supportive presence and then suddenly recalls, “Oh yeah, that’s what it was. Before I left the office, Alex, the supervisor, and I were discussing a marketing plan for the new widget. Alex and I had strongly differing opinions; we just couldn’t seem to agree. I felt competitive. We were combative, but in a good way. I felt forceful and clear. I suppose we could have hammered it out. Instead we stopped short of a solution when I remembered that Alex was dating the boss’s daughter. I stifled my power and ingenuity, and then, yes, that’s when I felt myself go into a rage. I wanted to throttle Alex but then retreated. I just wanted to leave and go home. The rest of the day I silently fumed. And then, when things were, well, the way they usually are at home, I wanted to explode. I felt the same seething rage I had felt at work. I guess I was triggered to blow when I set foot into the familiar mess at home; I just wanted to blow off steam. I was … well, really afraid that I could hurt you or the kids. So instead, I just went off to read the paper and simmered silently behind my paper fortress. I didn’t want to blow up at you and the kids. Really, what I wanted was the calm contact I am getting from you now.” This state of calm, unlike the temporary relief provided by the Valium in the first scenario, is a real shift in his perception of safety, an enduring one. It is achieved by a process of self-regulation and social engagement, rather than the temporary masking offered by a tranquilizer—though both act to relax the tight muscles. This collaborative experience is what brings Bob and Jane closer together.
The feeling of combativeness that Bob experienced at the office was powerful, focused and motivating. Had he not stopped himself, he might have entered into a productive negotiation with Alex. However, when he thwarted this process (out of a perceived threat that may or may not have even really existed), his directed feeling of healthy aggression (for getting what he needed and protecting what he had), erupted into (impotent) rage. This abrupt transition—from a fluid, organizing feeling process into a disorganizing, nonproductive, reactive emotional state—is what was so brilliantly studied by Nina Bull.
In an Unspoken Voice Page 37
