After being told in various contexts that I am not comforting to talk to, I looked up how to comfort someone. The AI response suggested nothing that I was unaware of, implying that there is something in the tone or style that I lack rather than intention. But what did catch my eye was the established phrase ‘time to process emotion’.
This raises some questions. Do we really mean ‘process’? This implies a raw input and a final, different product. Does suffering naturally get turned into happiness, or resilience, over time? Not for me. Would it be more accurate to say ‘experience emotions’?
I think that there is an implicit understanding that we adapt to circumstances. We experience mind-numbing pain and grief only in relatively brief bouts. The problem might not be solved, but our bodies are only capable of so much experience of one type before giving up for a while. The physical version of this is a little stone in a shoe: at first it’s annoying, but after a few miles of hiking you’ll have forgotten about it and only occasionally remember that it’s there. If you sit down for a while, you'll feel it all over again when you start. Grief similarly comes and goes in cycles of pain.
Does this mean that the feeling is ‘processed’? Has the initial input been turned into something else? I don’t think so. It’s very much becoming inured to the feeling. It’s still waiting, ready to be experienced at any time, but not right now. The video is still playing but attention has turned elsewhere, because there are other things in the world. The video has not changed or been turned off.
Calling it ‘processing’ probably perpetuates misunderstandings of how grief and suffering work. Grief is not a thing like a cut that one is supported through and then healed from a day or two later. It’s a change in life circumstance such as losing one’s home and belongings. It’s not something to ‘process’ in a moment or a few days. It is processed in the same sense that all of life is a process.
I do not know if other people genuinely need time to understand how they feel; to introspect and understand themselves. It seems strange not to know oneself, but perhaps what is meant is not so much knowing that one’s home has gone, but working out what one can face doing in the new life: how one might host guests, where to get the right attire for formal events… recalculating how to deal with the myriad challenges of life from a different place.
I think that many people do like to think of emotions as things to process. It’s part of the positivity cult that forbids anyone from experiencing the full range of life. Life is good and unhappiness must be processed like a carcass, turned into processed joy. Find the positives to death or suffering. ‘Well, at least it was a good life’… it was a good life before death. Death added nothing good.
Bad things do exist. They are natural, standard features of our world and lives. If we regard them as raw inputs that through industry can be made safe we’ll never address them properly. Death and disease are nightmares: horrors that cannot be made good. Just like right-wing ideology. We might never defeat them, but we must recognize that the only good, virtuous course of action is to eradicate them to the best of our ability, not accept them as key components of a full existence.
If people do not know how they feel then there is a problem beyond the immediate suffering. Perhaps we need to give lessons in introspection. I am aware that this is a concept used elsewhere, such as to explain domestic violence and toxic masculinity, in which the only socially acceptable emotion for men to feel is anger, and so when they feel something they express anger even when it’s something else.
Anger is appropriate in many circumstances. I have raged against the dying of the light a lot in my life. But I do not know if people really ‘feel’ a different emotion from the one they, er, feel. Can cultural conditioning stop you feeling the way you feel? Could we have toxic positivity that made everyone think that death is cause for celebration? We have tried this, called it religion (with delusions of an afterlife) and people still grieve. Toxic positivity turns out to make people feel worse, because they feel guilty or responsible for their sadness when they feel sad.
So no, I don’t believe that people process emotions. Nor should you. What we do is cope. We become numb to the immediate feeling. If it was a good one, we crave more extreme versions. More love. More affection. More text messages and validation in an addictive cycle of impatience, never waiting for the numbness to fade and the original version to be fulfilling again.
If a bad one, we call it resilience and endure the constant dread of the moment that the numbness fades and the full horror returns to steal more of our lives and joy.
I believe that I have, through necessity, become very resilient. I have self control: I can continue to function rationally and sensibly (as much as normal) when experiencing emotions. The emotions’ effect on me are dampened compared to some, who feel obliged to whoop for joy or collapse in sadness, their brains and identity lost temporarily.
Self control is an archaic virtue not much respected any more. The economy wants us to spend; to give in to the advertisers and shop layout artists. Media wants us to get distracted, or to perform like hooting monkeys to distract others. Even live performers expect audience feedback to validate them, on top of the audience money that’s already been paid. The toxic positivity movement wants us to be happy and whimsical, and thinks that if we believe hard enough somehow we can wish away sadness and process it into joy.
This is all nauseating. We should aim to think, not feel. To be human, not animal. To experience time flowing by as a river, to be watched from the stable shore of rational thought rather than drowning in the river bed. If someone gets flooded, the goal should be to help them find solid ground somewhere, not to let them ‘process’ the experience by developing gills or imagining that the water is actually wine.
Self-control; the existence of life outside of emotion, is part of what we teach in therapy classes for depression and bereavement. Some drugs for depression seem not only to treat the symptoms, but also to deaden libido. People complain about feeling dampened. I guess that when everything in your life seems bad, dampening might be a rescue, but many then feel that they have nothing to live for.
Is it possible to have self-control but relax it for nice things? I have rarely felt safe enough to let go in any context. People have a disturbing tendency to abuse such moments as weakness, sometimes long afterwards when they think it somehow becomes alright to be nasty. Can one endure horror and yet experience the nicest things in life as fully as a whimsical candle in the wind? I don’t know.
I do know that ‘processing’ is a delusion. We don’t ‘process’ them and return to normal life. We help others by promising, implicitly, that we will always be there for them. That support and concern now won’t turn into mockery in a year; that we will never say ‘remember when you cried like a baby!?’. That we understand that the emotion is not processed: it exists in one’s life and memory exactly as it is, and always will.
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