Note: The book in its entirety is available from Amazon.
A Simple Notion
It was the third Wednesday of March. The third Wednesday meant that my therapist consultation group was meeting. And March meant that I was scheduled to present.
I am always somewhat nervous when it is my turn. But this time I was more nervous than normal. I did not follow usual procedure by presenting an actual case for the consideration of my colleagues. Instead, I had sent my colleagues a draft of the book two weeks before this meeting, hoping it would provide a platform for discussion.
We have ten members in our group; usually five show. This was the public-school spring break, so our ten-member group became only three, plus me, but this did not lessen my nervousness. Tom is a professor at Vanderbilt. He teaches family therapy as well as the history of psychology. Jane is a social worker, who sees the world through a new-age lens. She is always full of questions. Ralph is an analytic type who understands and appreciates object relations and psychodynamic theory. Ralph taught philosophy before becoming a psychotherapist. All of them brought with them the blue plastic three-ring binder I had sent them that contained the draft of this book.
Tom wasted no time. “So you’ve written your magnum opus, a treatise on why cognitive behavioral therapy is not enough.”
“That’s not his point,” Ralph countered. “His point is that emotions have a dynamic, and each one has a different dynamic.”
“Why don’t we let David tell us the point of his book?” Jane suggested.
“Well, Tom and Ralph have it right,” I said. “It is a simple notion that I had never heard of or thought about in my training. The notion is simply that feelings change feelings. As Tom said, cognitive behavioral theory leaves out emotion. I’ve never believed you could think your way sane. Yet, I appreciate how cognitive behavioral therapy has helped therapists be concrete, task oriented, and behind what the client defines as his or her problem. I have come to believe that feelings create thoughts, feelings change feelings, and this dynamic can be used in therapy.”
Psychotherapy Theory on Emotions from Freud to Greenberg
Until I began writing this book, I had never heard of anyone who seriously proposed this simple notion. Turns out Spinoza said something similar in the 17th century. He said, “An emotion cannot be removed unless opposed or replaced by a stronger one (Spinoza, 1967, p. 195).” Other than Spinoza, no serious thinker prior to Greenberg and his colleagues has entertained the thought that emotions change emotions.
The theory of psychotherapy’s emphasis on undoing repression is so well traveled that most psychotherapy students and practitioners can repeat it in great detail. It is difficult to imagine that no serious thinker — from Freud (1935, 1936) to Jung (1946, 1953, and 1968) to Reich (1942 and 1949) to Dollard and Miller (1950) to Rogers (1954) to Perls (1947) to Polster and Polster (1973) to Janov (1970) to Mahrer (1978) — understood that each emotion had its own distinct dynamic and that this fact might provide openings for emotional and characterological change.
Freud (1935, 1936, and 1949) talked about emotions as if they were one thing. If there was one emotion that captured therapists’ attention before Greenberg, it was anxiety or fear. That was Freud’s main emotional construct. Behaviorists like Wolpe and Rachman (1960), and Stampfl (1967) inherited their focus on anxiety from Freud. It wasn’t until Bandura (1973) that psychotherapists began to consider anger and aggression as a focus of treatment. Bandura’s answer to aggression seemed to be to stop watching television and to choose more passive players and mentors as models for behavior. Bandura’s modeling theory had very little to do with psychotherapy.
The first real therapeutic recognition of an emotion beyond fear and fear-based sadness was a cognitive behavioral treatment of anger espoused by Novaco (1997). He seemed to be the first clinical theorist concerned about anger. Cognitive behaviorists espoused an intervention called “thought stopping.” The technique is simple. Attach a rubber band to your wrist. When you feel inappropriate anger, snap the rubberband against your wrist, thus negatively reinforcing anger.
There are many authors, Greenberg and myself included, that think this to be a rather silly intervention. Many believe the unconscious doesn’t register the negative. Attending to anger by telling one’s self not to feel this way only perpetuates the feeling. It does not work to tell someone not to feel what they feel.
Prior to Greenberg (1987, 1991, 1997, and 2001), Gendlin (1974, 1979, and 1981) suggested that each emotion should be explored and used in psychotherapy, but Gendlin did not suggest how to use each emotion. Greenberg coined the term “Emotion Focused Therapy” with a book by the same name Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings. But again Greenberg doesn’t seem to actually do anything in psychotherapy that is different from a Gendlin/Rogerian empathic treatment. He encouraged therapists to use the therapeutic encounter to provoke feelings in the session and to transform feelings with therapeutic attention. This strikes me as very similar to what Carkhuff (1969) calls “immediacy,” meaning to focus on the feelings occurring in the moment. Most would recognize this approach to be good therapeutic work, but I’m not sure it is anything really new.
What I am proposing is that the therapists teach clients the emotional dynamics of the emotion they are struggling with. The therapist and the client then collaborate to develop a ritual that the client might use several times daily to develop a broader emotional range and to create new emotional paths. The client practices this ritual between sessions to help expand his or her emotional range.
Psychotherapy and Religion
A few years ago, I visited a grand cathedral in Como, Italy. I was walking and looking, oohing and aahing in hopes of placating my wife, when I first realized that much of what we do in psychotherapy has been stolen from religion. My back was complaining, saying to me that I could walk and look no more. I discovered several rows of chairs.
As I sat down in the back row, I observed a line of people waiting their turn to kneel before a priest. This was an open confessional. The priest sat on a raised platform where everyone could see him. When it was the next person’s turn, that person walked forward, knelt before the priest in the open, and spoke softly to the priest for a moment. I presumed they said, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” and then confessed some sin. The priest listened, read something to the parishioner, then looked at the parishioner and spoke directly. I presumed he said something like, “You are forgiven. Say ten Hail Marys. Go forth and sin no more.” The person then walked over to sit in one of the chairs, where she contemplated, knelt and prayed in front of a cross, made the sign of the cross, and left.
Here is why I say that what the priest did was much like what I do. If I were to design healthy intervention for an untrained person to perform with people coming to them for help, it would be something like this. The person would come to the priest. The priest would listen as the individual unburdened herself, and she would leave, having been forgiven. I hope that today’s psychotherapists have more to offer than ten Hail Marys and some moralisms. But how different is this from Rogerian psychotherapy?
Our behaviorist forbearers have borrowed a great deal of what they do from the Hindu practice of meditation. Mesmer went to India to learn about Indian medicine. Instead of learning what the yogi master believed was most important (the self-mastery of emotions), Mesmer brought back hypnosis to the West, not as a tool of self-mastery, but as a tool to control others. This seemed silly to the Hindus.
Psychologists took this hypnosis protocol and taught clients to use it for themselves. They called their intervention systematic desensitization, but it is more or less the same as basic meditation. Every major religion has some version of chanting and meditation as an important spiritual discipline.
The sermon, or homily in the Islam and Judeo-Christian tradition, is a version of cognitive behavioral therapy; it tells people how to think. A visit to one’s rabbi, mullah, priest, or minister for consultation in the faith is also a version of cognitive behavioral therapy.
Zen practice with a Zen master has a great deal in common with psychoanalysis. Tavistock-styled group therapy is often called Zen practice in a group setting, because of the collective frustrations it creates in a group.
What I have borrowed from religion is prayer, not exactly prayer to a god, but a ritual repeated several times a day. My mother began everyday with religious readings and prayer. When her children were grown, she used thirty minutes of her day in this religious practice, followed by thirty minutes of physical exercise. The purpose for her daily prayer was to prepare her spirit for the day, to give her mind and heart a cleansing so that she could open herself to her God and to people with a healthy, loving spirit.
This is very similar to what I am proposing we teach our clients. Many faiths have prayer rituals. Muslims turn to Mecca five times daily in prayer. Catholics ritualistically pray, using rosary beads. Many people meditate and consult the I-Ching like my mother used her Bible readings and prayer. The point of this practice according to one such practitioner is “to do something to my brain. I hope that somehow the I-Ching will allow me to be a more aware, conscious, and whole person in the day I’m about to be a part of.”
I propose to use what we know about emotions to build a ritual with our clients to give them something that they can do daily to become a more emotionally healthy and balanced person.
Cognitive Behavior Theory Revisited
After I explained this to my colleagues in my consultation group, Tom said, “I get it. That’s why this works. One emotion resolves or changes another emotion through chemistry. You are proposing that people can wash their own brains.”
“Oh my god, David,” Jane said. “You are brainwashing, using our own natural brain chemicals.”
“That’s right,” I replied. “And turning off and on different brain circuits that are associated with different emotions. And people can practice changing their own brain chemicals and their emotions. Basic emotions aren’t new, but applying them therapeutically is a new idea.”
“That’s what makes this a good idea,” Tom added. “It’s obvious. It’s common sense. That’s David’s contribution. He did that in his sense of community theory. He puts a template on chaos, and it becomes obvious. He has done it again.”
“What I like about this,” Ralph said, “is that this can be a daily practice.
Psychoanalysis suggests that deep, real change can only occur over time and with lots of work. Since managed care won’t support analytic work, clients can use these rituals. Emotional rituals practiced daily will create cognitive dissonance. Clients will have so much time and energy invested that they will change simply because of the investment. Anything practiced over time and guided by a therapist can bring real change and new emotional postures.”
“Much like psychoanalysis,” Tom said, “except not as expensive.”
“You like that word ‘postures’ don’t you, Ralph?” Jane interjected, trying to distract Ralph from Tom’s dig. “I heard you use it in what you just said.”
“Yes,” Ralph said. “It’s better than the psychoanalytic term ‘defenses.’ I think we all should be grounded in the various ways we create impressions. The descriptions of these ‘defenses’ in the psychoanalytic literature offer a variety of tools for any therapist. Nancy McWilliams has written the most readable explanation of these defenses. Like Freud, she sees defenses as attempts to protect us from our fears. Fear, for her, is the motivation for engaging a defense. I use the word ‘posture’ to mean more or less the same thing, our way of posing to create an impression. This may serve to protect us from our fears, as Freud suggests, or it may be used proactively as a resource or tool that helps us reach a goal. The term ‘posture’ does not have the negative connotation of the term ‘defense.’”
“And I think each emotion is a posture,” I said. “An emotion may serve to protect and defend, or it can help us communicate, cajole, and organize. An emotion is a tool that can have many purposes. I agree with you, Ralph. The word ‘defenses’ is too limiting.”
“I want to change the subject,” said Tom. “I want to know how this is different from cognitive behavioral therapy. I get it that your approach helps people feel better, while cognitive behavioral therapy helps people think better. But is that it?”
“No,” I said, “but before we decimate the easy target of cognitive behavioral therapy, I think we should give the devil his due. Cognitive behavioral therapy gave us something that therapists might do effectively in the short amount of time managed care allowed. It focused on expecting therapy to produce change in behavior. It took the emphasis on the therapeutic bond and shifted it to the work the client was willing to do to get better. This de-emphasized the importance of the therapist and the therapeutic session and emphasized homework and practice that clients did on their own, outside the therapy hour.”
“We therapists have a tendency to think it is all about us and the therapy relationship, don’t we?” Tom commented.
“And sometimes it is,” Jane said, coming to Ralph’s defense, in hopes that he would ignore Tom’s challenge, and Ralph did.
“Okay, so that’s what’s good about cognitive behavioral therapy,” Ralph said. “What’s the dark side?”
“Cognitive behavioral therapy has as a premise that beliefs or cognitive distortions are the cause of dysfunction,” I replied. “I think, along with Greenberg and his colleagues, that distorted beliefs are the result of dysfunction, not the cause. Reason does not rule passion. Feelings generate thoughts. Changes in thinking come from changes in feeling. I’m not sure that one can transform rage with the snap of a rubberband on the wrist. I’m not sure real lasting change will come from a cognitive self-lecture that tells us not to feel this way.”
“Here, here!” Tom said.
“Amen, Hallelujah,” Ralph agreed.
“But David, you are proposing things that are very similar to the cognitive behavioral therapists,” Jane said. “Clients can use your ritual like a manualized treatment. You will probably teach skills and some clients will be offended. They will accuse you of treating them with a book, just as we do now with cognitive behavioral therapists.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “This approach is definitely aimed at emotional skill building.”
“Yes, and many clients want a relationship that makes them feel safe,” Ralph said. “They have had enough of people trying to teach them and change them. They need a place where they are safe to be.”
“I agree,” I said. “That is the limiting part of this therapy. It is for people who want information and who want homework. It is not for the many clients who need our love and attention more than they need information.”
The group then went on to inquire about the emotion theory that I used to develop my rituals.
The Journey to Tomkins’s Emotion Theory
The history of philosophy and psychology is filled with debates over which is superior, reason or emotion. The debate smacks of a couple’s arguments that we, as couples’ therapists, see daily in our offices. One can just hear one member of the couple saying, “My feelings should matter,” while the other counters, “Why can’t you just listen to reason?” We therapists understand that often reason is a defense against expressing feelings. The same appears to be true of philosophers in this debate. Plato (1974) and Aristotle (1941) thought that emotion was the antithesis of reason. Reason, they believed, was a good thing. Emotion they saw as bad, mysterious, and uncontrollable. Descartes was the first philosopher to take exception to this. Though he took a less defensive approach to emotions, he was the same philosopher who formalized the mind/body dualism that psychologists have been trying to undo for some time.
One can be more sympathetic to Descartes’s mind/body dualism when his ideas are put in the context of the times. He was attempting to take on the Church, using mind as a tool against superstition. Incidental to his argument against superstition was his contention that emotions were the place where the mind and the body met. Descartes identified six basic emotions: wonder, fear, love, hatred, joy, and sadness. He saw these emotions as positive human resources.
After Descartes, emotions continued to be a philosophical ping-pong ball pitted against reason. Spinoza (1982) thought emotions were bad. Hume (1739) said some were good. Kant (1953) said they were bad because emotions disrupted reason. Neitzche (1967) thought they were good, saying emotions had more reason than did reason itself. In the 20th century, philosophy abandoned emotion to psychology, becoming interested in the science/faith debate instead.
Psychology demonstrated the same ambivalence toward emotions as did philosophy. Darwin did a good job starting off the scientific inquiry into emotions in 1872. He named sixteen basic emotions. For Darwin, emotions were not opposed to reason. Each emotion had a species-adaptive purpose. They were survival tools. He saw emotions as neurologically wired instincts that originated in the body, primarily the face. (His ideas later greatly influenced my hero emotion theorist, Sylvan Tomkins.)
In the mid-1880s, James (1884) and Lange (1885) independently and simultaneously came upon the same idea. This idea united the mind and body, as did Darwin’s thesis. They claimed that we feel emotion before we are aware of what we are feeling. In other words, emotion precedes cognition. (This is the basis of Greenberg’s critique of cognitive behavioral therapy.)
After James and Lange, psychology’s treatment of emotion became behaviorist dogma. Watson (1970) and his black-box theory contended that, except for fear (à la Freud), we had no hardwired, instinctive emotions. All emotions were learned. The cognitive approach to emotions was extended through Canon (1927), who vehemently attacked the James/Lange theory. This cognitive approach continues to have its supporters (Ellsworth, 1994; Chwalisz, Diener and Gallagher, 1988; see reviews by Cahill, 1996; Demaree and Harrison 1997; and Cacioppo, 2000). These theorists all espouse some version of Canon’s criticism of James/Lange, which is that we are aware of what we feel before we express it.
In addition to opposing James and Lange, the behaviorists were attacking Freud and his notion of the unconscious. Freud (1935) suggested that one force organized human behavior. That force was the libido. The libido was the desire to live, exist, survive, and procreate. (Much of the literature that focuses on the libido often overemphasizes the procreate part of Freud’s notion of libido [Rilling, 2000].) For Freud, the libido organized emotion into two kinds: positive emotions, which are the result of satisfying libidinal urges, and negative emotions, which are the consequence of frustrating the libidinal drives.
This was more or less the state of the debate about emotions around the time that Sylvan Tomkins (the hero of our story) went on sabbatical in the 1940s (Nathanson, 1992). Like many other male academic psychologists, he scheduled his sabbaticals about the time that his wife was to give birth. And, like many brilliant psychological theorists before him, the fascination with his child combined with his thinking about psychological phenomena. I would bet that he couldn’t take his eyes from his child’s face. While looking at his child, as a father, he also saw her face as if he were Darwin discovering affect in evolutionary theory.
Tomkins’s first theoretical observation of his child was powerful. In 1981, he posited that a newborn infant does not know why it cries–it merely cries. Tomkins further theorized that emotions are hard-wired, genetically transmitted mechanisms that are universal to humans and animals.
Tomkins began to examine an infant’s facial expressions. He proposed that the face was the seat of emotions, that emotions were expressed in the face and perceived by our minds after they formed on our face. This notion united Darwin and James/Lange and extended their theories. Tomkins’s study of an infant’s facial expressions produced nine specific basic emotions: interest/excitement, enjoyment/joy, surprise/startle, fear/terror, distress/anguish (or sadness/grief), anger/rage, dismell, disgust, and shame/humiliation.
Writing in 1981, Tomkins said emotions worked as a species survival tool in this way: they amplify and organize the body’s response to the stimulus that set them in motion. “Affect makes good things better and bad things worse (Nathanson, 1992, p. 57).” Emotions unite behavior, cognition, and physiology.
According to Tomkins, it was arbitrary to separate these three domains. “Affect causes behavior all over the body” (Nathanson 1992, p. 60).” Each domain influences the other. Affect can precipitate cognition, and cognition can precipitate affect. Emotion directs our attention and provides the depth and color for our memory. The autonomic nervous system can have little to do with creating an emotion, or it can have everything to do with initiating the affective processes. The muscles in the face are as important to affective experience as the gray matter in the brain. As the face expresses a feeling, the autonomic nervous system correlates to facial expression; cognitive awareness of the feeling follows. And the brain uses genetically determined neurological circuitry with each specific emotion (Davidson, et al., 1990). Tomkins introduced this idea of a central- assembly system, a place in the brain responsible for the focus and maintenance of attention and recruitment of appropriate affect.
While embracing Tomkins’s theory, many recent theorists using neurological research discount the face as the emotion center (Buck, 1999). Current emotion theorists do not believe that the face expresses emotion as a separate bodily function, amplifying other mechanisms of behavior to support the basic emotion expressed by the face. Drives such as sex, thirst, and hunger can have their own specific neurological motivational circuitry that might include and express affect but are not created by affect.
“The point on which there is a consensus around Tomkins,” writes Ross Buck (1999), “is that affects can constitute primary innate biological motivating mechanisms that can be engaged by other systems” (p. 302). Tomkins is particularly useful when we use his specific emotions to understand higher level cognitive, social, and moral behavior.
Paul Ekman is today’s anointed son of Tomkins. More than any other, he has researched and extended Tomkins’s theory. Cal Izard is also a candidate. The problem with Izard is that he has to some extent appropriated Tomkins theory as his own (Nathanson, 1992). Izard’s writing and work, however, have more relevance to clinical practice than do those of any heirs of the Tomkins tradition. Perhaps that is because Izard was also a practicing therapist.
Ekman and Izard both set out to prove that Tomkins had indeed discovered the nine basic human emotions. They conducted cross-cultural studies using categorizations of human facial expression. A series of studies have been conducted in this way. In 1971, Izard claimed to have found eleven essential emotions, while in 1994 Ekman claims to have found seven. Ekman, however, is open to others being confirmed later.
Both Ekman and Izard report cross-cultural studies that demonstrate that Darwin and Tomkins are correct. Human facial expressions are interpreted universally the same way. They conducted studies in Japan, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, but the most convincing studies were conducted in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, among people who were so isolated that they had never seen movies or pictures interpreting emotions. In all the experiments, people from every culture interpreted the pictures in the same way.
Space does not allow a review of these studies (see Keltner and Ekman, 1996). Suffice it to say that after much criticism and seeming relentless attacks, these studies have basically withstood their assaults. There is wide agreement on Ekman’s seven basic emotions and some debate on whether or not to add others.
Another line of research has used the Tomkins 1962 model to discover emotion markers in the autonomic nervous system. Ekman and his colleagues lead the field here as well. Ekman, Friesen, and Levenson have published several articles with different author arrangements and different documented dates (1983, 1990, 1991, 1992) for discovering sets of anatomical markers of specific emotions. Stemmler (1989), Boiten (1996), Sinha and Parsons (1996), and Miller and Wood (1997) are just a few of the other scientists who have recorded specific ANS correlates to specific emotions. (See Cacioppo, et al., 2000, for a review.)
Other researchers have focused on neurological substrates in the brain and specific neurohormones that are active during the expression of emotion. The invention of magnetic imaging has done a great deal to aid this endeavor. Panksepp (1991) and his colleagues have done great work in this field. Panksepp irritatingly renames the emotions as if he discovered them. But his writing is clear and his research excellent. Davidson is the leader in the Ekman camp of researchers discovering the emotion brain circuitry. Studies using MRI have found a great deal of hard-wired emotional neurocircuitry, and neurochemists have identified a number of neurohormones active in specific emotions (Davidson, 1993).
What Ekman, Frierson, Levenson, and Davidson collectively discovered was when certain facial muscles were engaged, this stimulated reciprocal neurocircuits and neurohormones. This means that emotions work from outside in as well as inside out. Expressing a feeling in the face will create the internal neurological experience of that emotion. It is also true that imagining or remembering a feeling will stimulate the neurological and facial expression of that feeling. The ability to choose one’s own emotional experience by imagining, remembering, and facially expressing a chosen feeling is the skill we hope to promote to purposefully change our own neurochemistry.
Emotion theory debate was especially rancorous and even vicious in the last part of the 20th century (but perhaps that has always been the nature of the debate on emotion). In fact, discussion has become so extreme that the National Advisory Council was formed by the National Advisory Mental Health Council, Rockville, Maryland, to help clear the air and to focus responsible debate and research. Members began by stating a consensus of what was known about emotions at that time (1995). Without giving a nod to a single emotion theorist, the Advisory Council confirmed Tomkins’s basic theory. They wrote in The American Psychologist (1995): Vol. 50, p. 839:
Our maturing scientific perspective on emotion owes much to the recent explosion of technology that has permitted researchers to describe and measure aspects of emotional life in unprecedented richness and detail. Using sophisticated monitors, behavioral scientists can now track respiration, heart rate, muscle contractions, facial expressions, voice changes, brain activity, and other objectively measurable aspects of emotion. . . . Researchers now use these and other emerging technologies to bring rational understanding to emotion, an aspect of behavior long regarded as irrational.
They confirmed the existence of cross-cultural agreement on Ekman’s seven basic emotions. They reported evidence for three emotions that exist at birth: surprise, distress (or fear), and pleasure (or joy). By the age of four months, a child’s anger, too, is clearly visible. By six months, shyness and fear appear. Later, complex emotional responses such as guilt/shame, empathy, and pride become a part of the child’s emotional repertoire, according to the Council.
At this point (1995), the Council said that science has matured to the place where we now know something about emotions. This is a good jumping-off place to develop a theory of emotions that will be useful in psychotherapy. I believe such a theory can explain and unite much of the theories used in clinical practice to date. The only surprising element about this simple notion is: Why have not discrete emotions and their movement from one to another been a central focus of psychotherapy theory and practice before now?!
My Basic Emotions and Why
My consultation group continued its discussion.
“What are your basic emotions?” Tom asked. “They are fear, anger, sadness, joy, surprise, disgust, shame, interest/desire, and fatigue/rest/trance/sleep,” I said.
“Why these?” Jane wondered.
“I used six of Ekman’s seven basic emotions. They are: fear, anger, sadness, joy, surprise, and disgust. Ekman has both contempt and disgust. For clinical purposes, these two can be treated as the same emotion.”
“So how did you choose your other three?” Jane asked.
“What are they again?” Tom asked.
“They are shame, interest, fatigue/rest/sleep/trance,” I answered.
“Before you explain that, what about the terms affect, emotion, and feelings?” Tom wondered. “Many emotion theorists contend these words have different meanings.”
“For me, and I think for most clinicians, the distinctions among these terms become pedantic and unnecessary. So, in my book, they all mean the same.”
“So, how did you choose your other three basic emotions?” Ralph asked.
“Well, is shame a hard sell to therapists?” I countered.
“No,” Jane said. “That’s a basic human emotion.”
“Yes,” Tom said. “It’s in my office with every client.”
“Agreed,” Ralph concurred. “Why did Ekman leave shame off his list?”
“Ekman has eight criteria in considering whether an emotion should be considered a basic emotion,” I answered. “One is that the emotion be present at birth or soon after and have its own physiology. Shame might be a complex emotion that includes fear and sadness, rather than a single emotion, and it is not present at birth, or soon after. It develops later as the brain develops. Ekman suggested that further research might indeed identify shame and other emotions beyond his seven as also basic human emotions, but that right now the data does not support including shame. Of course, we all would agree to include shame.”
“Yes,” they said in one voice.
“But David, what about guilt?” Jane asked.
“Yeah,” Ralph said. “These are two different emotions. I forget which is which. One is what others impose on you about something you did, and the other is what you impose on yourself–it’s about the core of who you are.”
“Guilt,” Tom said, “is about something you did. Shame is about who you are.”
“I’m not sure that our clients make that fine distinction,” I replied. “I think that is a more recent definition imposed on the therapy world. But the general public, like Ralph, either gets them confused or sees them as one and the same.”
“Yeah, I think that’s right,” Jane said. “I confuse them too.”
“The emotions I chose are ones that you can recognize when you see them on someone’s face,” I said. “That is an important criteria that Ekman imposes as well. And there is no expressive difference between guilt and shame. I treat them as the same basic emotion. Make sense?”
“Yes,” they agreed.
“The next emotion,” I continued, “is one that I think will also be an easy sell to therapists.”
“Which one is that?” Jane asked.
“Interest/desire/excitement,” I explained. “I use these three words to represent this emotion to illustrate the problem it presents to the academics. This emotion is not on or off. It has a modulating function like a volume control. This is too confusing for researchers.”
“Yes,” Tom said. “Researchers don’t easily tolerate dimensions in variables.”
“I contend,” I said, “that our pantheon of emotions should include some emotion that represents motivating forces, for example, appetites like sex, food, greed, power, and fame. Many emotion researchers include this emotion as a basic emotion. Using all three words–interest/desire/excitement–represents the range of this emotion from low to medium to high and symbolizes the fact that this emotion has this kind of movement.”
“This is Freud’s libido,” Ralph said. “It makes sense to include this one to me.”
“I think we need to include an affective drive system. This makes sense to me too,” Tom added.
“Me, too,” Jane said. “What I want to see is how you can include fatigue/rest/sleep and the trance.”
“This emotion is what interest/desire/excitement is not,” I said. “Sleep is to emotions as zero is to numbers. When considering numbers, we might ignore zero because it has no value. But zero is as important a number as one, two, or nine. To ignore sleep as a basic emotion is as similar an oversight as ignoring zero in numbers. I believe the at-rest state is as much a basic part of the human experience as joy, fear, or sadness.”
“But what about Ekman’s eight criteria?” Tom wondered. “How does this match up to them?”
I began to list them. “They are: (1) automatic appraisal; (2) common antecedents; (3) presence in other primates; (4) quick onset; (5) temporary duration; (6) unbidden occurrence; (7) distinctive physiology; and (8) characteristic display.
“Regarding point 1, automatic appraisal, isn’t it obvious to any observer when someone’s asleep, tired, or bored, or in a trance? Clearly, there are common antecedents–point 2–which precede sleep. Exhaustion and lack of stimulation are probably the two most obvious. Of course, sleep is present in other primates. That takes care of point 3.
“Can sleep have a quick onset? Point 4. Of course, sometimes it does. Don’t you know of people with narcolepsy or people who have been so exhausted that they fell asleep in their plate while eating or even in mid-sentence?
“Criterion 5, temporary duration, depends on what ‘temporary’ means. Sleep can be as short as one minute or even a few seconds. It can easily last up to ten or twelve hours. Criterion 6 is unbidden occurrence. Certainly, children prove each day that they get tired and go to sleep even when they don’t want to. Point 7, does sleep have its own distinctive physiology? Yes. According to Cantero, five different brain waves are exhibited during sleep. The whole body participates in sleep.
“Point 8 is characteristic display. Surely, eyes closed, mouth relaxed, fingers slightly curled, rapid-eye movement, low heart rate are clear signs of sleep.”
“How can you have all these words representing this one emotion?” Jane asked.
“As I said,” I responded, “this emotion is the antithesis of interest/desire/ excitement. Just as it has dimensions, so does fatigue/rest/sleep/trance. It moves from a hunger for rest or fatigue, to rest, to trance, and then to sleep.”
“And, if you are going to say every emotion has a healthy resolve,” Tom questioned, “what are you going to use to resolve fear if you leave out this emotion? We use the relaxation response or the trance to treat phobias and panic attacks all the time.”
“How would you explain EMDR without the trance?” Jane asked.
“I agree,” Ralph said.
“Me, too,” added Tom. “So you’ve sold us on your basic nine emotions. But I have a problem with having just nine emotions, What about emotions we encounter every
day in therapy sessions with our clients, emotions like anguish, dread, anxiety, disappointment, love, pleasure, or wicked feelings like hate, envy, greed, and so forth?”
“Some of them, like disappointment or anxiety, are just other words for the basic
emotions, sadness and fear,” I said. “Others are complex emotions. For example, anguish is a combination of fear, anger, and sadness; envy is a combination of desire, sadness, and anger. In reality, emotions are rarely felt as a pure entity without other emotions mixed in. But I can’t explain the theory focusing first on the real world.”
“Ambiguity is the truth,” Ralph said. “Clarity is a distortion of the truth. David, as he always does, speaks to clarify, hence to distort.”
“Yes, I suppose,” I agreed, “but even in the mixture of emotions often there are
healthy and pathological combinations, and often one emotion is the dominant emotion in the mix.”
“R. D. Laing called this complex of pathological emotions, ‘knots,’” Tom said. “The concept of knots takes advantage of David’s idea that emotions resolve into each other. This can create a pathological emotional cycle or knot. These emotions might consist of two emotions bouncing back and forth between one another, or a repeating cycle of three or more emotions. The most common, well-known knots are the depression knots. There are three of them. One resolves sadness with anger. In anger, the person does something stupid, which creates shame, which is resolved by sadness and so on (sadness, anger, shame, sadness). The other depression knot resolves sadness with fear, which feels, to the person, like cowardice, and becomes shame, which is resolved by sadness and so on (sadness fear shame sadness). The third knot begins with interest/desire and is followed by fear of failure, which is followed by letting go of the interest, which is sadness, which is resolved by interest/desire (interest, fear, sadness, interest). When it becomes too dangerous to access interest/desire, we are left with fear and sadness.” “Cal Izard, remember him?” I said. “He taught at Vanderbilt and introduced me to emotion theory. He has described what he called the hostility triad. Rozin called it the CAD complex. This is just a knot using anger to achieve a goal. Once the goal is achieved, joy follows, and, after joy, comes disgust at one’s adversary.”
“That’s a pretty mean, disgusting knot,” Jane said.
“Yes, it is. I imagine there are as many pathological knots as there are combinations of various emotions. But you are right, Ralph. My job here is not to describe reality’s confusion. It is to tease apart the elements of our emotional experience and help us understand them and master them.”
“I would like to get back to your theory,” Tom said. “The thing I don’t like about the lineage of your theory is this: If you combine mind and body as Darwin, James, Lange, Tomkins, Ekman, Izard, Greenberg, and you do, you will always be the victim of your emotions. We need a theory that helps us master our feelings and one that at the same time conceptualizes the unity of the body and mind.”
“That’s what David is trying to do here,” Ralph said.
“Is that right?” Jane asked.
“Yes, I think it is, now that Tom has put it in these terms. I am trying to recognize that we do feel before we think; that emotions can come on us, as if out of nowhere. Yet, I want to use this reality as a tool we can use to create, so that we are not just subject to our feelings as if they were a disease that we catch. Yes, I think feelings are contagious. But I also believe we can choose to bring to ourselves the next feeling. We can master our attention, and we can use our imagination and memories to create fantasies that bring with them a certain new emotion that will bring with it a healthy resolve of the old emotion.”
“I get it,” Tom said. “We cannot avoid the reality that emotion precedes cognition, but that does not mean we have to become victims of our feelings. It is because our bodies and minds are one unit that we can focus our minds on a new feeling and that feeling will come.”
“This sounds cognitive behavioral to me,” Jane said.
“I’m not telling clients what thoughts to think,” I said. “I am only asking them to remember or imagine a scene that contained the feeling that they want to feel next, a feeling that will lead them to a healthy constructive resolve out of their stuck emotional place.”
“David’s theory assumes, as I do,” Ralph said, “that feeling one emotion all the time is sickness. Health is an emotional balance, where we flow naturally through all our emotions.”
“So,” Jane said, “I’m still not clear on how we can use this idea that emotions resolve one another and that we can use emotions, rather than thoughts, to free us from an unhealthy emotional hole or knot.”
“I think we are all predisposed to expressing some emotions while avoiding others,” I said. “When we know which emotions we allow ourselves to feel and which ones we avoid, we know where we need to work. We are often stuck in the emotions we feel most easily. We need to use those emotions we avoid to help us change our emotional habits.”
“Why do you think we tend toward some emotions and avoid others?” Tom asked. “Our families taught us,” Ralph answered.
“Perhaps,” I said, “or perhaps we were born this way. I don’t think the reason matters. What matters is that we need to find a way to become comfortable to feel and express all our feelings. There is a time to every purpose.”
“The Birds,” Jane said.
“Peter, Paul, and Mary before them,” I added.
“Who are the Birds and Peter, Paul, and Mary?” Tom wondered.
“Two 1970s rock groups. They sang those words.”
“The words come form the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes 3:1,” Ralph explained. “They make David’s point. There is a purpose for each emotion, and, to be a whole, healthy person, we need to feel all of them. Most of us feel the ones we want to feel and avoid the others. David’s right.”
“So, how do we use this in therapy?” Jane asked.
“Well, in the therapy hour, you can help your clients know which emotions they need to work on,” I said. “You can model for them and teach them how to move out of an emotionally stuck place and back into the natural emotion flow that can include all their feelings. And between sessions, you can give them rituals they can use to become masters of their emotional process.”
“But to do that,” Ralph said. “We must know how emotions work and which ones work best to resolve unhealthy emotional knots and patterns.”
“This is an interesting theory,” Jane said. “I would trust it more if I understood how you came to this.”
How I Came to This
The answer to that question was too complicated for me to answer there. In 1971, I took an emotions course from Cal Izard and read his book, The Face of Emotion (1971). Later, I read Donald Nathanson’s book Shame and Pride (1992). These books introduced me to Sylvan Tomkins (1962, 1963, 1981), but these things had little to do with my ability to understand this theory. I was only twenty-five when I first read about Tomkins. I had not yet seen my first client.
This idea first occurred to me fifteen years later on my wedding day. I have always teared-up at weddings, and I was especially concerned that I might fall apart at my own. I was determined to keep my composure and speak audibly in declaring my commitment to my bride, Marietta.
The guests were gathered. The photographer had begun taking pictures (and sipping the wine). Marietta’s father, a minister, was to perform the service. He specifically instructed the photographer not to take pictures during the ceremony, because he wanted no distractions from this important moment. I sensed the photographer wasn’t paying attention to his admonitions. I asked a friend to keep an eye on her to make sure she was not shooting during the ceremony.
The ceremony began. I was standing before my future father-in-law, Marietta at my side, all of us in front of a large picture window. We were nearing the part where I would have to say something. Emotions began to flood over me. Tears filled my eyes. I was choking. I wasn’t sure I would be able to speak.
The momentum of this sad joy seemed beyond my control, until I saw the photographer tiptoeing outside the house and behind the large picture window. Anger poured into my body. I motioned to my friend to go outside and rein her in. He moved immediately. Marietta’s father turned to me cueing me to speak. “I do” I spoke with a clear, strong voice. The flow of the sad, tearful hormones had been replaced in an instant by angry neurohormones. My composure returned, and I was able to perform as I had hoped, thanks to the photographer and my anger.
Since that day, I wondered if somehow I could use this same physiological law (anger resolving sadness) with my clients. Sometimes, when I saw a depressed client, I would think, “I wish he would just get mad.” I would dismiss that thought and do what I had been trained to do: listen carefully; empathize; create a safe, sacred context for the client to find the various parts of himself; integrate them into a new whole; and help him graduate from therapy.
Once I began to open my mind to this way of thinking, ideas began flooding my brain. I kept thinking about music. Emotions are like music. Think about Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” It mirrors moods related to seasonal changes. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, a musical composition can reflect how emotions work in the brain. We are always feeling something. In a healthy person, that “something” we feel changes, like the shifts in the notes of a symphony. Each musical tone resolves into another. That new note merges with another, and so on. The composer establishes major emotional themes, with undercurrents of other emotions.
Emotions move through us in the same way. This flow can create a brilliantly harmonious symphony, or it can become a discordant hodgepodge. Accomplished composers know which notes to put next to each other to create harmonious melodies. They understand point-counterpoint. They anticipate the effect of major and minor keys upon the listener’s emotions.
As I thought about it, emotions could be considered as different instruments played in a symphony. Some instruments are used best in certain parts of a composition. Almost all the instruments could play the notes, but trumpets are best at making announcements. Violins do an excellent job of crying. Tympanies create depth. Some of us try to play all of our emotional music using only one or two instruments. For those folk, therapists should help them learn to play all their instruments so that their emotional symphony has a complete expression.
Surely, if we understood emotions as instruments in a symphony orchestra, we could become emotional maestros instead of emotional victims. What if we knew how to purposefully put one emotion next to another to make a harmonious emotional flow? How would this impact our daily lives? Hearing one note, monotonously repeated is comparable to being stuck in one emotion.
I saw the same point from another perspective. It is like film in a movie projector stuck on one frame. Eventually, the celluloid frame is overheated by the light bulb, the frame overheats, burns, and the film disintegrates into acrid smoke.
This theory can find another metaphor in color. For some, color is the outward reflection of inner feelings. In literary terms, red is anger, blue represents sadness, and yellow stands for fear. Talented artists create exquisite compositions using harmonious combinations of color. They are masters of knowing which palettes work together to communicate visual beauty. And we all know beauty when we see it. Perhaps we do not understand what we are seeing, but most of the time we agree on what is appealing to the eye.
For instance, two of the most unappealing paintings to a viewer might be a completely black canvas or a blank, white canvas. In emotional terms, this would be equivalent to alexathymia, the expression of no emotion. Why can’t we paint with our emotions the way an artist combines colors in a painting? Wouldn’t that be great? If we understood how our emotions work the way artists understand colors, we would be masters of ourselves.
Then I read John Gottman’s and colleagues (1997) famous study of how families communicate emotionally. This was a study of parents who were emotional masters and compared their children with the children of parents who were emotionally ineffective. Gottman followed a cohort of children, ages four to eight. The experimental subjects were children who had a psychologically emotionally competent parent; the controls did not. The children of the psychologically minded parent scored higher on measures of self-esteem, school performance, sociability, and appropriate behavior. They even scored healthier on measures of vagal nerve tone, as well as general physical health.
Gottman concluded that children with psychologically minded parents are healthier, and more socially capable and intellectually competent, and are more likely to pass on this emotional competence to their children. For clinicians, the point of this study is that if people can become effective at managing their emotions, they can change the quality of their lives and also the lives of those they love.
My next thought was not so original. Many people are claiming that they can change brain chemistry by changing thought patterns. I’m not sure that changing thoughts will change brain chemicals. But I am sure that changing feelings will change brain chemicals, because chemicals are part of our body’s emotional response. We can’t change how we feel without changing the brain chemistry.
This is exactly what 14-year-old Portnoy (of Portnoy’s Complaint [1994]) do. They feel embarrassed and ashamed by the awkwardness of their age and their lack of social skills. When they come home from school, they retreat to their rooms, reach between their mattress and box springs, pull out a Playboy and imagine they are exactly what they are not. They fill their brain with desire and images of their sexual power, and they change their brain chemistry with masturbatory fantasies.
Girls of the same age often do the same thing with food. They come home from an embarrassing day at school, and they can use food to cover their feelings, or they can purge food as their release. Some girls avoid their painful feelings by starving themselves. Appetite neurohormones, those that accompany a starving person’s desire for food, fill their brains. Their hunger and accompanying longings for food cover their unpleasant feelings.
And this is what batterers do after they have been chewed out at work. They come home and cover their shame and fear with rage at their wives and children. These are all drug events, aren’t they? Some of us get addicted to these emotions because of the drugs they give us.
As I was reflecting on how emotions change emotions one day, I was listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I heard Beethoven move from fear to anger, to shame, to surprise, to rest, to joy, and back and forth among, what seemed like to me, all nine of the basic emotions. What he did in this piece was amazing, not only musically but emotionally. He found segués between emotions resolving one feeling with another, and that feeling with another, until he explored the whole range of human emotions. Listening to this piece in this way, through the frame of this theory, was thrilling.
Wouldn’t it be great to have such an emotional range? As a person, I want this kind of mastery for myself. I think if I can begin to understand how Beethoven did what he did in the Ninth Symphony, I can help clients become emotional masters as well.
In this masterpiece, Beethoven gives us the opportunity to use all our feelings. Using all our feelings is the way out of being overly dependent on just a few.
As I further thought about how this theory might affect my practice, another appealing aspect became evident to me. Managed care sometimes forces therapists into unethical boxes. Therapists can no longer treat those patients who need time (lots of it) and our compassion (lots of that, too). So clients come to us, complete with their allotted six to twenty managed-care sessions. When, after twenty sessions, they can no longer afford to see their therapist, they become abandoned once more. They are insulted by the instruction we give them in our new world of cognitive behaviorism. They might fill out the evaluation form, pretending to be helped to gratify the therapist or to conform to what they think others would write. But basically, they have been betrayed once more.
Though I abhor managed care, I must confess that it has forced me to ask myself, What do I have to teach people who come to me, hoping that I have some new information about how they can feel better? Their way of coping with life isn’t working. They seem stuck in the same painful emotional cycle. They sincerely want to be taught a new way. They need information. What can I teach them?
My answer is that I can teach them how their emotions work. That’s how this theory came to me. That’s why I wrote this book.
Notes
McMillan, D.W., “Sense of Community,” in Journal of Community Psychology 24(4) (1996): 315-325.
Dissmell is an emotion described as “turning up one’s nose at fools.” For Tomkins, this was different than disgust. This distinction is too esoteric for our purposes.
Cantero, J., M. Atienza, C. Gomez, and R. Salas, “Spectral structure and brain mapping of human alpha activities in different arousal states,” in Neuropsychobiology, 39, (1999): 110-116.