Louisville Medicine Volume 68, Issue 10 | Page 12

THE TYRANNY OF EMOTIONS Christine B . L . Adams , MD
MENTAL HEALTH

THE TYRANNY OF EMOTIONS Christine B . L . Adams , MD

Emotional displays flood our lives .

Television , radio , social media , conversations and written media provide a continual barrage of anger , tears , venom , upset and grief . The political arena is an ongoing slugfest of emotional outrage , gestures , name-calling and put-downs .
The excessive outpouring of feelings dominates our interpersonal landscape as well . How did we arrive here ? Does everyone use an emotional megaphone , or only some of us ? Some of us are emotionally reserved . How do we coexist with each other ? As a child and adult psychiatrist for 40 years , I have some observations on both the over- and under-expression of feelings and the implications for both emotional health and illness . I discuss these observations in the book I co-authored with psychiatrist Homer B . Martin , MD , titled Living on Automatic : How Emotional Conditioning Shapes Our Lives and Relationships .
Neurophysiologists and neuropsychologists point out that feelings are subjective experiences of emotions . Emotions arise from patterns of neural activity in the limbic system . Then feelings interpret the neural-based emotions . For purposes of this article ( psychiatric , not neurophysiologic ) I use feelings and emotions interchangeably .
EMOTIONS AND ROLES
We all have emotions . Most of us assume our feelings and emotional expressions are hardwired in us , but they are not . In childhood we grasp how , how much and when to display our feelings . This takes place through unaware teaching within our families and the roles parents shape us in for managing relationships . We grasp these roles by age three .
THE RESERVED AND UNEMOTIONAL
Some of us master roles of hiding our feelings and keeping them under wraps . In this role we rarely acknowledge , much less show our feelings . We may be unable to identify when we are sad , happy , angry or anxious . During psychotherapy , when I ask such people what they feel in a given situation they say , “ I don ’ t know what I feel ,” or “ I ’ m unsure .” Often , they tell me what they think instead of what they feel . We refer to them as reserved or unemotional .
Reserved people can make poor judgments when other people are involved because they do not use their own feelings to assess what they need to think , do or say . They suppress feelings and , in
10 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE