Additions to Today's Discussion

What I wanted to add to this discussion today was my further developed thoughts on emotion. As I said in class, The Magus took over my life in a way that was emotional, heartbreaking, and, at times, infuriating. In class I still wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Dr. Sexson’s comment about being able to feel something better than another infuriated me at first. Then, I realized that I did just that with The Magus. But something about that still didn’t feel right. And here is what it is.

We all experience emotion in our own, individual way. Sure, there are similarities. My ecstatic probably doesn’t look like the average person’s distraught. That being said, emotion is such a personal experience. I am going back to my original thought that it’s ridiculous to say that one can feel emotion more accurately or with more depth than the person who originally experienced it. There is no such thing as wrong emotion or better emotion or anything that implies ranking. It is simply different. If I told Nicholas that I felt his emotion better than he, I would not blame him for slapping me across the face. I’d do the same thing if someone said that to me because it’s pretty insulting. Even though I have an incredible capacity for compassion, I would never EVER say that I can feel an emotion better than the person who went through it. Here is why.

We are all different. We all have different life experiences and backgrounds that have shaped who we are today, right now, in this moment. I have no goddamn clue how anyone else feels because I don’t know an individual’s life and everything that has happened in that time and how it feels to that person. Those cumulative experiences result in an emotional experience that will be decidedly different from my own. Even if I was the identical twin of this person and went through life side by side this person, I wouldn’t say that I know how this person feels.

I recognize here that I am a) being stubborn and not very open and b) clearly a product of my environment and what I have been taught. However, I’m not okay with saying or thinking or believing that I can feel something better than someone else. That is a value judgement that I do not feel okay making. Emotions are so personal and so raw; words do not do them justice. Sometimes we may feel very similar emotions. Sometimes certain individuals may experience emotions more intensely than another. However, there is no better or worse. Not in my mind, at least.

I've been thinking a lot lately about gender roles and how those play into emotion. There is a lot of conflicting research regarding whether men or women are more emotional. I hate the premise of this research because I like to believe that we have a bit more control over our actions than what our traditional gender roles seem to allow. Perhaps I’m naïve, but I don’t see a fundamental difference between men and women with the exception of certain biological differences after puberty. I belive the majority of sex differences are culturally created, defined, and perpetuated. This comes back to how I feel about emotion. People say women are more emotional than men. Be it beuase of their periods, estrogen, or any other trivial thing, we have this idea in our culture that women are much more emotional than men. However, how can we know this if we’re limited by language to describe emotion and the words we have don’t do emotion justice? All research in this field is flawed from the beginning because of this one simple fact. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. It kind of works because they’re kind of related, but it’s not quite right. Emotion is simply not something you can accurately put into words and describe, let alone make sex-based generalizations or value judgments about it. I don’t buy it. Perhaps it’s twelve years of psychotherapy that’s brainwashed me, but that is something that I hold true to my heart and have no intention of changing anytime soon.



As a side note, I am almost a bit frustrated myself with being so stubborn on this. I feel as if I've done a good job of staying open-minded to the ideas in this course, and this is something that I have no desire to change. I think this requires some further exploration for my own sake. I want to delve deeper and find out why this is so important to me.