Tamed and Untamed Emotions
Emociones domesticadas y no domesticadas
A gentle exploration of the emotions we habitually return to, the ones we avoid, and how learning to tell them apart can help us grow.
Tamed and Untamed Emotions
Feeling and emotion
We can consider emotions to be a type of thought,
a form of thought,
because you can distinguish feeling from emotion.
For feeling, you don't need thought.
It's just a way of defining it,
so what's there might be other ways of defining things, to use these words.
Whatever we can experience at the level of feeling without thought,
I would call that feeling.
And when there is what we could call, say, what I feel, for example shame,
you cannot experience shame without thought.
It's a form of thought.
There has to be a narrative, an "I" in the center of a narrative,
for there to be an experience of shame.
And then there are different kinds of emotions, lots of kinds.
I call them all fear and pain.
I would say shame is a form of pain.
Anxiety is a form of fear.
Deep feeling
And some of these we have had a really hard time experiencing.
And ultimately, what's the hardest thing for us to experience is feeling,
deep feeling.
So sadness,
grief,
joy.
For those you don't need thought,
and in fact thought would obscure them.
Tamed emotions
Tamed emotions are the emotions that we're addicted to.
It's what we tend to create with our thinking, habitually.
It will be very uncomfortable.
For example, shame is a very uncomfortable emotion.
But depending on the person,
I might be very comfortable experiencing shame, even though it's very uncomfortable.
And so it's tamed. I may hate it,
but if I'm experiencing it regularly, it's a tamed emotion.
So if I'm a frustrated person,
depressed,
angry,
there are emotions that I'm comfortable with.
By comfortable I mean your sense of self is not threatened.
And so usually we experience them regularly.
It's like a thing that's like, here we go again, I'm frustrated,
or I'm feeling bad, like a blueness, a depressiveness,
like feeling blue.
Anguish is not the same as sad or in grief.
And you can tell the difference if there's a lot of narrative going on.
Untamed emotions
Untamed emotions are emotions that we feel threatened by.
There's a sense of self that's threatened by them.
And it depends on the person. It's like, what's your preference?
It's like how your psyche developed.
Some people, anger might be an untamed emotion.
And it's really hard for them to feel and express anger.
And for the next person, anger could be a tamed emotion.
They're in it all the time.
Same with shame.
Untamed emotions in a sense are what we need in order to grow.
We need to learn to feel.
Mechanisms of defense
Because in a sense they are how we have mechanisms of defense,
you could say.
And you could also call it, in a more spiritual sense,
mechanisms of illusion,
how we create an illusion of what reality is.
And so reality might be there's something that's very sad.
But I can't feel sadness.
Like deep sadness could be very powerful.
Or there could be a terror that's beyond,
it's not an emotional terror,
it's beyond thought.
And then what we do is we create tamed emotions,
a narrative that in a sense helps us bypass the untamed,
and keeps us distracted from the untamed.
Learning to see
That's something that we need to learn to see.
For example, there's a certain kind of anxiety and confusion,
being confused and not knowing, not understanding.
And for some people, that's really hard to be with.
And so we will create the habitual narratives that create a state of knowing,
a sense of knowing, or a sense of things are okay.
I understand what's going on. I know what I need to do.
But the next person, it might be the opposite.
Some people are very comfortable in a constant state of drama.
And those people usually become actors or therapists.
It's the kind of thing that becomes like the thing that I'm familiar with,
I can go into, I can understand it, learn how it works, kind of play with it.
And for the next person it's really uncomfortable to be sad,
to be in any kind of negative emotional state.
And so they will be constantly creating optimism, and everything's okay,
and avoiding anything that's a little dramatic.
Anyone who's dramatic, they would see as problematic,
and there's something wrong with them, or they don't get it,
or why are they doing that, it makes no sense, they're just ruining their lives.
But that, for that person, is in the shadow.
The shadow of comfort
A person that's always optimistic, obviously there is (I'm generalizing),
feeling a kind of habitual okayness that's not real or deep.
That isn't necessarily a good thing.
And vice versa, feeling a lot of movement of emotion,
a kind of sense of being overly emotional,
also isn't necessarily meaning that one is going deep and feeling a lot.
It could be a form of avoiding a deeper grief or fear.
What we inherit
So just to wrap it up: the distinction between tamed and untamed
is what we're comfortable with, which reinforces our sense of self.
We've learned to be comfortable there.
And then there's what we're not comfortable with.
This was what we learned in the environment we grew up in.
It's in a sense kind of handed down by our caregivers, or society, or parents.
If one of our parents cannot handle their child being angry,
it's very, very difficult to be angry as a child.
And for that child, that's going to be an untamed emotion.
Most likely. Maybe not, right?
It's no guarantee of how it's going to work in that particular person.