Lately, I
have been grappling with the functions of my feelings. I partook in a DBT
group in which we picked apart an experience and ultimately named the function
of the feeling we had. The group leader was not very direct and I didn’t
feel confident of her knowledge. She ultimately called most everyone’s
function of his or her feeling “self-validation”. I’m not sure if I agree
with her, and it has motivated me to ponder this concept of functions of
feelings.
In my day job, as a school psychologist, I’m often examining the
function of kids’ behaviors. They ultimately come down to 2 different
functions—getting attention or avoiding something, in other words, attainment
or escape. So, when I am analyzing things through the DBT lens, I am
trying to wrap my head around the function of some feelings, and whether they
are far off from the function of behaviors.
Feelings are definitely more complex
than behaviors because we can experience many of them at once, they are not
very observable, and there are 3 different components of an emotion: a
subjective component (how we experience the emotion), a physiological component
(how our bodies react to the emotion), and an expressive component (how we
behave in response to the emotion.) So, feelings/emotions definitely pose
a more complicated element....but in looking at their purpose, it helps me to
begin to make sense. Emotions help us to avoid danger, to make friends,
and assess things. They also motivate us to take action. Emotions
serve an adaptive role in our lives my motivating us to act in ways to increase
our chances for success.
But what happens when these pure “adaptive” emotions are messed
with?
I found
blurb in the amazing book, The
Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller that is quite brilliant and
helping me understand how corrupted functions can work:
The contempt shown
by many disturbed people may have various forerunners in their life history,
but the function all expressions of contempt have in common is the defense
against unwanted feelings. Contempt simply evaporates, having lost its
point, when it is no longer useful as a shield—against the child’s shame over
his desperate unreturned love; against his feeling of inadequacy; or above all
against his rage that his parents were not available. Once we are able to
feel and understand the repressed emotions of childhood, we will no longer need
contempt as a defense against them.
-Alice Miller
So here, she analyzes the function of contempt. And she
concludes that the function of this emotion is the defense against unwanted
feelings. I need to let this idea marinate. I, at times, experience
contempt..and it makes sense to me that its purpose is to shield me from
unwanted feelings. I want to sit with this and observe it as it
happens....and
then I want to look at other very limiting expressions of my emotions--such as
shutting people out when they want to help...or making myself
unrelatable. I’m thinking these are things I do to shield myself from
some awful feelings.
