The Function of Emotions

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.