We all learn very early on, intuitively, what is and what isn’t acceptable within our families, and this includes emotional expression. In one family the expression of anger may be completely OK, yet at their next-door neighbour’s house, anger may be a taboo but sadness welcomed. Social and gender norms play a part in this also. We’ve all heard “boys don’t cry” or “it isn’t nice for girls to be angry”. Culture plays a big part too, for example in British society, expressing any emotion, publicly at least, is generally frowned up.
How does this process happen?
Children growing up experiment with different emotions. One minute they might be feeling angry and the next time something happens they feel hurt, or the next guilty or scared or inadequate or righteous. The child discovers that certain emotions are treated with indifference or even outright disapproval in their family, while often one of the emotions is acceptable and gets positive results. That favoured feeling becomes a type of conditioned reflex which often then persists unconsciously for the rest of the person’s life. It becomes their ‘go-to’ emotion when anything happens.
Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis uses the idea of a roulette wheel of feeling. He uses the metaphor of a housing development with 36 houses built in a circle around a central plaza. Randomly, like the spin of a roulette wheel, there is a baby waiting to be born at no. 17, and after that baby is born, the next will be born at nos. 23, 11, 26, 35, and 31.
10 years later, each of the children has learned how they are supposed to react. The child in no. 17 has learned, “In this family, when the going gets rough, we feel angry.” The child in no. 23 has learned, “When the going gets rough, we feel hurt”. The babies at 11, 26, and 35 have learned that when the going gets rough, their respective families feel guilty, scared, inadequate. The baby in no. 31 learns that in this family, when the going gets rough, we don’t stay in any one emotion, rather we find out what to do about it. This is the child who grows up into the adult most equipped to be able to problem solve in the here-and-now rather than get pulled back on an invisible bungee to the strategies and emotions of childhood.
People will defend their favoured emotion as the natural or even inevitable one in a given situation because it’s subconscious and automatic to them. It’s not however a response to here-and-now reality but has a predictable, known (and therefore safe) result for them – in TA this is called the Script Payoff.
Do you have a go-to emotion and find other emotions much harder to access? Emotions are often accessed in layers so if your go-to emotion is anxiety, underneath the anxiety might be sadness, and then once you’ve been able to access the sadness, under that might be anger, or joy.
In my family, we were OK with anger. It wasn’t understood as dangerous or unwelcome but rather a way of sorting things out. Then once the anger had been expressed, hovering underneath it was often sadness, so after the anger tears would often flow. Once the sadness had been cleared then there was space for joy, laughter, happiness, play. The emotion that wasn’t recognised in my family was anxiety or fear. We were all, at least on the surface and largely to ourselves, all completely fearless. It took me until I was about 30 to realise some of what I was feeling in certain situations was actually anxiety. I had no clue here what this strange emotion was as it just never figured in my family.
The first step in this journey of freeing yourself from some of this early conditioning so that you have more choices of how to respond and problem solve in the here-and-now, is just gently starting to become aware of what your go-to emotion is. When you’ve identified your preferred emotion in difficult situations, try experimenting with other emotions, just as you would have done as a child. It maybe very surprising, liberating even, to realise you get different responses from both yourself internally and also from others when you use different emotions.
Refs: Eric Berne, “What Do You Say After You Say Hello?” 1975
Also in communications with: Dr Mark Widdowson