Body Shocks
Or, psychosomatic symptoms.
This is the sixth in my current series on subjectivity and emotions. In this series I’ve been putting forward the idea that the central aspect of emotion in human beings is that its somatic components – tears, blushing and so on – evolved so that the knowledge emotion conveyed became impossible to miss. Somatic components like tears are universal in human beings and relate to fundamental experiences. They are cognitive, but they apply whenever the experience arrives. In the case of tears and grief, that fundamental experience is loss.
Some cultures – my own for instance – were set up so that the expression of emotion became frowned upon, especially in public, and especially for men. This would not have happened consciously, nor been decided deliberately, and in the case of the British it is a relatively recent phenomenon, but it did have a purpose. That purpose was to deny the value of the knowledge contained in the emotion. It is no accident that the arrival of massive, top-heavy social hierarchies once the Industrial Revolution got going coincided with the social imperative to suppress emotion. This in essence was because the appalling deeds of British men across the world as they spread their creed and built their empire on exploitation, slavery, theft and genocide would have been halted had they felt the slightest emotion of shame, loss and so on. But they did not wish to halt their domination and colonisation. To paraphrase Shere Hite’s memorable observation: no patriarchal social hierarchy can exist populated by individuals with a full and functioning emotional life. Men in particular have to deny their emotions, just as centuries ago they denied to themselves what they were doing or indulged in nonsensical racist rationalisations: in India, in China, in Kenya… across the world. This became the British stiff upper lip. It was denial, pure and simple.
As attitudes freed up a little during the twentieth century, it became clear to psychologists and to counsellors in particular that emotional suppression was harmful. Nobody at the time had much of an idea why. (Emotion has until recently been a topic of little study by the male-dominated psychological world.) But now we know more. We know that fundamental psychological modes are being shut down in cases of emotional suppression, modes that are essential to mental health and wellbeing. Suppressing emotion is simply an unhealthy act. It is a kind of self-sabotage.
This is exactly what we might expect, however. Human mental models are active. The adaptive neural networks those models are created from are active. That means the human mental model must communicate with itself as well as with others. Emotion has this purpose in the case of high-value knowledge such as loss, frustration and so on. To suppress that self-communication is to deny the reality of the world. Yet, although it is a dangerous ploy in terms of health, it was the preferred mode of all those British men who wanted to build their blood-stained empire. Those men of history gave us our reputation for the stiff upper lip.
Emotional suppression however does have its own symptoms. I remember watching an interview with Leonard Nimoy – Mr Spock from Star Trek – when he was describing playing his near-emotionless character. One day, at the end of a lengthy filming schedule, he suddenly found himself crying for no apparent reason. As he described it in the interview: the emotion he suppressed during filming simply had to come out.
But of course! Emotion doesn’t dissipate if it is not expressed. It stays inside the mind, watching, waiting, coiled up like a watch-spring. Its mode of operation is to be felt, to be experienced.
This, then, is the reason counsellors place emphasis on reconnecting with childhood or other emotional suppression, that those emotions be expressed as part of healing and closure. Often this is linked to psychological trauma, but that is not the only circumstance. All British families have their own codes of conduct when it comes to certain emotions. In many, anger is the taboo emotion, which must not be expressed. For others it is pretty much all emotions. Yet suppressing anger over many years just means all that anger builds up, waiting for its chance to be expressed. Quite often the trigger for such a release is something entirely unrelated to the original circumstances, as when somebody rages if they drop a saucer on the floor or some such trivial act. Their fury doesn’t relate to the saucer. It relates to the past.
Self-communication through emotion is an act of authentication. Human mental models cannot properly survive without that basic mode of operation. Without it, they are inauthentic. They are dysfunctional. They are incomplete.
But there are other, more insidious symptoms of emotional suppression. Emotion’s somatic components are not its sole mode of expression. In cases of long-term emotional suppression another mode arises, and that is though the body.
Given that emotion’s purpose is to be felt and experienced, and given that conscious or learned suppression robs it of that ability, emotion looks around for another way of appearing – of being noticed. That way is physical symptoms. These symptoms turn into what are sometimes called psychosomatic illnesses. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is one such. Certain kinds of heart disease are another. For some people, debilitating skin conditions are what develop. In a lot of people, the symptoms of IBS have in essence the same function as the somatic components of fear and anxiety, in those instances where their root problem is anxiety. Having IBS is better described as the physical symptom of an underlying anxiety disorder rather than a thing in itself. Those physical symptoms of IBS have exactly the same purpose as the somatic components of fear, which is the source of most anxiety. That purpose is to be noticed.
IBS in such instances is a form of self-communication. It speaks of a fundamental mode of mental operation appearing through a physical disorder, a health condition, rather than through those emotional channels which evolved in human beings over hundreds of thousands of years. To regain health, IBS needs to be viewed as only the symptom. The real target of wellbeing in the case of IBS is recognising, then understanding, unconscious fear and anxiety.
Last week, a report in The Independent revealed the cost of this kind of suppression to women in particular: research has found how much of a toll this is taking on [women’s] bodies, particularly if your people-pleasing involves something known as ‘self-silencing,’ i.e. when you suppress your own emotional needs, overly monitor your behaviour, and refrain from self-expression to avoid upsetting others. This modern term self-silencing is particularly telling, I think. Literally the suppression of emotional needs in order to please others, it also involves hypervigilance and learned behaviours such as constantly agreeing and seeking approval. The real damage is silencing the self – in effect blocking self-authenticating networks so that the self cannot communicate with itself in meaningful ways. Self-silencing says it all: no route at all for emotional knowledge to be expressed. It is this lack of ability for women that leads to illnesses and conditions which they in particular suffer. Such conditions include fibromyalgia and many others. Mental wellbeing through full emotional expression also leads to self-worth. Women suffer far more in these areas than do men.
These behaviours for women have a solid biological basis in the brain too, because, as a learned behaviour, self-silencing through people-pleasing involves dopamine pathways. That means people-pleasing, seeking approval and self-silencing all become behaviour patterns which, though damaging, are difficult to unlearn because they are rewarded by the brain through dopamine. The stress patterns such behaviours generate are often what lead to chronic conditions, because a woman’s nervous system simply never gets a chance to switch off; there is no pattern of on/off when it comes to activity and relaxation.
We are all self-authenticating creatures: men and women. We need that mode of operation because it is absolutely central to our conscious minds. Human emotions evolved for a specific and vital purpose. To deny that purpose is to deny the real world.
These are indeed acts of self-sabotage.
