In this module: Three stages of emotional development: Repression, expression, discretion.
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Module one
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Module six
Module seven
Full transcript of Module six:
I’m Justice Schanfarber, and this is module six of the gentle art of emotional mastery seven day audio course, where you learn to create preferred emotional states from the inside out, regardless of past history, current circumstances, or other people.
The emotional development of children gets a lot of attention and is the subject of much scholarship and research, but emotional development doesn’t end with the transition into adulthood.
Our emotional development continues throughout our life, and it follows a basic trajectory through three distinct stages.
It is only in the third stage that the gentle art of emotional mastery becomes possible, but each of the two previous stages has its own legitimate part to play in preparation.
At the first stage, emotion is largely suppressed, repressed, minimized, or denied because it is unfamiliar, uncomfortable or mistrusted. A confident and healthy relationship to feeling has not been established, so feeling is met with suspicion and even rejection.
I call this the repression stage, though the word suppression is sometimes more accurate.
People at this stage often report not knowing how they feel, and they tend to express only a narrow range of emotion, though it might be expressed quite strongly. For some people at the repression stage, anger or rage is the primary emotion they have access to. For others it might be sadness or depression. Sometimes it is doubt or suspicion.
People at this stage can appear to be emotionally “shut down”, armored, unavailable, invulnerable, cut off, numb, though they might also be emotionally explosive. If you haven’t known someone at this stage of emotional development (or been this someone) you have definitely seen them as characters in movies or shows or in books. Tony Soprano from the HBO series and Darth Vader from Star Wars are two iconic examples.
People who have not yet developed a comfortable and trusting relationship with a full range of emotion will restrict and constrict their feelings in order to protect themselves, and possibly, in their minds, others. They’ll do this either unconsciously and unintentionally, which we call emotional repression, or they’ll do it consciously and intentionally, which we call emotional suppression.
The repression or suppression of feeling has, in various cultural contexts over time, been considered a skill or virtue or necessity.
Emotional suppression has at times been demanded by religion, advocated by philosophers as far back as ancient Greece, taught implicitly or explicitly in schools until very recently, and been a defining feature of countless families, marriages, workplaces, and personal lives.
People’s relationship to emotion has been very fraught, individually and collectively, for a very long time, for many reasons.
Today though, there is widespread support, and even an expectation, for individuals to become more sensitive to feelings, their own and others’, and value is placed on the ability to express a range of emotions.
People now generally recognize that suppressing or ignoring your feelings has consequences. Few of our institutions, leaders, celebrity icons, or public figures are advocating for emotional repression anymore, and mostly the opposite is now true.
Emotional repression and the limits it imposes on human wholeness give rise to a desire and an imagining of something better, something beyond, and that something is the second stage of emotional development: emotional expression.
Emotional repression is a burden, and eventually the burden simply becomes too great. The dam breaks, and, sometimes quite suddenly, emotional repression gives way to emotional expression.
It often takes a crisis to provide the kind of pressure needed to crack the defenses of an emotionally stuck or repressed person. Sometimes the crack is temporary, there’s a brief opening, a small divergence, and then a return to the established order.
But other times, a door is fully opened, and a person steps through that door into the next stage of their development.
Moving from the stage of emotional repression to the stage of emotional expression is a dynamic, expansive, and liberating move. As a person makes this move, their philosophy of life changes, along with their values, their interests, and more often than not, their circle of friends and community.
In today’s culture, increasing value is placed on emotional expression, and cultural institutions and social norms largely encourage, support, and validate anyone who is moving past emotional repression, with its associated emotional armoring, judgment, and denial, toward emotional expression, marked by emotional vulnerability, honesty, and acceptance, as well as compassion and empathy.
The move into emotional expression can feel exhilarating and liberating, but at this stage emotion can be rather chaotic, unpredictable, and frankly exhausting. You’re no longer afraid of feeling too much, but you might be spending a lot of time and energy navigating and processing feelings, as well as the situations that expressing all of these feelings gets you into, such as the “difficult conversations” and personal confessions that have become so valued and valorized by those in the emotional expression stage.
People at the emotional expression stage tend to emphasize emotional processing, emotional boundaries, and emotional needs. They value communication, validation, and vulnerability. They believe that empathy and compassion are some of the highest human achievements, even the solution to any and every problem ever faced by humans.
At this stage friendships and relationships can be subject to volatility as the individuals involved are negotiating to get needs met, set boundaries, get the validation and understanding they want, process past hurts and traumas, and generally give their attention to a full spectrum of feelings.
At the second stage, emotional repression and denial gives way to a full embrace of “feeling it all.” The contrast between the repression of stage one and the expression of stage two can be extreme, like a pendulum swing.
At the second stage, all feelings are welcome, and there’s a belief that all feelings are, in a way, equal. That is, no feelings are better than other feelings, and all feelings deserve your attention.
In fact, at the expression stage of emotional development, there’s a strong belief that if you do not pay enough attention to unwanted or negative feelings, ie – anger, shame, fear etc, and somehow “integrate” them, you will be less whole, even less human. There’s also a fear that any unexpressed emotions, including unpleasant ones, will somehow sneak up on you and do you harm.
The following quote, often attributed to Sigmund Freud, perfectly reflects these beliefs, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
Freud developed his “talking cure” to bring repressed aspects of the self, including emotions, into consciousness. He worked in Victorian Europe, a time and place marked by a dominant culture of repression.
A belief in the value and necessity of expressing all emotions, even unwanted ones, is a reaction to, and a developmental improvement upon, the limiting aspects of the previous emotional repression stage.
At stage two we discover that there is no “good” or “bad” emotion, that all feeling has a purpose. This second-stage illumination delivers us from first-stage repression and opens the door to greater emotional discovery, understanding, sensitivity, and connection.
Observing Western culture today, we see a general evolutionary move away from emotional repression and toward emotional expression, and those at the emotional expression stage often assume that the primary human goal, emotionally speaking, should be to go forever deeper into the fullest possible range of feeling.
But this does come with consequences, with a downside, and I want to offer an alternative vision, one that points the way to a new kind of relationship to emotion, and to self.
I want to propose that the emotional sensitivity developed at the second stage paves the way for another stage, which is defined by the discovery of a new kind of emotional choicefulness, at a level of mastery unimaginable at the previous two stages.
At the first stage, emotion is a problem to be contained.
At the second stage, emotion is a natural force to be honored and freed, a wild and wonderful ride, rather chaotic, but sacred in its fullness.
At the third stage, emotion becomes a powerful indicator of the direction of one’s focus and attention; not a random force of nature at all but rather a result of our own creation, either through intention or by default.
I call this third stage Emotional Discretion.
At the emotional discretion stage you are far beyond the fear or mistrust of emotion that made the emotional repression of the past seem necessary. You have befriended emotion and have developed enough emotional sensitivity to know how you feel in any given moment. You are able to express a full range of emotion, demonstrating a sophisticated emotional fluency and vocabulary.
But now you want to bring intention to your emotional experience. You have preferences, rather strong preferences, about how you want to feel. Your emotional sensitivity has created a desire in you to feel good. You know that you deserve to feel good. And you believe that you are capable of creating a good feeling emotional experience for yourself from the inside out.
These are the qualities that define the emotional discretion stage, and all three must be present in order to inhabit this stage productively. You must have a clear connection to your desire to feel good. You must believe that you deserve to feel good. And you must have at least some belief in your ability to create a good feeling emotional state for yourself from the inside out, regardless of past history, current events or other people.
The gentle art of emotional mastery that I teach is synonymous with the developmental stage of emotional discretion. It is available to those people who are ready to move beyond the emotional repression stage and the emotional expression stage.
I’ve created this developmental model, and this part of the course, to help you conceive of an emotional life journey that is purposeful and satisfying, and to provide a somewhat linear map that can appeal to your logic.
Each of the three stages that I describe – Emotional Repression, Emotional Expression, Emotional Discretion – imply their own kind of perspective on the nature of emotion, and even more broadly their own kind of worldview, meaning-making, and perspective on life.
Each one takes a different view on what emotions are and how they should be navigated.
If you ask someone at the emotional repression stage about the gentle art of emotional mastery, they will probably be confused by the “gentle” part. They might believe they are practicing emotional mastery by controlling their emotions, but there is nothing gentle about this kind of control, and as we can see at later stages of development, nothing truly masterful either.
If you ask someone firmly rooted in the emotional expression stage about the gentle art of emotional mastery, they will probably imagine this as an attempt at emotional domination or control, some regressive version of the emotional repression that they have happily grown beyond and rejected.
It is only from the perspective of the third stage of emotional development that the gentle art of emotional mastery becomes conceivable.
At this third stage, emotion is understood not as something to be either guarded against or indiscriminately embraced and expressed. It is understood to simply be an indication of how we are using our attention, our focus. When we feel good, it is a result of how we are shaping our perception. When we feel other-than-good, it is a result of how we are shaping our perception.
To thrive in the third stage of emotional development we must be willing to simultaneously feel ourselves as creators of our own life experience, and also to never, ever use this knowledge against ourselves. This is a bit tricky at first.
If I am creating my emotional experience, and my emotional experience sucks at the moment, then it must be my own fault, right?
In the moment that this thought arises, and it might arise often when you are in the process of transitioning from stage two to stage three, one of the most important choices you face in this life is presented to you, by you.
At the very beginning of this course I said that that if you do nothing but be really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always you will be on your way to emotional mastery.
This quality of your relationship between you and you is both the beginning, the pre-requisite, the ground on which the gentle art of emotional mastery is built, and it is also the outcome of the gentle art of emotional mastery, the evidence of your success.
In the precise moment that you become absolute in your certainty that you deserve your own gentleness always, in the precise moment that you become absolute in your clarity that it’s possible, and desirable, to be really, really nice to yourself no matter what, you have succeeded in the gentle art of emotional mastery.
It is, in that moment, accomplished. It is instantaneous. But it is not complete, because you are not complete, never complete. You are a process in motion, constantly evolving, the living face of an ever-expanding universe, always discovering new desires and new satisfactions.
Being really, really nice to yourself and gentle with yourself always takes on new meaning in every moment that you are paying attention to how you feel and how you want to feel next. It is an adventure with no end, an eternal discovery.
I hope you will reflect on this three stage model of emotional development and let it guide you toward the emotional discretion and mastery that is possible for you if you want it.
Are you enjoying this course? Do you know other people who might benefit from it? Please consider sending the link to the course page for this course to three people who might benefit. You can find the link at the bottom of this page, or on my website. www.justiceschanfarber.com
This concludes module six. Module seven is a nice concise recap, a celebration of the journey so far, and the conclusion of this course. Now is a good time to do one of the previous four guided embodiment exercises. If you’re not sure which one, start with the first and work through all four, then repeat.
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