brutinator t1_iz9yzd8 wrote on December 7, 2022 at 3:57 PM

Reply to comment by Enfants in Philosopher José Antonio Marina: 'The fact that happiness has become fashionable is catastrophic' by FDuquesne

So not philosophy, but in therapy you are taught to:

Recognize your emotion and label it.
Validate and feel your emotion.
Then formulate how you act or react.

Using anger, its important to recognize that thats a "secondary" emotion, as in its not truly the emotion you are feeling and is merely the way you are responding to said emotion. Anger usually stems from places like fear, shame, stress, and being hurt. In your example, you arent angry that someone honked at you. You are startled by the sudden stimuli (a fear response), you are feeling stimulus overload after avoiding a potentially dangerous situation (fear), you are ashamed that you did something thatd cause someone to honk at you (shame).

So to follow the steps:

You get angry at being honked at, because you swerved into another lane after the car in front of you abruptly stopped.
You recognize, examine, and label it the true emotion you are feeling.
You validate that feeling and feel it. Its important in this step to avoid imperitives like 'should' and 'need'. Don't focus on next steps to lessons to take away, just the moment you are in. So if you avoided a potentially dangerous situation and someone honked at you, you would say to yourself "They are reacting to the method I chose to protect myself. I am safe now. My adrenaline is pumping right now and my heart is racing, but I am currently safe."
Now you can formulate your response to being honked at, which would likely be ignoring it and working on clearing your stress, whule continuing to your destination.

Notice that this doesnt suppress or subdue your emotions. Outwardly, it makes you less reactive and volatile, but at no point are you saying "I shouldnt feel this, I am not allowed to be angry, Im not upset at all and everything is hunky dory". You are simply taking the next step after having an emotional response and addressing it. If anything, not addressing the true emotion and simply saying "Im angry" is as much suppression as saying "Im not upset" and not addressing the root emotion.

I dont think that would make you have no personality or be okay with everything.

I would also challenge you to examine why you feel that someone choosing to not react with anger, fear, sadness, etc. and instead processing their emotions and working through them would make someone less of a person, or a less interesting one, it why someone being reactive to their negative emotions make them more interesting and "more" of a person.

To use a topical example, look at how many people are experiencing lonliness, a sense of nowhere to belong, and instead of examining it are saying "Im angry" and allowing that to blind them and get wrapped up in the incel movement, terrorist (domestic or otherwise)pipelines, or otherwise hateful ideologies. (NOTE: Not trying to say that these people are intetesting and therefore what you are talking about.) Does getting angry and lashing out at a demographic of strangers really address that sense of lonliness? If you took an incel and gave them a "perfect" woman by their definition, would that really resolve the underlying state they are in and reacting to?

Part of why the "monkeys paw" is such a powerful trope is because rarely what we think we want is truly what we want, its just merely a reaction to something triggering our fright, flight, or freeze response.

Enfants t1_iza7189 wrote on December 7, 2022 at 4:51 PM

I think what you are talking about is tangential to what I am saying.

I dont have anything against therapy, if your natural reactions are indeed causing you issues then as I said, one has to try to control their feelings in order to improve, but what I am saying is that there is no need to achieve being a perfectly virtuous being.

In the context of stocist philosophy, the ultimate goal is to achieve a peace and calm through all misfortune by recognizing that such events are a natural part of life, typically outside our control. Say if one experienced an earthquake that led to a loss of loved ones and ruined their fortune, the ultimate stoic response would be to say "This was a natural event I could not do anything about. There is nothing to feel angry or spiteful about".

Or if you were wronged, youd try to understand that the person who wronged you is a human being whose acting out of their biological impulses, and instead of being angry youd try to be understanding and and subdue your natural distateful resctions.

While this a completely logical course, my argument is that the practice of constantly trying to subdue such feelings, in my experience, is in itself harmful.

I am arguing that such a practice goes against your natural will as a human being. That it isnt necessarily good to always be logical about things and it is good at times to let out your natural reactions of being fearful, angry, spiteful, hateful.

I find being trying to be logical about everything to be a surpressment of myself as a human being. I took this view after reading Nietzche.

I no longer feel need to be ok with everything and everyone. There are things and people I hate and I feel much more at peace with myself expressing that.

To respond to your, why do I think it makes for someone being uninteresting. Uninteresting, isnt the right word, its more like you feel a sense of dullness. But Imagine that we all achieved this perfect state of being, everyone would be the same person with no defining personal characteristics.

brutinator t1_izavpm7 wrote on December 7, 2022 at 7:32 PM

I dont feel like what you are describing is stoicism though.

> Or if you were wronged, youd try to understand that the person who wronged you is a human being whose acting out of their biological impulses, and instead of being angry youd try to be understanding and and subdue your natural distateful resctions.

As we covered, "Anger" isnt a primary emotion, its a phsyiological response. You process the underlying emotion you feel (like Anxiety, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Envy, Jealousy, Sadness, and Contentment), which then informs you of the action to take.

That doesnt mean you need to neccesarily forgive them or pretend everything is fine and provide them no consequences for their action. If your mother constantly makes racist remarks towards your partner, a stoic wouldnt say to just "let it slide because its not a big deal". Someone you care about is being hurt, and while its a complex situation, the right answer isnt not address it. But at the same time, are you going to accomplish anything by shouting over your mother? Would it bot be better to address WHY you are angry (Guilt for subjecting your partner to the experience, Shame that your mother is so hateful, Fear because you need to stand up to an authority figure, etc.) and then respond to those emotions, like "Mother, I won't be spending the holidays with you until you can accept Jill and apologize to her. I am ashamed that someone I care so much about is being so hateful to someone else I care for deeply, and I will not subject her to this treatment. Jill, I apologize, I did not realize that my mother could be so hateful. I will not ask this of you again until she has been able to examine her feelings."

Nothing in that is not stoicism. You are establishing a boundry and you are communicating how you feel. All without resorting to fight or flight reactions. Thats not harmful at all, and is healthier than just not trying to understand why you are angry at all. In that case its pretty obvious, but what about when someone bumps i to you and you lash out at them. Was that simply "not suppressing your emotions", or was that taking them out on someone who didnt deserve that response?

thegooddoctorben t1_izczfw2 wrote on December 8, 2022 at 4:45 AM

>Anger" isnt a primary emotion,

Just to make clear, anger can be and often is a primary emotion. If someone is rude to you or treats you unfairly or harmfully, anger is a primary (and justifiable, within bounds) emotional response.

It's sometimes a secondary emotion, too, if it arises because you don't know how to handle a different primary emotion, as you point out.

brutinator t1_izd32l1 wrote on December 8, 2022 at 5:20 AM

Primary and secondary isnt a value judgement, and Im not saying anger is not a justifiable emotion. But anytime you are angry, youre not REALLY angry, an emotion is triggering your fight, flight, or freeze response If someone is rude to you, the primary emotion you are likely feeling is shame, if someone is treating you unfairy it might be envy or jealousy, if someone is harming you then its fear. Anger exists to keep you safe, it just unfortunately loses a lot of effectiveness in modern society.

Again, its not a value judgement. Theres nothing wrong with, say, feeling envious of someone who isnt being bullied like you, who is innocent and unconnected to your current situation. It becomes wrong when you lash out at them.

thegooddoctorben t1_izcz200 wrote on December 8, 2022 at 4:41 AM

>While this a completely logical course, my argument is that the practice of constantly trying to subdue such feelings, in my experience, is in itself harmful.

It's not about "subduing" or "controlling" emotion. It's about accepting them. In other words, you don't stop your feelings - you let them run their course. BUT you grow your awareness of them so that your feelings don't immediately result in bad choices and harmful behavior. That's what stoics meant when they talk about the passions ruling you. It's not that the passions themselves (the feeling of them) rules you, it's that you let them dictate your behavior.

Instead of reacting to your feeling of anger by physically attacking something or someone, you pause and say to yourself "wow, I'm truly angry" and focus on processing that emotion. You acknowledge and analyze your feelings. The more you practice this, the more you're capable of riding the emotional roller coaster of life without jumping off or being paralyzed by fear.