For many of us, tremendous effort goes into “controlling” our emotions, managing feelings, and striving for a happier state of being. Although theorists differ slightly as to exactly what are the basic emotions, in the end they tend to be categorized into good emotions and feelings (happiness, joy) and bad (fear, sadness, anger, disgust) with the goal of increasing the “good” and decreasing or eliminating the “bad” in our lives. Those emotions and feelings designated as bad are uncomfortable, leaving us the urge to shed or quash them as soon as possible, and it’s this desire that leads a lot of people to seek counseling in order to be “fixed.”
The problem with trying to “control” emotions is that we really cannot; in fact, trying (and failing) only exacerbates them and their negative effects.
Consider anger, the topic of our last column (“Our Anger Pandemic”) and the companion piece to this one. Definitely considered by many a “bad” emotion when we default to focusing on its often destructive nature, we forget its powerful drive to action, as we’ve previously described:
Channeled properly, anger can motivate us to call attention to and confront unfairness, or to demand more from those who are supposed to serve us. It can motivate us to examine ourselves and take corrective action where needed, or to seek forgiveness and strive to be better to others.
Righteous anger has driven much of our history. The United States was born of angry patriots asserting for a new type of nation, and a new type of government. Angry abolitionists refused to accept the status quo of the early nineteenth century and insisted on the freedom of all men, regardless of their skin color. An angry world mobilized to confront the rise and threat of fascism in the mid-twentieth century. Controlled anger demanded, and won, sweeping change in Civil Rights law throughout the fifties and sixties. Righteous anger, skillfully wielded, is a potent force.
In order to channel the anger, however, we first have to accept its reality and presence, and move through it to function. This acceptance and movement, and the psychological flexibility it both requires and promotes, happens to be a critical component of good mental health.
Fighting emotions only leads to increased frustration and anxiety
The messages we send ourselves about these so-called “bad” emotions and feelings, usually mirroring the parental or social messaging that to feel certain ways means we are weak, unappreciative, irrational, etc…, illegitimize honest reactions to life’s sometimes painful, frustrating, and unfair circumstances. Worse, they are not only ineffective at stopping “bad” emotions, they exacerbate and extend them without resolution while steadily whittling away at our self-regard for our inability to control how we feel.
Imagine being raised by parents who not only voiced the message that being angry is “bad”, or that people who feel and show anger lack self-control and respectability. Expressions or displays of anger were discouraged, judged, or even punished. Flash forward into adulthood and the world of complicated relationships, work stress, mortgages and auto loans, congested roads at every turn, family stress, and a toxic political culture, among many other day-to-day pressures, and the occasional flashes of anger and frustration are inevitable.
As are the disapproving voices of the past lodged in the recesses of your memory, reminding you that “anger is BAD!”
So with a flash of shame you tamp the anger down, working hard to convince yourself to not feel the way you do or promising yourself you’ll not let it happen again, and strive to sin no more. But you will, because, you know… life… and you repeat the whole process again and again, growing ever more frustrated (a form of anger) with yourself and your embarrassing “weakness.”
The same thing happens with anxiety or sadness, with the same result. Socialized and ingrained messages tell us we shouldn’t feel this way, and we need to get control over our emotions and feelings, and if we don’t we are failures. But each failure over our stress leads to anticipatory stress over the next time we will feel this way, and efforts to talk ourselves out of sadness or depression only make us more depressed. The answer – and one more and more professionals in the mental health field are recognizing as the emerging gold standard of care – is based in the tenets a therapeutic framework known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
Rather than working toward getting rid of unpleasant or uncomfortable feelings, what most people hope for without any reasonable expectation of success, as discomfort is an inevitable part of life and, the focus is on learning to be open to the discomfort, without either overreaction or avoidance. This openness reduces the tendency to either “awfulize” a situation or deflect from dealing with it but, better, it forces us to deal with and learn from the discomfort. And what do we learn?: That we can survive anger, anxiety, sadness, or any other uncomfortable emotion/feeling; natural techniques and cognitive processes that help us cope in the moment; that sadness isn’t final, anxiety won’t kill us, and anger is just something we experience and not who or what we are. It gives us permission to feel, experience, and react to our emotions without judgment.
Law enforcement officers work in an environment rich with opportunity for strong and frequently painful or uncomfortable emotions, and work really hard at divorcing their day-to-day lives from them. There is a kind of perverse pride among cops at staying separate from or above their emotions, but it doesn’t work. Over time, how many officers experience anger, stress, frustration, sadness, or any other strong and sometimes distressing emotions, and are affected negatively by them? How about you? As much as cops might like to believe and claim they can put their feelings in a box, the walls are porous and old messages about them start playing in the recesses of their memories repeating lies about what it means to feel them.
In our next article we will discuss the 6 Core Principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy leading to “flow” and increased psychological flexibility. with special attention to how they relate to law enforcement. Until then, Stay Safe!
