Philosophers' Corner - Emotion

Question: Sometimes I find myself having a hard time controlling my emotions. I find myself getting angry when dealing with my parents or co-workers. I find that when I drink my emotions become aggressive. I find myself getting very close to road rage when driving and it takes everything I have to calm myself down. Sometimes I feel so out of control and helpless to my feelings. Is there any way of shutting off these out of control emotions I have?

It’s not about turning your emotions off but about understanding them. Emotions rule most of our lives and it is a battle that we face everyday. Emotions can give us strength to either get through something difficult or be destructive both to others and ourselves. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Be careful of the demons you cast away, they may be the best things about you.” Emotions are our teachers; they seem like demons to us because we don’t understand them. This lack of understanding sometimes leads to emotional breakdown. We should never think of conquering them since they are a part of us and cannot be conquered. However, through understanding them, when they surface, we can channel them appropriately.

Lets compare our emotions to the scales of a dragon where each scale represents a different emotion and the dragon is your own ego or a part of you that makes you a slave to your own emotions. Most of us try to slay this dragon and suppress it, but we cannot because it is part of who we are. Time and time again we might think we have defeated it but it surfaces in different ways at different times. As the scales do not exist separately from the dragon, but move together as one unit, so emotions comprise who we are. Emotions move with us through life; we should not treat them as objects that we can discard or control. We cannot get rid of them but have to "ride life" with them just as the scales "ride" on the dragon. This awareness shall allow a better understanding of their nature. If you are upset with someone then it doesn’t mean that you don’t react back or defend yourself if they are attacking you. It means that when you feel the emotions such as fear and anger rising during a confrontation, by understanding them and not reacting to them, you see more options with your reaction to the situation. So if someone is provoking you intentionally and is looking to get you angry, then by simply understanding what the other person is doing and understanding that anger rising to surface, you have already defeated the other person by truly not reacting based on understanding. If you don’t react in this kind of situation due to fear of consequences and suppress your anger without understanding it, that suppressed anger will eventually find its way to the surface via an alternate channel: through meditation, practicing kung fu, going crazy after drinking too much, or even through an emotional breakdown or depression. Since we can’t escape our emotions, they always seem to overwhelm and follow us, looming until we can’t tolerate it anymore. This leads to a series of mini-emotional insults that others may not notice until it leads to a major emotional release.

During a mini-emotional breakdown, counseling will have to come from your emotional teachers (i.e., your understanding of your emotions) since they occur in the privacy of our minds. However, if it gets to a point of major emotional breakdown, then you will have to get help from a professional through counseling and/or medication. It is interesting to note that it has been proven scientifically that counseling with medications significantly improves psychologically disorders like depression compared to medications alone. Therefore, it is critical to cultivate some model of self-communication through meditation, martial arts, or something as simple as keeping a personal diary. Trying to suppress or lock up the dragon can affect and afflict others or make you depressed about your life. Whether it is chemical, environmental, biological, or genetically predisposed, our emotions are our teachers and we can learn a lot about ourselves from them. When we feel overwhelmed and feel like "here it comes again", this is a trigger point where the dragon shows its head; this moment serves as an opportunity to turn it into something positive. It is important to understand what triggers your actions.

In martial arts, when someone is being grabbed or choked they react by trying to escape or by grabbing the hand that is choking them. This is counter-productive to defeating the opponent. The proper technique involves paying attention to what's free, then executing as appropriate. As with a choke-hold or grab, pay attention to what’s free when dealing with emotional issues that seem constricting or suffocating, rather than just focusing on the emotions themselves that are suffocating you. Determine what "you have free" and prepare a strategy to free yourself from your emotional chokehold. It may seem like you can’t escape it; the more you fight it the tighter it constricts. As a means of escape, we employ drugs, exercise, sleep, etc., but that feeling always comes back. Therefore, stop fighting and understand.

When the dragon rears its head, we feel overwhelmed and realize that is where the chokehold is coming from, that our ego has been insulted. Then before without understanding why, an emotional flurry befalls us. Instead of fighting the dragon, find a way to ride it, be one with it. Each emotion represents a different symbol of our desires, needs, or wants and by understanding them we don’t get disappointed by the out come of our situation. Consider the example of a warrior’s meditation, living in each moment and recognizing what’s happening as its happening. We all need to recognize the warrior within ourselves. The warrior understands that he/she must be prepared for combat, emotional or physical, at anytime. We may be having a great day and suddenly something goes wrong, we need to understand that its part of suffering we call life and face it with the attitude of a scholar warrior.

The internal warrior recognizes the combat of emotions that can lead to destructive behavior. The simplicity of the warrior is not getting sucked into the wants of the mind but to see the options available by going back to the self. Food, shelter, and clothing to sustain health are the things that we all truly need. The simplicity of who and what we are is what is important. Sometimes we are caught off guard and that’s when the emotions rise and that’s the trigger point, it comes out of nowhere but has the same melody and sound. Because many people don’t recognize their emotions when they surface and don’t understand where they are coming from, this leads to the Darth Vader complex, where the very thing you hate is what you become. Like a child who is sexually abused or grows up with an alcoholic father ends up abusing others or becomes an alcoholic, the very thing he hates. Its one thing to understand and another to control. The warrior has to know when to take action and this is the first step to escaping a hold. See where you are coming from and see the dragon as your partner. You always have a place to go by appreciating where you are now and move away from the hold by seeing more options.

In mythology, we see Jesus Christ turning the other cheek when he was slapped. The difference between an average person and someone like Jesus or Buddha is that there was no emotional content and no temptation to hit back. They were not present emotionally, so they were not tempted to hit back or give into that emotion. We are not trying to be like Jesus or Buddha but build our own mythology and explore our own individual path by creating a model that works for us. They had full understanding of what the scales of their dragon symbolically represented and hence possessed a better understanding of their emotions. By building on this model, we can establish one of our own, allowing us to react to our emotions by first paying attention to the cause of that emotion, and then proceeding in a strategic manner that allows us to express that emotion with specific intent.