Everyone is challenged by the intensity, frequency, and distortedness of their emotion. Some people are more challenged than others. But no matter how problematic it is, emotion is a normal part of being a person.
Somewhere in the last few decades, intense emotionality has gone from being a naturally difficult part of you to an unfortunate pathology in you. If you have a lot of emotion, even if itâs infrequent, you are deemed a disordered person in need of repair. Your exaggerated way of beingâhow you areâis rarely considered a basic function of your emotion. Instead, it is thought of as an illness with a designated diagnosis, a medical condition causing you to be feeling, thinking, and behaving in ways that are either complicated and neurodivergent or dysfunctional, imbalanced, and mentally ill.
You donât need to be a clinical psychologist to notice how many people identify as psychiatrically disordered or disabled. Nor do you need to practice in a mental health facility to witness how many people get labelled with âsicknessesâ of the mind. But maybe you need to engage in intensive psychotherapy with hundreds of highly emotional people a year, as I do, to know that the âmental illnessâ out there is not about illness at all.
Too many people see themselves as having mental disorders when what they have is emotion, and in some cases, a great deal of it. When more than half the room has a psychiatric diagnosis of âabnormal psychologyâ then abnormality is not the problem. Intuitively and statistically, the norm cannot be abnormal. Yet somehow it is. This current ârealityâ is a gross overestimation of diagnostic assessment and veracity, and a collective mischaracterization of what it is to be emotionally normalâand what it is to be emotional altogether.
Mental health awareness is a movement that has everyone seeking treatment and support for their âmood disordersâ and âpersonality disordersâ and âneurodivergencyâ, but this system isnât leading to wellnessâitâs impeding it. Despite multiple and conflicting diagnoses, years of therapy, mountains of meds, and accommodations for all matters of operations, people are still experiencing intense emotional dysregulation and living messy lives, all while having to manage the medical verdict that theyâre fundamentally not ok.
Emotion is a challenge to treat because itâs not something that can be treatedâie. itâs not for treating. Essentially, medicalizing emotion is not the solution, because sickness is not the problem.
Youâre not emotional because youâre sick, and youâre not sick because youâre emotional. But emotionality gets characterized this way by MDs, by PhDs, by teachers, by parents, by partners, by children, by everyone. A rich, firmly established culture of mental illness identification has made it something that you and everyone can have âand seemingly does.
Emotion doesnât need diagnosis. It doesnât need medication. It doesnât need special treatment. It needs to be understood.
***
It used to be that when you had an âemotional problemâ, you would go see friend, a family member, a counsellor, maybe a religious figure. Now when you have strong feelings, you go to the doctor. A doctor has a job: to remedy that which ails you. If you go to a doctor with a problem, their job is to address the problem with a solution. Since psychiatry is the branch of medicine that manages the mindâand the thoughts and behaviours that emanate from itâits mandate is to address psychological issues with the same intervention approach as any other: first, to identify the âirregularityâ and then, hopefully, to provide a way to solve it, heal it, and fix it. Defining what is psychiatrically abnormal is not measurable with blood tests and CT scans. It needs consensus and group decision. Psychiatric diagnoses are not objectively identifiable entities, they are concepts, ideas and classifications made by small committees of people who believe they know.
Over the last half century, the ever-inflating process of organizing illnesses of the mind has gone from being a preoccupation of psychiatrists searching for solutions for the suffering masses to a classification system used by everyday people to understand themselves. With its something-for-everyone assortment of characteristics, the DSM has become an exciting encyclopedia of self discovery used by everyone who wants to âreally understandâ themselves. Psychiatric verdicts are not just the property of those who deliver them. They reach far past medical walls, into the offices of psychologists, therapists, counsellors, social workers and the rooms of teachers, parents, aunts, friends, and neighbours. They are for everyone, available to everyone and almost universally used to define, characterize, and diagnose everyoneâs periodic and patterned moods.
This is possible because the DSMâs diagnostic criteria is very relatable. The lists of required emotional provisions are everyday human patterns that everyone engages at least sometimes. So much so, for someone suffering with a lot of emotion, a psychiatric diagnosis is not just available, itâs alluring, and often, extremely validating. At last, something official to account for your disturbing ways, to explain why you feel what you feel, why you think how you think, why you do what you do. A self-description with a verifiability so seemingly solid you can immerse your identity in it without question, join the many groups and chats about it, all while formally succumbing to the newly permissible condition of being you.
When you are given the endorsement of âillnessâ or âdivergencyâ to understand your lifelong emotional state, it does something beyond medically defining you: it finally explains your emotional reactivity. Being identified as a disordered person for having emotional behaviour signals that it makes sense for you to feel the way you feel and act the way you do, but not because of perceived needs and reactivities, but because of abnormal, pathological issues. It makes sense that youâre very emotionalâof course, it does, youâre diagnostically ill. All that emotion? You donât have it for natural reasons. You have it because youâre sick or different, thatâs why.
With this comes some degree of triumph. Finally, emotional suffering is receiving the authorized consideration it deserves. Finally, the experiences of the mentally unwell and unique are being legitimately acknowledged without judgement nor humiliation. Finally, messed up emotion has a way of being classified, clarified, and managed. No longer are you alone with your suffering nor are you criticized for having it. After years and years of not being supported for your extreme, âinappropriateâ and inopportune emotion and behaviour, now, with this diagnosis from this credible and helpful professional, you finally have a right to feel the way you feel. Learning that your emotion is a disorder that happens to you, removes the fallacy of blame for being âbadâ or âweirdâ or âmessed upâ or âneedyâ. Maybe, for the first time in your life, you get the message that itâs not your fault that you feel the way you feel and act the way you do, that you have a disease, and itâs the cause of it.
The initial reaction to having your emotionality validated this way is to ease off it. Without the need to defend yourself, you feel relief. You feel ok, at least temporarily. But soon after this form of validation is provided, you will invariably experience an increase of negative emotion due to the specific paradoxical predicament of attaining relief from being told that, well, youâre sick. Getting informed that you have a âdisorder of the emotionâ is not like being told you have a disorder of the pancreas or the liver. Your emotion affects your thinking, your feeling, your talking, your being. If your emotion is disordered, it might as well be you thatâs disordered.
The pathologizing of emotion is an insidious process that begins with a lot of emotion and, ultimately, ends with more. Emotion is not a disorder, but once you invest in the idea that your feelings and your psychology are a function of an illnessânot to mention the mental health system that supports it as suchâyou are hard pressed to let go of it. Losing your mental disorder means losing the frame that has upheld you with âdiagnostic veracityâ. It means losing the support of those who have finally acknowledged you now that youâre âlegitâ. It means losing the sick and special identity it has provided. To adopt an understanding of emotion that emphasizes normalcy removes all the backing that came with being able to address it in a way that people listen: as a medical problem.
For all the positivity that comes with destigmatization and an overall rise of consciousness surrounding maladaptive emotion and debilitating trauma, there is an emerging wariness: mental health recognition is resulting in a whole lot of awareness, but not a whole lot of wellness.
***
Animal Theory of Emotion was developed over the course of a decade, while working with more than a thousand patients diagnosed with âmental disordersââgroups of them, together, seeking treatment for illnesses that most of them embraced for the very reason they âhadâ them: the need for support, validation, reassurance, and care. The irony was sobering, and it inspired a powerful motivation to rid people of their sick identities by insisting not only that they were not disordered and divergent, but that no one was, with regards to emotion. That everyone has emotion, that emotion is an evolutionary condition, not a medical one, and too much emotionâsufferingâis the human condition, a part of being a person that we all must manage in varying degrees. That everyone is subject to emotion because thatâs what it is to be a person in need of surviving.
Animal Theory of Emotion is the principle that when youâre emotional, youâre not sick, messed up, broken, crazyâyouâre just overprotecting yourself out of instinct: youâre on animal.
Emotion is not a disorder, it is a distortion: an amplified mental mistake that occurs when your evolved mind is hijacked by your primal impulses and has you thinking you need to make a survival move, even though you donât. When you have anger, you are just fighting. When you have shame, you are just fleeing. When you have disgust, you are just flinching. When you are depressed, you are just playing dead. When you experience fear, you are just freezing. Every negative emotion in your mind maps onto a basic animal move that your ancestors needed for survival in the wild but have no use for you as a rational creature in a civilized world.
Emotion is not a complex thought pattern, it is simply feel-thoughtâthought had while feeling the urge to surviveâthat is psychologically produced because of advanced cerebral ability, not survival necessity. You have emotion as a result of being an animal that intellectually advanced to the point of not regularly needing to use instincts. Your mind evolved for civilized living, not do-or-die reactivity, and it canât manage the raw system of your basic animal. Itâs like you have an iOs1 hooked up to an iOs17: it just canât compute. Your animalâs energetic cues are not needed, but they sound off anyway, and when they do, your intellect is stuck managing them. It spins them and distorts them and, in an effort to make sure youâre fit for survival on abstract levels, insists on engaging your animal energy. The result is an overly energized thought process, circuitous and relentless, known as obsession, rumination, and intrusive thought. The more your mind engages your animal, the more your body prepares for survival, with energy meant for making moves, energy that you feel as feelings, revving up for survival with blood pumping, arteries constricting, gastric juices circulating, etc. This energy drives your thinking, convincing you that you need to make a move for survival. But when thereâs no actual danger, thereâs just nothing urgent to do: if there was a true life-or-death emergency, you wouldnât be thinking at allâjust acting.
Everyone is on animal sometimes, but if you have intense and frequent emotion, itâs not because there is something neurologically or chemically disordered about you, itâs because you never received the developmental message that you didnât need protection and that, in fact, you are ok, and continue to protect yourself, needlessly, just in case. Emotion is not something you have as a trait, like height or eye colour or intelligence. It is not modelled or learned from your environment. And it is most certainly not a chemical aberration that makes you sick.
Emotion is your inner engine that activates for your survival. It is a survival process, not a personal, genetic, or medical condition. Classifying emotions and behavioursâand the personality that stems from themâas disorders is essentially defining surviving as sickness.
You donât skip work because youâre lazy, you skip work because, in your survival state, you think you need to avoid. You donât punch the wall because youâre crazy, you punch the wall because, in your survival state, you think you need to attack. You donât spy on your ex-boyfriend for hours of your day because you have a personality disorder, you do it because in your survival state, you think you need to check. You donât smoke a gram of weed every day because youâre an addict, you do it because, in your survival state, you think you need to change the thinking patterns of sadness. You donât block-out sound with noise-cancelling headphones because youâre autistic, you do it because, in your survival state, you think you need you need to shut down. You do not âhaveâ ADHD. You do not âhaveâ OCD. You not âhaveâ PTSD. You donât have it because no one has it, and no one has it because it is not something to have. You become aggressive, avoidant, disgusted, depressed, and anxious out a perceived animal need to protect yourself.
Animal Theory is the idea that no matter how intense and frequent your emotions and the reactive behaviours are, they are never sicknesses, impairments or even character flaws, nor are they important aspects of the self that require attention and examinationâthey are simply mental mistakes that need to be disengaged and disregarded.
Challenging the harmful and unproven paradigm of mental disorder, Animal Theory offers a normal, primal explanation of what it is to have excessive feelings and, ultimately, what it is to be emotional at all. Animal Theory is about shedding your animal and recognizing that no matter how legitimate your emotional urges seem, they are always exaggerated and misrepresentative.
So long as youâre not actually in danger, youâre fundamentally ok and wonât benefit from your survival energy. You are never better on animal and will be far more effective navigating your life with calm reason than with raw instinct. The best thing to do when youâre on animal, is to get off animal.
Emotions donât need to be indulged, investigated, or diagnosedâthey just need to be tamed. When you appreciate the distorted nature of emotion, you can grasp the futility of it, and successfully work to reduce it. Ultimately, managing your mental health is an existential undertaking that requires embracing the primitivity of being a person and accepting that, despite the evolutionary discrepancy between you and other living creatures on a cerebral level, you are still just an animal trying to survive, but for the most part, donât need to be.
Yes! Finally!
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My sanity/insanity has been completely determined by the projections of professionals who decide what they are looking for and of course find just that, because of course they couldn’t find anything else because they’re not looking for it. In other words, if the diagnostician looks for my insanity and treats me as if I’m insane, or like a child (I’m still pretty sure after all these years I’m not one), they invariably confirm for themself that they should treat me like a child, e.g., lie to me, manipulate me, try to trick me, all for my own good, and I get confused and in their eyes that’s proof of my mental illness, which, they’re right, it is now. It’s infuriating and it–ironically–drives me crazy. Once in a while someone will wonder if maybe I’m not insane, and when they treat me like that they find that they are right! In that sense, I find this piece very validating.
That being said, I’m not ready to go as far as the Dr. in reducing human emotions to unnecessary remnants of our primitive animal nature. We should be anxious for our survival as a species, and we should really be anxious about the accelerated process of dehumanization that we are all being subjected to, one which pathologizes so much deviation as “deviant” without considering that maybe these ways of being in the world really actually do tell us something about our world, and are therefore needed, vital, healthy: prophetic. We need to acknowledge the validity and value of our emotions as to integrate them and transcend ourselves that way, not by jettisoning them.
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I donât see a big difference in this kind of reasoning. Mistake means something is wrong and we need to make it right. Now we are going to say someone is more like an animal and the other is more human – meaning: being more like animal is worse than being a human. To give an example: my depressive and anxious reactions are not only totally logical for me, but mostly very adequate (not exaggerated). Civilized world? What does it mean?
We do not yet have research that tells us how often people and animals kill out of jealousy or envy. But even if people do it less often in the literal sense, we can kill ourselves psychologically: we slander ourselves, we tell lies about ourselves – can you measure which type of harm is more severe?
We live in a human world where there are thousands of different approaches to different political and social topics, different beliefs about how to organize life on earth, or what happens after death, many people believe that they have the only right answers to how to manage our lives and we call each other idiots if someone has a different view on a certain topic, e.g. economic management of a given country, homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia. In our reality there is a lot of room for different opinions, pluralism and relativism. Unfortunately, this results in endless dissonances, quarrels and clashes. How can you not experience fear, depression and despair in such a “civilized” reality? We have been regularly fighting life-and-death wars with each other for thousands of years in our civilized world. How to stay calm in such a reality? How can we want to send new lives to such a reality?
No, these are not mistakes or errors either, unless we call sending new beings to this dangerous, unpredictable, painful physics of reality a mistake.
I don’t believe at all that being a human is better than being an animal. I would love for this to be the case, but history tells us otherwise. Yes we can build planes and even fly into space, that is wonderful. But we can also drop atomic bombs on each other and create elaborate lies to destroy other people.
Vegetarianism, veganism? Plants are also living organisms, the survival of each of us is built on being a killer. Such philosophical reflections can really lead to resignation.
Of course, we have to somehow manage our human jungle, but it is still a jungle, civilized in some sense, but the physics of reality is constant. And above all, the reality, the physics itself is the crazy one. I will never send any new being into this world.
For a long time, I truly believed that the end of World War II was the end of our human “animal” stage. Since the war in Ukraine and in Gaza, I know that these were my illusions and dreams of a child. How, having knowledge about the nature of reality, chemistry, animals or people, do we decide to send children to experience this crazy life-death journey?
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I think you make some excellent points here. But I don’t like what seems to be a wholesale dismissal of emotions as archaic leftovers from our animal existence. Emotions give us information about what is happening. Yes, we need to be able to handle our emotions without flipping out constantly, but it can be very helpful to investigate them, especially if they seem to have patterns. Because that can help figure out the best ways to handle them. I don’t believe it’s helpful or healthy to view our emotions as distorted and futile and reductive: without our emotions, we’d have little motivation to care for anything at all.
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DSM disorders “are for everyone, available to everyone and almost universally used to define, characterize, and diagnose everyoneâs periodic and patterned moods.
“This is possible because the DSMâs diagnostic criteria is very relatable” [but NOT remotely scientifically reliable or valid].
https://psychrights.org/2013/130429NIMHTransformingDiagnosis.htm
“The lists of required emotional provisions are everyday human patterns that everyone engages at least sometimes. So much so, for someone suffering with a lot of emotion, a psychiatric diagnosis is not just available, itâs alluring, and often, extremely validating.”
But NOT for those of us, who had all the legitimate distress, caused by 9/11/2001, fraudulently blamed on an unprovable “chemical imbalance,” in my brain alone … by a psychologist.
And also NOT for those of us who were DSM defamed, to cover up the sexual assault of our beloved child … because the scientifically “invalid” DSM deluded psychologists “partnered” with the mainstream, paternalistic, systemic child abuse covering up religions, long ago.
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/01/23/18820633.php?fbclid=IwAR2-cgZPcEvbz7yFqMuUwneIuaqGleGiOzackY4N2sPeVXolwmEga5iKxdo
https://books.google.com/books?id=xI01AlxH1uAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=
onepage&q&f=false
“the DSM has become an exciting encyclopedia of self discovery used by everyone who wants to ‘really understand’ themselves.”
No, it’s a scientifically “invalid bible” billing system for all who utilize the “invalid” DSM, to profiteer off of covering up, the systemic child abuse covering up crimes, of the paternalistic religions, including the psychiatrists.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/04/heal-for-life/
No offense, Ilana, but you have a very naive perspective. I was young and naive long ago too … and made the mistake of trusting in doctors, pastors, and my former husband … all of whom were systemic, paternalistic, child abuse and rape cover uppers, of my innocent 3 year old child, according to his medical records.
The non-medically trained psychologists are just as much to blame, as the systemic child abuse cover uppers of the scientifically “invalid,”psychiatric, DSM “bible” creators.
I hope you young psychologists will some day understand why we need to get rid of the DSM, rather than try to continue to glorify it. And stop deluding yourselves, that maintaining the DSM (“the status quo”) is acceptable. It is NOT.
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I know this comment will not be approved now, since my original comment has not yet been approved.
But, Steve, I should have put this quote:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1
In between the second to last “paragraph” of my last comment, and my last comment. So, if you can properly edit it that way, I’d be grateful.
Just an FYI, Steve, your job would likely be reduced – but not eliminated – if MiA goes back to letting commenters edit their comments, for at least 30 minutes.
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I donât see a big difference in this kind of reasoning. Mistake means something is wrong and we need to make it right. Now we are going to say someone is more like animal and the other is more human – meaning: being more like animal is worse than being a human. To give an example: my depressive and anxious reaction are not only totally logical for me, but mostly very adequate (not exaggerated). Civilizaed world? What does it mean?
We do not yet have research that tells us how often people or animals kill out of jealousy or envy. But even if people do it less often in the literal sense, we can kill ourselves psychologically: we slander ourselves, we tell lies about ourselves – can you measure which type of harm is more severe?
We live in a human world where there are thousands of different approaches to different political and social topics, different beliefs about how to organize life on earth, or what happens after death, many people believe that they have the only right answers to how to manage our lives and we call each other idiots if someone has a different view on a certain topic, e.g. economic management of a given country, homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia. In our reality there is a lot of room for different opinions, pluralism and relativism. Unfortunately, this results in endless dissonances, quarrels and clashes. How can you not experience fear, depression and despair in such a “civilized” reality? We have been regularly fighting life-and-death wars with each other for thousands of years. How to stay calm in such a reality? How can we want to send new lives to such a reality?
No, these are not mistakes or errors either, unless we call sending new beings to this dangerous, unpredictable, painful physics of reality a mistake.
I don’t believe at all that being a human is better than being an animal. I would love for this to be the case, but history tells us otherwise. Yes we can build planes and even fly into space, that is wonderful. But we can also drop atomic bombs on each other and create elaborate lies to destroy other people.
Vegetarianism, veganism? Plants are also living organisms, the survival of each of us is built on being a killer. Such philosophical reflections can really lead to resignation.
Of course, we have to somehow manage our human jungle, but it is still a jungle, civilized in some sense, but the physics of reality is constant. And above all, the reality, the physics itself is the crazy one. I will never send any new being into this world.
For a long time, I truly believed that the end of World War II was the end of our human “animal” stage. Since the war in Ukraine and in Gaza, I know that these were my illusions and dreams of a child. How, having knowledge about the nature of reality, chemistry, animals or people, do we decide to send children to experience this life?
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Wonderful!! After years of experience with self-empowerment, private therapy and various relational workshops and being a recent witness to the terror wrought on our upset young people by the mental health industry which is so quick to capture and sedate them with highly addictive neurotoxins, this âAnimal Theory of Emotionâ is exactly what the world needs now. It is so correct. So in tune. So real. Bravo!
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I balk at the idea that emotion should be defined as distorted perception. Such a narrative ignores the roles of trauma and stress. WHY are some people stuck in âsurvival mode?â WHY are some people unable to regulate their emotions? Are their emotions informative about their lives past and present even when they are extreme? What past and present circumstances contribute to or induce extreme emotionality? What developmental factors contribute to resilience and the capacity to regulate emotions, and what factors disrupt it, so we can produce a healing environment? Is there really such a thing as an emotionless perception at all, and could such a thing really be equated with true perception? Itâs so rationalist and hegemonic and patriarchal to say that emotions are beasts to be tamed instead of messengers to be heeded or properly understood. Reminds me of CBT: I get angry when my family abuses me because of my âdistorted cognitions,â and I get presently angry when Iâm reminded of it because of my âdistorted beliefsâ (epistemic injustice), and being anxious in grad school has nothing to do the pressure cooker environment and alienating system and my parents demand that I succeed at all costs to regulate their emotions, but with my âdistorted perceptionâ that grad school is scary residing in my outmoded âanimal brainâ (a Neuro scientific myth). It explains nothing, and while taking away diagnostic labels it is simply pathologizing wearing different clothing. It aids my self understanding and comprehension of the teleological function of my emotions and extreme states in no way at all.
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My grandmother had Alzheimerâs, we family – as caregivers – experienced all kinds of reactions and emotions: sadness, dispar, anger, depression, anxiety, extreme states. These reactions are totally reasonable reactions/emotions.
Over time we have managed to achieve a degree of indifference that I see more in animals than in humans. I don’t know, I’m afraid that in many cases we are in a stalemate, to say the least tragic situation in terms of naming what is healthy, what is sick, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is a mistake. When I watch nature films that depict the earthly journey of various creatures, I am flooded with all sorts of emotions. When I watch news from our human world it’s the same. Both worlds can arouse delight and terror.
We all are here to survive and die in the same time, isnât that crazy?
There are trillion trillion times a trillion lives in this world, we consume each other to survive only to eventually die. Human consciousness has developed so deeply that we are able to think and analyze everything that is happening. This amount of information and unclear conclusions is overwhelming and evokes a whole range of emotions and reactions. Buddhists say that being an animal is a lower form of existence and I would often rather be a fish or a plant that has no such awareness as a human. Whose life is harder? Better? I think we are all in a difficult situation. It is so hard to compare. It is so hard to be a plant, a fish, a human.
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I agree that there is not illness but emotion. But I donât agree with the animal theory. The problem of being stuck in a state of extreme emotional upset with intense emotions, isnât a matter of falling into animal instincts of survival, that you need to pull yourself out of because youâre not really in danger. Thatâs way off the mark in my view.
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I struggled with depression, anxiety, severe social phobia, adhd, and gender dysphoria for years and years on an ideology close to this one without any success, but when I started moving toward the theory of constructed emotion all that melted away. Like, nah, all my emotions were always subjectively perfectly rational, anything an animal neuron does is physically doomed to be. You change the conditions under which emotional self-flagellation is rational to those under which it no longer is, and bam. I’m still really avoidant but I’m no longer punishing myself and I’m a lot more comfortable in human interaction, transitioning is a hell of a lot nicer when you don’t hate your reflection and no longer fear the judgements of those who refuse to appreciate what you’re sincerely doing, and when you stop telling yourself “I want to but my brain won’t do it” and start telling yourself “I don’t want to”, it makes it much easier to create conditions that make you want to do more things.
Dividing yourself into tamer and beast is schizoid bs anyway. Just be the beast!
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First episode of great series âSpy in the wildâ called âLoveâ:
âUncovering how similar humans really are to animalsâ
https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Spy-in-the-Wild/0HONR7FLTKTJREGKPTX6155X0M
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Illana
This is spot on…I have been watching some videos by James Francis who began working with abused, neglected horses and other animals. He developed the Trust-Technique. His work is remarkable and clearly has benefits for people.
Thanks for your valuable insight…
Jim
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I think there is a contradiction in the article’s thesis. if emotions are just remnants from humans’ animal past and if they don’t have a necessary and true relation to their reality then they would usually be harmful to a person. what a person supposed to do is to understand the ‘meaninglessness’ of their emotions and learn to ‘ignore’ them. but if you accept these premises then very powerful, overwhelming emotions are really ‘disorders’ because what defines disorders other than forcing people to behave in a limited, unwanted way? there is little practical difference between modern psychiatry’s definition of disorders and the article’s definition of powerful emotions. you deal with both by suppressing, bypassing or extinguishing them.
this theory seems to define human beings as partly animal but then advises people to reject that essential and necessary part of themselves. the animal is the servant and the ‘human’ should be the master. but isn’t what is specific to a human being is just a function of their material being, according to evolutionary biology? how can a single function of an organism rule that whole being? ‘the animal’ is the body. can you transcend or ‘leave’ your own body? in fact the animal defined in this article sounds more like a ‘machine’ than a living being. emotions are just ‘errors’ or ‘malfunctions’. but you can’t fix errors by ignoring them and emotions cannot be fixed or simply abolished. I think it would make much more sense to take the opposite maximalist position and accept that emotions are almost always basically ‘true’ because they relate not to actuality but to possibilities. the possible is more real than what is at a specific moment, actual.
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The first half of this article makes sense.
The second half set off my BS detector.
It sounds vaguely sciencey while at the same time sounding vaguely like the kind of stuff being served up by gurus that promise to show us how to master our emotions in order to unleash our inner billionaire.
Highly creative people are famous for being emotionally messy people. Our emotions and neuroses are inextricably entwined with our intuition and creativity. And yet somehow this fact always seems to be glossed over by those who would characterize emotions as mental mistakes that need to be tamed, even though many creative masters often have little mastery over their emotions.
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This is a mess of a contribution and not up to MIA standards. I believe this article should be removed.
The author contradicts herself by initially critiquing the pathologization of emotion, only to claim that emotions are always exaggerated, unhelpful, and mistaken. Many MIA readers seek to recover from, and potentially escape, real survival experiences. Trauma often involves disassociation from crucial emotions that provide attentional drives, allowing individuals to perceive danger and seek or negotiate their own safety. Healing typically involves recognizing real dangers or harm that have occurred or are ongoing, and restoring emotions to their vital role in perceiving and consciously attending to potential dangers to prevent them from escalating into harm.
The tenor of MIA is to recognize that mental health is social. By assuming that emotion is always “mistaken” and has nothing to offer, this article perpetuates the systemic denial of the social and contextual threats many people face daily.
While this article may resonate with those who experience significant distress out of sync with their situation, perhaps struggling with anxiety, it does not foster mutual understanding to privilege the experiences of those with anxiety over those who have experienced or are experiencing real survival threats. That some emotional distress is out of proportion to actual survival scenarios does not mean all emotions are mistakes. As commenter Jansen aptly states, “I think it would make much more sense to take the opposite maximalist position and accept that emotions are almost always basically âtrueâ because they relate not to actuality but to possibilities.” I could not agree more. Neither delusion nor deficit of survival distress is resolved through “taming.”
This article falls short of MIA’s standards for guest blogs, lacking both lived experience and critical scientific insight. MIA, as I see it, fosters understanding between lived experience, clinical practice and theory, and neuroscience. Neuroscience consistently emphasizes that cognition cannot exist without emotional presence. Such an article challenging the value of emotion could be an opportunity for discussion and clarity if the author was not making such bold claims to authority. The preamble perhaps dupes Mad In America into publishing this puffed-up branding piece by starting what seems like on-topic critiques of psychiatry. The author fails to disclose her business interest in promoting ‘Animal Theory’ as a form of DBT, a significant omission that calls into question the article’s intent. I do not see the value of publishing this article here, as it promotes the naive confusion around emotion that MIA typically seeks to dismantle through good science, reason, and lived experience. While MIA states that “opinions are the writer’s own,” accepting a submission such as this that condones uncritical and grandiose claims to authority undermines the objectives and spirit of MIA.
In other words, scam alert! This article does not belong here. It does not disclose its commercial intent and condescendingly puts forward an ideology that does not open up conversation but instead fosters solipsistic dismissal of the lived experiences readers come here to understand.
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