My last column was mostly about two emotions, grief and fear. This column will concern two other emotions, shame and anger, and also another kind of stress, bodily tension such as illness and fatigue. Emotions and feelings are at core physical, rather than only mental. Sadness is the feeling we get when bodily preparations to cry are not carried out. In this view, crying is the orgasm of a state of bodily arousal: grief. The habit of controlling emotions by ignoring them turns out to be a huge problem. Over the long haul, unresolved emotional arousals can build up to the point of continuous painful feelings and/or tension.
Last time I proposed that all emotions, both positive and negative, can be enjoyed. The challenge is to be able to experience them in a third way: neither 1. ignoring them, on the one hand, nor 2. getting lost in them, on the other. In drama theory this third state is called aesthetic distance. The audience is to identify with the characters to point of feeling their emotions, but at the same time remembering that they are NOT the characters.
Strong emotions can be enjoyed in a safe environment: theatre, film, books, songs, or telling one's experience to an empathic person, or even to one's self. Peter Levine (1997) described this state as pendulation, moving very quickly back and forth between painful feelings and the safe present. I once had an extraordinary fear experience in this mode: after an excruciatingly dangerous experience, my body took over, shaking and sweating til my clothes were drenched. It was not painful, and I felt completely relaxed when it was over. Shaking and sweating seems to be the orgasm of fear arousal.
Like many people, when angry I may get loud and mean. But I have had several anger experiences of a quite different kind. I told the culprit "I am angry at you because....." in an ordinary voice. Since this approach is so undramatic, I have had to repeat my complaint several times. Then two things happened: the other person started apologizing, and I felt hot. I realized that it was not the room that had gotten warm, but my body. Apparently catharsis doesn't involve yelling and fighting. It is rather an internal process: heat metabolizes the adrenaline of bodily preparation to fight. Could body heat signal the orgasm of anger?
Shame, embarrassment and humiliation: When I tell students to describe to the class their most embarrassing moment, many of them are convulsed with laughter telling the story. Laughter seems to be the orgasm of shame. However, it's often difficult to get to laughter, especially if one was deeply humiliated. What is often required are many repetitions of just talk about the incident, before one can find humor in it.
It also needs to be said that just as there is a good cry and a bad one, there is also a good laugh and a bad one. A good laugh turns out to be when one is laughing at one's self ("Silly me") or the universe, but not at other people. Laughing at others usually is ridicule, driven by anger: no help to either party.
One final comment on yawning. Even though most people think that yawing increases one's oxygen supply, there is no evidence. In my experience, I yawn when I am tired, not when I am sleepy, and when under intense physical pain. A trip to the dentist often results in a fit of yawning afterwards. In my most painful illness, I think that extraordinary fits of yawning made the pain bearable.
As you may have guessed by now, I am not saying that it's easy to enjoy your emotions, only that it is possible. With enough time and practice, I think that anyone can learn the art of distancing (pendulation) of one's emotions to make them less painful and to begin the long process of resolution. It may be that the future for human beings depends on everyone learning this lesson.
These comments on catharsis were brief. For further discussion, see #57 on my home page (http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/faculty/scheff), my 1979 book, or an edu-tainment backed up by two rock stars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM_MxBizcQk
