The emotions do not deserve being put into opposition with “intelligence.” The emotions are themselves a higher order of intelligence.
—O. Hobart Mowrer
Strong emotion is the essence of love—and strong emotion is what has given love a bad rap. We don’t understand intense emotion, and we don’t trust it. We want the joy and elation love brings. They lift us up out of our dull, mundane routines and make us feel alive and significant. But we abhor the fear and anger and sadness that also attend love. They drop us into deep pits of desolation and despair and make us feel helpless and out of control.
Colin tells me, “In the beginning, in the first infatuation, feeling like I was being swept away was intoxicating, thrilling, even. The excitement was so high. I felt so alive. This is what I had longed for all my life. All the stupid sentimental songs suddenly seemed so true. I took emotional risks without even thinking about it. But then Donna’s old boyfriend came back into town, and she met him for coffee. Even though I agreed to their meeting, suddenly everything seemed different. Waiting for her outside a restaurant, standing in the rain, I realized that I was out on some kind of limb here. I wasn’t in charge of what was happening at all. Suddenly I felt so vulnerable. I didn’t know whether to run or rage. When Donna arrived, I stayed cool. I told her that I was going to be busy for the next few weeks and I cut our date short.”
As Freud remarked many years ago, “We are never so vulnerable as when we love.” If we don’t understand the intense emotion that love engenders, then love will always be a scary proposition. Thankfully, a radical new view of emotion and its role in love relationships has been emerging. In the past two decades, nearly every “fact” about emotion that was drummed into my head in grad school has been repudiated. We owe this largely to advances in technology. We no longer have to rely solely on patients with brain anomalies or terrible head injuries—like Phineas Gage, the 19th-century railroad foreman whose personality changed after an explosion rammed an iron bar through his cheek into the emotional center of his brain—as subjects for study. With the fMRI scanner, we can look inside normal brains and actually see in real time where emotion arises and how it operates. And what we’ve learned is astonishing.
Technology has given the lie to long-held assumptions about emotion as a random, irrational impulse. Emotion, we’ve discovered, is a sharp, smart force that organizes and elevates our lives. It is what transforms existence into experience. “I do not literally paint that table but the emotion it produces upon me,” observed Matisse. Emotion is what turns an object into a memento, an event into a happening, and a person into the love of your life. Nor is emotion a selfish, corrupting drive leading inevitably to destructive excess and devilish sins, as my first teachers, Catholic nuns, warned me. We’ve now learned that emotion is, in fact, the foundation of key elements in civilized society, including moral judgment and empathy. To feel for someone is the root of caring action.
Equally amazing is what the new research reveals about the impact of emotion in our closest relationships. The message touted by popular media and therapists has been that we’re supposed to be in total control of our emotions before we turn to others. Love yourself first, and then another will love you. Our new knowledge stands that message on its head. “For humans,” says psychologist Ed Tronick of the University of Massachusetts, “the maintenance of [emotional balance] is a dyadic collaborative process.” In other words, we are designed to deal with emotion in concert with another person—not by ourselves.
Love relationships aren’t meant only to be joyrides; they’re also restorative and balancing meeting places where negative emotions are calmed and regulated. It’s a little like the old adage “Two hearts are better than one”; indeed they are. When we find what Harry Harlow called “contact comfort” by moving close to another person, the impact of every risk or threat is reduced. In horror movies, the hero or heroine is always alone when the ghoul or monster first appears but finally triumphs over fear and fiend with the help of a buddy.
In fact, the reason that distress in a relationship so often plunges us into inner chaos is because our hearts and brains are set up to use our partners to help us find our balance in the midst of distress and fear. If they instead become a source of distress, then we are doubly bereft and vulnerable. As Terry tells his wife, “That you would do this to me, you of all people. The one I count on. I am so confused. If I can’t trust you, who can I trust? I thought you had my back; you were my safe place; but now it seems like you are the enemy, and there is no safety anywhere.” The other side of the coin is that loving connection is the natural antidote to fear and pain.
Jim Coan at the University of Virginia, one of the most creative scholars in the new field of social neuroscience, put women, all happily married, in an fMRI machine and took pictures of their brains as they saw small circles and x’s flash in front of their eyes. They were told that when they saw the x’s, there was a 20 percent chance that they would receive an electric shock on their ankles. After each shock, they rated, on a simple scale, how much it hurt. The twist in the experiment: sometimes the women faced the shock threat alone; other times they were with a stranger who came into the room and held their hand; and still other times they faced the shock threat with their husband clasping their hand.
The results were fascinating. When the x’s popped up in front of their eyes and they were all alone, their brains lit up with activity like a Christmas tree. Alarm was everywhere. And they rated the shock, when it came, as very painful. When the stranger grasped their hand, their brain reacted with less alarm to the x’s, and they found the shock less painful. Isolation is traumatizing and exacerbates our perception of threat. But what was really interesting was that when their husband gripped their hand, their brain barely responded to the x’s (just as if someone had told them it was raining outside), and they said that the shock was simply uncomfortable. This is love in action, offering us safe harbor, a place to calm our terrors and find equilibrium.
Recently Jim and I did a variation of this study with women in distressed marriages who were in therapy. They and their partners reported on questionnaires that they were insecurely attached and were undergoing EFT to improve their relationships. Before therapy, the women reacted just as the women in the original study did: their brain lit up in alarm and pain, and the shock really hurt. A stranger holding their hand eased their fear a little. But clasping their husband’s hand had little or no effect. The spouse was not a safety cue in these insecure and troubled marriages.
After twenty sessions of EFT, however, the women were happier and more secure in their relationships, and when they saw the x’s and had their husband’s hand to hold, their alarm response was virtually eradicated and their pain was judged “uncomfortable.” What was especially striking was that their prefrontal cortex, where emotions are regulated and controlled, did not even blip. With the presence of a mate with whom they felt more securely bonded, the women were not just able to cope differently with the pain, they registered even the threat of being shocked differently. This marks the first time that a systematic intervention aimed at changing interaction with a loved one has been shown to have an impact on the brain. This means that, with the right kind of therapy, we can begin to create a safe-haven relationship.
Learning to love and be loved is, in effect, about learning to tune in to our emotions so that we know what we need from a partner and expressing those desires openly, in a way that evokes sympathy and support from him or her. When this support helps us balance our emotions—staying in touch with but not being flooded by them—we can then tune in to and sensitively respond to our partner in return. We can see this in movies of moms and secure kids in the Strange Situation experiment, and we see it in our research tapes of adults in therapy who succeed in mending their relationships. In these moments, we are what John Bowlby called “effectively dependent”; we can call to others and respond to their call in a way that makes us and our connection with them stronger. Once we are balanced, we can turn to the world and move in it with flexibility, open to learning and able to look at the choices available to us in any situation. Nothing makes us stronger and happier than loving, stable long-term bonds with others.
Distrust of emotion has long been a hallmark of Western civilization. It dates back at least to the days of ancient Greece, when Stoic philosophers argued that the passions, love included, were destructive and had to be checked by intellect and morals. Down through the years, emotion has been viewed primarily as an attribute of our base animal nature, crude and sensate. After all, we “feel” emotion; it is a visceral force. Reason, in contrast, removed from the body and residing “in the head,” has been viewed as evolutionarily superior, a reflection of our higher spiritual self. We must rise above emotion if we are to be a truly civilized society. Social critic Marya Mannes said it succinctly: “The sign of an intelligent people is their ability to control emotions by the application of reason.”
The case against emotion seems to stem from two factors: its unstoppable power—indeed, it can overtake us in less than a second—and its apparent randomness and lack of logic. Research now paints a much different view. Emotion is actually nature’s exquisitely efficient information-processing and signaling system, designed to rapidly reorganize behavior in the interests of survival.
Emotion apprises us that something vital to our welfare is occurring. We are bombarded by hundreds of thousands of stimuli every second of every day. Emotion automatically and reflexively sorts through the barrage, picking out what matters and steering us to the appropriate action. Our feelings guide us in issues large and small; they tell us what we want, what our preferences are, and what we need. We choose pistachio ice cream rather than vanilla because we have a better feeling about it. Research with brain-damaged people shows that without emotion to guide us, we have no compass. We are bereft of direction and have nothing to move us toward one option rather than another. We are stuck pondering all the possibilities.
Emotion is the great motivator. It comes whether we will it to or not, and it stirs, even compels us to act. The word emotion derives from the Latin movere, meaning “to move out.” We see its power most clearly when we sense we are in immediate physical danger. If we’re charged by a rabid dog or a rampaging rhino, we feel fear and make tracks in the opposite direction. Charles Darwin, the first scientist to point out emotion’s survival value, would regularly visit the London zoo to stand in front of the puff adder cage. He knew that staring at the snake eye to eye would make it strike out. He also knew, as a reasoning being, that he was perfectly safe, since the adder was behind glass. Darwin stared, determined not to flinch, but no matter how many times he tested himself, when the reptile attacked he jumped back.
Emotion can spur us to act even when survival does not appear to be an immediate issue. During 9/11, a woman named Julie was at work in the South Tower of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit the North Tower. Instructions over loudspeakers told her and her colleagues to stay put in their eightieth-floor offices. But overwhelmed by fear, she headed down the stairs. She had reached the sixty-first floor when the second plane hit her building. She made it home. Of course, emotion is not an infallible alarm system, as Darwin’s experience demonstrates. Julie could have made the hot and anxious trek down eighty flights for nothing. But in survival, false positives are always more valuable than false negatives. You’re better off heeding a warning emotion than ignoring it. As George Santayana pointed out, it is often “wisdom to believe the heart.”
Emotion is also the great communicator. It swirls within our bodies and flows out, whether we want it to or not, as signals to others. It spurs our own behavior and conveys our deepest needs to others as well as theirs to us. As such, it is vital to our love relationships. Our partners are central to our sense of safety. How can they shelter us, be our safe harbor, if they don’t know what we are afraid of and what we yearn and hunger for? Emotion is the music of the dance between lovers; it tells us where to put our feet, and tells our partners where we need them to put theirs.
We broadcast emotion mainly through our facial expressions and tone of voice, and we apprehend and comprehend these signals instantaneously. It takes just one hundred milliseconds for our brain to register the smallest alteration in another person’s face and just three hundred milliseconds more to feel in our own body what we see in that face—to mirror the change we see (I will talk about just how this mirroring process occurs in the next chapter). Emotion is contagious; we literally “catch” each other’s sentiments and feel what the other person is feeling, and this is the basis of empathy.
Dorothy Parker once famously panned Katharine Hepburn’s performance in a play as “running the gamut of emotions from A to B.” We know that there are more emotions than that—many more, most people would say. But how many? Some twenty years ago, I read a book for therapists claiming that there were thirty-nine basic feelings. However, most social scientists today agree that there are only six innate and universal emotions: fear, anger, happiness or joy, sadness, surprise, and shame (some theorists divide shame into disgust and guilt). Each one leads naturally to an action. In anger, we approach a challenge or a frustration; in surprise, we pay attention and explore; in fear, we freeze or flee. The fact that negative emotion predominates in this list speaks to the existential significance of emotion. In survival terms (as reporters know), bad news and negatives are more important. You’ve probably noticed that love isn’t on the basics list, and I’ll go into that a little later.
The list derives from American psychologist Paul Ekman’s pioneering research into facial expressions. Darwin believed that emotional display is biologically determined and universal across societies. But in the 1950s, another view held sway: that emotion’s manifestation is culturally dictated and learned. Which was right? Ekman’s evidence favors Darwin: he has found that people in literate cultures of the West and East agree on the nature of the emotion they see in pictures of faces. People from all over the planet can, in fact, read certain key emotional expressions and assign the same meaning to them.
Ekman first traveled in the 1960s to the highlands of New Guinea to meet with a tribe, the Fore, that has no written language. An isolated people, they had never seen movies or television. Ekman showed them pictures of Westerners’ faces displaying different emotions and, through an interpreter, asked them, “What is happening to this person, and what is going to happen next?” He found that they could pinpoint what the Western person was feeling and predict his intentions. He visited the tribe a second time and told them stories, then asked them to match the story with a picture of a facial expression. They easily did so. Ekman also took photos of tribesmen with varied facial displays, and when back in the United States he asked college students to interpret the emotional content. The students identified the tribesmen’s emotions and how this linked to their intentions.
Ekman’s findings have been replicated by colleagues studying other isolated groups. The conclusion they have all reached is that the display of the six basic emotions and the ability to assign the same specific meaning to each cuts across cultures. In other words, there is a universal language of emotion. In anger, the eyes widen and stare, the brows contract, and the lips compress. These expressions do not need to be learned; the congenitally blind also show them. Culture appears to be significant in one respect, however: it influences which facial features we focus on. For example, if we’re from the West, we pay more attention to the mouth and brows; if we’re from the East, we concentrate on the eyes.
Just knowing that there are basic emotions we all feel and recognize can make a huge difference in our everyday lives. Psychologist Matthew Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, has demonstrated that the simple act of naming an emotion calms the emotional center of the brain. In an fMRI study, Lieberman showed people images of faces with negative expressions—for example, grimacing in anger. When subjects were asked to identify the sex of the person in the image, the emotional area remained highly activated. But when they were asked to label the feeling they saw by choosing between two words written under the image, their brains calmed down. Naming an emotion begins the process of regulating it and reflecting on it.
I see this happening in therapy. As Bernice tells me, “Well, I guess if I pay attention instead of going off in my head, I can see that my husband is sad right now. Usually I just freak out—get all confused and dithery. It’s silly, but it feels better to recognize that he is sad. It’s kind of like pinning everything down; the cues he is sending and my inner responses make sense then. Everything seems clearer, more manageable. Last time, I didn’t just clam up. I was able to tell him, ‘When you get so sad, I don’t know what to do, and that scares me. I think you are getting depressed again.’” What we name we can tame; when we give meaning to something, we can tolerate it and even change its impact.
So what about love—why isn’t it on the basics list? A few of my colleagues say it should be, but I don’t. Love doesn’t have a distinct facial expression. It’s not a single emotion, a lone note. It’s a mix of feelings, a medley. In point of fact, it’s a state of being that encompasses all the basic emotions. When we love, we can be joyful, sad, angry, afraid, surprised, or ashamed—often at the same time. Writer Jeffrey Eugenides puts it beautifully: “Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in ‘sadness,’ ‘joy,’ or ‘regret’…It oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, ‘the happiness that attends disaster.’ Or: ‘the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.’”
Today, we have not only identified the main emotions, we also know how they are generated and processed. First, there is a trigger or cue—say, a beautiful sunset or a frown on your lover’s face. This cue is picked up by the thalamus, a structure deep in the brain, and given a fast read to identify which emotion is called for and ready the body to react. The information is then relayed onward. If the initial rough assessment is that immediate action is required—as when, for example, you’re being attacked by an intruder with a knife and your life is at stake, the message goes straight to the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped organ between the temporal lobes. If there is no such urgency, information travels on a more circuitous route from the thalamus to the frontal cortex before heading to the amygdala. The cortex is the thinking part of the brain; it assesses the exact meaning and significance of the stimulus, but this assessment is too slow to be useful in critical situations. Finally, a compelling action emerges, and the body responds. In anger, blood is directed to the hands to prepare us to fight; in fear, it is directed to the feet, to prepare us to flee. The entire sequence occurs without our being aware of it; it is swift and supremely logical.
The idea that emotion also involves reason will surprise most people. In the past, emotions were believed to originate strictly in the right brain (the “feeling” side), and thoughts were believed to originate in the left brain (the “rational” side). As one scientist wrote, intense emotion involves “a complete loss of cerebral control” that contains no “trace of consciousness.” Today, we have a much more nuanced, integrated picture. There is evidence that the right brain is more active when we feel highly arousing emotions, like anger. But we now know that such emotions, whether positive or negative, generally activate both sides of the brain and that the frontal cortex, once considered the exclusive province of reason, processes emotional cues.
Dividing the brain into parts, and separating emotion from reason, is illusory. A functioning brain is an integrated brain. All parts work together to create our experience at any moment. Interconnection and interdependence are the name of the game—in the brain and in relationships.
One of the insidious effects of the cult of independence in the Western world is that we’ve been taught that suppressing our negative emotions is an effective—indeed, the optimal—strategy for getting along in life. I remember learning early on the adage “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” My clients tell me that they put huge effort into holding back when their partner upsets them. But that, we’ve now discovered, often simply exacerbates relationship difficulties. Moreover, repression takes a huge physiological toll.
Psychologist James Gross of Stanford University has directed a series of fMRI experiments assessing the effect of suppressing emotions compared with another strategy, reappraisal—that is, changing the way we evaluate an emotional situation. One of the most interesting studies asked 17 women (women are considered more emotionally expressive than men) to watch fifteen-second film clips of either emotionally neutral nature scenes or “disgusting” events, including vomiting, surgical procedures, and animal slaughter. The women were instructed either to try to hold back their reactions to the repulsive clips (“keep face still”) or to try to reappraise the events by adopting a more general perspective, like that of a medical professional watching the film.
Scans showed that suppression actually heightened activity in the amygdala, “fear central” in the brain. Stifling emotional reaction had a rebound effect: the women became so stressed and tense from holding back that the negative emotional effect of the disgusting clips was exacerbated. By contrast, the more distancing reappraisal strategy reduced the women’s negative emotional experience of the disgusting films. Scans showed activation of the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that regulates emotion and turns down activity in the amygdala.
Why is reappraisal a more effective strategy? Reactive emotion flashes up very fast. Reappraisal intervenes as emotion is being generated and thus is able to modify and shape it. Suppression, on the other hand, occurs after the emotion registers in the brain. We have to work very hard to push down intense emotion; our heart rate speeds up, and stress chemicals pour out. Think of capping a ready-to-erupt volcano: the bottled-up force makes the eventual explosion stronger. That’s why we see people suppress, suppress, suppress, then blow!
Smothering emotion is bad not just for us but also for our love relationships. The effort is exhausting and distracts us from attending to emotional cues coming from our partner, curtailing our ability to respond. James Gross has shown, too, that the tension created by suppression is contagious: our partner picks up the strain, and becomes stressed as well.
The most functional way to regulate difficult emotions in love relationships is to share them. We know that confiding helps us reorganize our thoughts and responses, get clear about our priorities, receive new information and feedback, and feel comforted and calmed. The complicating issue is that the partner we share with is also often the trigger for our bad feeling.
Most folks tend to associate love with the emotion of happiness. When people in studies are given lists of words and told to group them into categories, they generally place love under “joy.” But to scientists who study love relationships, the most fascinating emotion is fear. Fear is the most powerful of all the emotions. Not surprising, since it is our basic survival mechanism, an alarm that blares when threat looms and that prompts us to escape.
Psychologist Mario Mikulincer, perhaps the most prolific researcher on attachment in the world, speaks to me in a soft, musical voice from his lab in Herzliya: “I am a Jew, and with the history of my people, I became fascinated with how people deal with fear, helplessness, and lack of control,” he says. “Since we knew from research into children and their caregivers that feeling securely attached increases one’s sense of mastery and helps modulate negative emotions, we decided to examine how our sense of attachment impacts our fear of death. And we found that securely attached people seem to be less afraid. Anxiously attached people’s fears center around not mattering to anyone anymore and leaving others. Avoidant people’s fears focus on the unknown nature of death. I was captivated. I realized that our bonds with others are not only our most crucial source of vitality but our strongest defense. Suddenly I realized that I was studying the power of love!”
Fear clangs noisily, too, when our love relationships, the main source of our emotional support and comfort, seem to be in jeopardy. More and more evidence is emerging that the nexus for the social brain is the amygdala, the main processing site for fear. Jaak Panksepp of Washington State University has been studying the brains of rats for thirty years. In structure, rodent brains are surprisingly similar to ours. Panksepp’s work reveals that rats who bond with their mates and rear their young with care have a specific neural pathway in the amygdala that switches on automatically when a loved one is suddenly perceived as unavailable, such as when their mate is temporarily removed from their side. Panksepp has shown that this separation plunges them into what he calls a “primal panic.”
Panksepp is convinced that a comparable pathway exists in the brain of all mammals who form close ties with others, including humans. I am convinced of this, too. “When Michele just turns away and shuts me out like I don’t matter at all to her, I go into some kind of meltdown,” says Darren in my office. “Does this mean I am crazy?”
“No,” I assure him. “It means you are a mammal in love who suddenly senses a lack of connection. Your brain takes this as a danger cue. It codes it as a threat to your safety and well-being.”
In fear, muscles tense, stress hormones release, blood rushes, thoughts of pain and other harm arise, and the impulse to freeze or flee forms. The elements of this experience are inescapable and unfurl predictably. Each element inexorably evokes the next, and the more times it is laid down in the neural circuitry, like a track repeatedly run over in snow, the more automatic the entire sequence becomes.
Andrew grew up with volatile, abusive parents and is sensitized to loud voices. So when his wife, Amy, raises her voice, he moves into fear faster and more intensely than someone who was reared in a tranquil, supportive home. “Deep down, I am so wary and so vulnerable,” Andrew confesses to Amy during couple therapy. “I am always ready to run away. It is hard for me to let you in. I always assume the worst is happening. I guess I need lots of reassurance that you do want to be with me, and I need for you to be patient as I learn to trust.”
Unhappy partners often are visibly angry, but the anger is usually secondary to a deeper sense of fear. Emma reminds Tim that they have a special date on the weekend to celebrate their ninth anniversary. Tim shrugs and comments that they will have to change it; he promised to attend a party with his boss. Emma explodes in anger. But if we were to freeze-frame this encounter, we’d see that Emma’s first emotion when Tim announced the cancellation was fear. If she were able to slow down and pay attention to her fear that she is becoming less important to her husband, her action might be very different. Instead of erupting angrily, she might ask for reassurance. But Emma does not register this anxiety. When she talks about this row in my office, she looks angry, and she accuses Tim of selfishness. Emma’s outburst in turn triggers her husband’s fear of failure and rejection. He becomes still and silent. This response, unfortunately, reinforces Emma’s fear. Their different ways of dealing with their emotions become part of a script, a pattern in their marriage. If the script this couple is following becomes fixed, the relationship is in trouble.
To reiterate this in a more general way: the way we regulate and process our emotions becomes our habitual way of signaling and engaging with others. It becomes our social script. The more narrow the focus of the script, the more limited are our ways of dancing with others.
Later, when Emma feels safer with Tim, they discuss the above incident, and she is able to broaden her focus and explore her experience, acknowledging that the “hard” emotion she showed him was not the whole picture. It was the “soft” emotion of hurt that was the main music playing for her in their conflict. Some have suggested that hurt should be included in the list of basic emotions. But we now know from various studies that this kind of hurt is a composite emotion, made up of, on the surface, anger; on a deeper level, sadness at a sensed loss of feeling valued by another; and, on the deepest level, fear of rejection and abandonment. As Emma shows her hurt, it changes the script with her husband. It prompts tenderness in him and reassures him that he is valued by his wife.
Just as we have not understood the role specific fears play in love, we are only now understanding the tangible physical nature of social or relational pain. Until recently any parallel between emotional pain, such as rejection, and physical pain, such as burning your arm, was thought to be caused purely by overlapping psychological distress rather than by any shared sensory processing. In fact we often downplay others’ hurt by comparing it to the “real” hurt of physical injury. Amanda says to Roy, “You act like I stabbed you just ’cause I got a little critical. Don’t you think you are being a little melodramatic here?”
It is now clear that there is a literal neural overlap in the way we process and experience relational and physical pain. Both pains, as experiments by psychologist Naomi Eisenberger of UCLA attest, are alarm systems, designed to grab our attention and focus our resources on minimizing threat. The threat in hurt feelings, arising from triggers such as rejection by a loved one, is emotional loss and separation. In mammals, perhaps because of their need for extended maternal care, isolation is a clear danger cue: it registers as a physical threat to survival.
Eisenberger and her colleagues arranged for subjects, while lying in a brain scanner, to play Cyberball (a virtual ball-toss game) with, so they believed, two other players. In fact, they were playing with a computer programmed to act as if the other players were deliberately refusing them the ball. The subjects reported feeling excluded and ignored, and their brain scans revealed significant activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the same region that registers physical pain.
This neural overlap explains why, as researchers have found, Tylenol can reduce hurt feelings and emotional support can lessen physical pain (including that of childbirth, cancer treatment, and heart surgery). Our need for connection with others has shaped our neural makeup and the structure of our emotional life.
We learn about the nature of emotion and what to do with it in our first attachments. If we are lucky, over the course of thousands of interactions with loved ones who are exquisitely responsive to us, we learn to tune in to, order, and trust our emotions and those of others. We can also use the supportive responses of those closest to us to shape and modify our own emotional reactions. Good relationships in childhood do not mean that our emotional life becomes consistently even and positive, but it does mean that we are more likely to discover that our negative emotions are workable and useful and that our positive emotions can be trusted and rejoiced in.
The good news is that even if we were emotionally starved in our childhood relationships, our adult lovers offer us a second chance to learn new and more effective ways to deal with our emotions and signal our longings to others. At the end of the process of EFT, Marion, who was physically and sexually abused by the people she depended on as a child, tells me, “It’s a strange thing: I have had these inner demons, these terrible fears about myself all these years. I could never risk letting anyone see me. It’s like I would get hijacked by terror if anyone got really close. If I trusted them and they hurt me again…it felt too risky. But now, with Terry, I can touch my shame and my fear, and ask for his help with these feelings. And when he gives it, I calm down and I feel reassured and somehow more whole. It’s like a loop—more safe connection leads to more feelings of safety inside and vice versa.” More secure bonding teaches us how to tolerate, work with, and use our emotions, and being able to manage our emotions in turn helps us adapt to and connect with others.
A secure relationship is one in which we learn to become emotionally intelligent. Loving partners help us when we are confused and unsure about our feelings, as when we feel too little or too much. When we feel too little, we say things like, “I don’t know how I feel. Maybe I feel sad, but I don’t know why.” We cannot order our experience into a coherent whole; we cannot find the direction in the emotion. Sometimes we feel “flat” or cut off from our emotions altogether. The inability to touch or name emotions leaves us aimless, without an internal compass to steer us toward what we need. The inability to show emotion also completely leaves our lovers hanging in space. No signal, no music, no dance, no relationship.
On the other hand, plugging in to too much emotion can be overwhelming and chaotic. I can remember being shocked by the way my grief at my mother’s sudden death took over my body and my world. As a client remarked to me, “Grief is like drowning in a bottomless sea.” At such moments we are all too aware of how fragile we are. People use images to capture experiences of overpowering emotion; for example, my clients use phrases such as: “To face the fear of reaching for someone is like walking through fire for me”; “His anger hits me like a Mack truck. I am knocked down, flattened”; “The shame hits me like a wind—so, so cold. Suddenly I am helpless. All I can do is hunker down and disappear.” We seem to be able to capture emotions best in images. They bring together perfectly the elements in the experience of emotion: the triggers, sensations, meanings, and the urge to act.
If we find ourselves caught in the too-much-or-too-little mode across lots of situations and relationships, chances are that we are having a problem with emotional balance, with regulating our emotions. The ability to find this balance is the most basic lesson we learn (or not!) from our early attachment figures. Those of us who have had even just one such positive relationship with a parental figure gain an advantage: we acquire a procedural map of how to hold on to our emotional equilibrium and connect with others. Being in balance allows us to move in many directions easily and thus have more ways of responding to and dancing with others.
When we are emotionally poised—either because that is our personal style or because we are tightly connected to another—we are less triggered. We do not hold on to and expand on any fear of rejection or betrayal kicked up by small slights and injuries. If we do feel hurt, we have more faith that we can share those feelings and get our lover to respond in a way that heals us. We are not flooded with alarm messages from our body or swamped by catastrophic thoughts; we can listen to our longings and risk asking for help in retrieving our balance. All this adds up to the fact that the more secure we are, the more able we are to turn emotion up or down with relative ease. A secure base creates safety that continues to foster personal growth, emotional balance, and loving connection. Being able to securely attach is the gift that keeps on giving!
We tend to focus on negative emotion because cues relevant to survival are given priority by our mind and body. But positive emotion is a powerful force as well. Life is, after all, a constant search for just this! Studies now show that happiness is not only a sign of flourishing but also the impulse that creates well-being. Just as sunlight makes gardens grow, joy makes us more alive and adventurous. It moves us forward and outward, pushing us to explore novel objects and places and engage with loved ones and strangers. In psychological terms, it sends us into “approach” behavior—but in a softer, more inquisitive way than does anger, which has a harder, more assertive quality. Negative emotions, such as anger and fear, narrow our focus, while positive emotion expands the range of our thoughts and creates the urge to play and experiment.
When we watch children having fun together at the park, we can see this easily. When I watch partners who have repaired their relationship and are now preparing to leave therapy, I see a new web of smiles, touches, and laughter connecting them. They are ready and eager to become more open to each other. Annie beams at Josh and tells him, “You are so funny. I never realized that before. It must be loving me—it’s growing your brain.” Josh, a straitlaced, introverted man, taps his thumb on his nose, crosses his eyes, and giggles. “Press the button,” he says. “More neurons coming up, ’cause I sure do love you.” Her eyes fill with happy tears.
So never mind the obvious advantages of joyfulness: if we stick with being stodgily scientific, what exactly does joy do for us, besides make us feel so good? Psychologist Barbara Frederickson of the University of Michigan asked people to view three types of film clips: those depicting situations filled with joy, those filled with fear and anger, or those with a neutral emotional tone. Then she told them to imagine themselves in the scenes. After the screening, viewers were asked: “What would you like to do right now?” They came up with many more responses after viewing the joyful clips—that is, they had a broader “thought-action” repertoire. Even the modest version of joy—contentment—generated more answers to the question. Positive emotions turn on our curiosity and desire to engage and explore. They set us up for openness and learning. Joy, for example, invigorates us.
But this is not all positive emotions do. They also undo negative emotions. We all know that making our partner laugh after we’ve made a careless, hurtful remark soothes upset feelings and eases the way back into harmony. Great literature is full of this undoing. The war-torn hero, aching with grief, stumbles into a church, is uplifted by the music of the choir, and turns toward life again. Positive emotions remind us at such times that suffering and uncertainty are not the whole story in any human life. Positive emotions and beliefs fuel resilience and help us bounce back from adversity. They generate even more positive emotions in an upward spiral.
This is surely part of the power of love. Love, at its best, brings a cornucopia of good things: joy and contentment, safety and trust, intense interest and involvement, curiosity and openness.
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If science has taught us anything about emotion, it is that we should never underestimate its power and value. It has shown us how emotion figures into our most intimate relationships and shapes them. And it has taught us that we can use those relationships to temper our negative feelings, dampen their toxicity, and be inspired by positive emotions to reach out to others and to the world. In his book The Wise Heart, Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield offers a beautiful image for our new understanding: “We can let ourselves be carried by the river of feeling—because we know how to swim.”
The better you are at listening to and distilling your emotions and sending clear emotional signals, the better your relationships will be. Science is disciplined observation—forming a hypothesis and testing it. You do it every day.
Sit quietly for a moment with a pen and paper in front of you. Then think about this question: Can you pinpoint a time, either in your current love relationship or in a past relationship, when you felt hurt or scared by the dance you were caught in with your loved one?
See if you can focus on the moment when these feelings crystallized. What was the trigger? Was it a look on his or her face? Was it a word used or a conclusion you drew from the way the dance was moving? Write this down.
See if you can find the trigger—the body sensation, the catastrophic thought about you or the relationship—and the action impulse that appeared with it. Did you want to run, to turn and fight, to crawl under the rug? Write down any of these that you can name.
What did you do? This question is hard. Try to focus just on the action, use a verb, and ignore the desire to defend yourself or prove your partner was wrong.
Can you find a new or a “perfect” word that distills your emotional experience? (A recent fMRI study found that just being able to put feelings into words seems to calm our painful and difficult emotions.)
What do you think your partner saw? Did he or she see what you were actually feeling on a deep level, or just annoyance or blankness? Did you signal your real emotion, or did you throw up a mask to protect yourself?
What do you think will happen if you tell your partner about your deep feelings now? What does this tell you about the state of your relationship?
Your answers will probably depend on how alarmed you were. If you were very apprehensive, the emotional cue traveled the fast road to your amygdala, the processing center for fear. That may make it hard for you to think this through, but you probably will be able to pull up your instinctive reaction. If there was less alarm and urgency, the message went the longer route, through your cortex, where it was thoughtfully assessed, and then on to your amygdala. This path makes it easier to pinpoint your reaction.
Paying attention to the way your emotions unfold in interactions with your partner can reveal important patterns. Once you recognize a sequence, you can exert more control over how you react and offer your partner guidance as to the response you need and want from him or her.
For example, Sally tells John, “When you act tired and don’t want to make love, it’s okay, I can handle it. Unless you turn away from me in bed and instantly fall asleep. Then I automatically go into this funk of spiraling thoughts: ‘I don’t exist. He can just turn away. He will leave me, like all the others have. It’s just a matter of time. You fool, don’t trust him.’ Once this happens, I am stuck in anger all the next day. I don’t want to go into this panic.” John responds by offering to hold her when he is tired, so they can fall asleep together. Sally also agrees to tell him next time she leaps to thoughts of him leaving her.