Psychology Today Blogs - Anger in the Age of Entitlement

Emotional Pollutants II

Steven Stosny — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:37:08 -0700

Here are more emotional pollutants identified by the people in our survey that are almost guaranteed to cause a negative response in bystanders.

5. Pettiness
It's making a big deal out of nothing or focusing on one small, negative aspect of something with no attempt to see the bigger picture. It's making less important things more important than the most important things. Pettiness is usually a function of resentment; for the resentful, nothing is too petty to resent.

Confronted with petty attitudes or behavior, you will feel reduced to some small mistake, as if nothing you have ever done right in your life matters. You will feel criticized, if not condemned, and diminished for the smallest of infractions, real or imagined.

6. Sarcasm
It comes in many forms. Sometimes it's just poorly-timed humor - saying the wrong thing in the wrong context. Sometimes it's innocently insensitive, with no intention to hurt or offend. More often it is hostile and meant to devalue. The purpose is to undermine a perspective you don't agree with or to shake someone's confidence, for temporary ego gain or strategic advantage. The sarcastic person tends to be especially into impression management, always trying to sound smart or witty. They often want to be admired rather than liked. Their tone is always diminishing.

7. Victim identity
Individual and collective identities exert far-reaching influence on thoughts, feelings, and behavior, as well as public policies and laws. The profound ripple effect of identity owes to its function as an organizer of experience and a filter for what sort of information the brain (or legislature) selects to process. The brain (or legislature) looks for information conforming to identity and overlooks all disconfirming evidence. A national identity organized around the sanctity of individual freedoms produces a different legislative agenda from one that considers itself tough on criminals. Similarly, people who identify with injuries, defects, or weaknesses tend to see only negative aspects of themselves and their experience.

Victim identity directs all intelligence and creativity to confirming the various ways in which we seem to be victims. The result is a terrible loss of power over internal experience, as responsibility for regulating how you feel (cheering yourself up when you're down and calming yourself down when you're upset) is abdicated through chronic blame - "I feel bad and it's your fault."

Victim identity has dire implications for healing. One of my teenage clients admitted that he did not want to relieve his depression because that would let his father "off the hook." This boy, like millions of others, wants his suffering to serve as a monument to to someone's bad behavior. In victim identity, the "damaged" self becomes a monument to the transgressions of others. Their attitudes announce loudly: "What others have done to me is more important that who I am as a person." Self-worth is measured by the never quite adequate apologies of others, by the amount of damages awarded in court, or the degree of "validation" garnered on Oprah.

The pollution element of victim identity lies in its obvious air of entitlement along with its built-in revenge motive of wanting to see the perceived offender punished. Think of your response to someone whom you think is a victim of misfortune or bad behavior as opposed to someone who identifies with being a victim. The former invokes a basic humanity connection. The latter makes you feel defensive, diminished, distrusted, manipulated, or used.

The dangerous part of victim identity lies in the fact that almost all criminals, abusers, and violent people have it. Their identity as a victim justifies in their own minds any kind of compensatory retaliation.

8. Enmity
Henry Kissinger once said that even the paranoid have enemies. Paranoid or not, emotional polluters can hardly avoid making enemies. Other people see their negativity or casual disregard of others as rejection or put-down and certainly do not see the core hurts, regret, or remorse that cause it. Far from invoking greater understanding, which is what emotional polluters really long for, their behavior creates little but an impulse for revenge in others.

The chronic negative feedback produced by entitlement, resentment, anger, superiority, pettiness, sarcasm, victim identity, and enmity can do nothing but create more emotional pollution.

CompassionPower

Emotional Pollutants

Steven Stosny — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:38:34 -0700

You've got them (all of them) under your skin. Emotional pollution is transmitted covertly by body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice and more overtly by language and behavior. The negative effects of the more subtle forms of emotional pollution are nearly as great as the more dramatic forms. This post will list the top four emotional pollutants.

1. Entitlement
Entitlement is the primary emotional pollutant because it plays some part in all the others. Think of how you react when you see people who behave as if they deserve special treatment or consideration. They expect to cut in front of you in line, smoke wherever they want, drive anyway they like, say anything they want, and do anything they like. By making their rights superior to yours, they imply that you don't count.

Why do they do it? Emotional polluters often feel put upon by what they perceive as the world's unfairness and general insensitivity to their needs. Driven by high standards of what they should get and what other people should do for them, they feel chronically disappointed and offended. So it seems only fair, from their myopic perspectives, that they get compensation for their constant frustrations. Special consideration seems like so little to ask! Here's the logic:

"It's so hard being me, I shouldn't have to wait in line, too!"
"With all I have to put up with, I deserve to take home a few supplies."
"With the kind of day I had, you expect me to mow the lawn?"
"All the taxes I pay, and they bother me about this little deduction!"
"The way I hit the golf ball, I should get the best seat in the restaurant!"
"I'm the man; you have to cook my dinner!"
"I'm the woman; you have to support me!"

2. Resentment
The most common emotional pollutant, resentment is based on a perception of unfairness for not getting the expected help, appreciation, consideration, praise, reward, respect, or affection. It is one of the most unpleasant emotional states to be near, in part because it carries a powerful sense of entitlement - it's only fair that the world give me what I want. More to the point, resentful people are so caught up in their "rights" and so locked into their own perspectives that they become completely insensitive to the rights and perspectives of others, which means that you will certainly feel shut out and diminished in their presence.

3. Anger
An isolated expression of anger, like an isolated display of entitlement or resentment may not be polluting. However, it is rare to see an isolated expression of anger, simply because it is the most contagious of all emotions. Our unconscious brain constantly scans the environment for evidence of aggression and is primed to react to it before we become consciously aware of it. In other words, you'll be defensive and angry (or afraid) in response to an angry person before you even know it. That's why it's so hard not to become angry around an angry person, even if the anger is not directed at you. A prime example is the driver who leans on the horn in a busy intersection. He is angry at only one particular driver, but he upsets everyone who hears his self-righteous outburst. Many angry men are clueless to the effects of their anger on their intimate partners, because they don't direct the anger at them. "What does she have to be afraid of?" they naively ask.

4. Superiority
Superiority is the implication, at least through body language or tone of voice, that you are better than someone else. Emotional polluters tend to have hierarchical self-esteem, i.e., they need to feel better than someone else to feel okay about themselves. Not surprisingly, this form of distorted self-esteem lies at the heart of racism, sexism, and all other prejudicial points of view.

The most abusive form of hierarchical self-esteem is predatory self-esteem. To feel good about themselves, persons with predatory self-esteem need to make other people feel bad about themselves. Family abusers usually have predatory self-esteem. Many will test high in self-esteem, while everyone else in their family tests low. When intervention increases the self-esteem of the emotionally beaten-down spouse and children who then no longer internalize the put-downs, the predator's self-esteem invariably declines. Predatory self-esteem rises on a wave of criticism used to put down loved ones. When the arousal wears off or when victims no longer internalize the criticism, the predator drops once again into depression.

Genuine self-esteem is a virtually unachievable goal for those who need to feel superior. No matter what criterion they use to determine their superiority, they will always find people with more of it. They will inevitably meet those who are smarter, wealthier, more powerful, better looking, more popular, have better socks, and so on; failure is the inevitable end of this precarious notion of self-worth.

Less toxic, though no less pleasant, examples of this form of emotional pollution are displays of arrogance and self-righteousness.

Steven's Amazon blog

ComassionPower

Obama, Oprah, and the Contagion of Hope

Steven Stosny — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:23:05 -0700

Oprah Winfrey went out on a limb to campaign for Senator Obama at the beginning of his unlikely bid for the White House. Although polls showed that the results were mixed in terms of her influence on voters, there is little question that her presence at his pre-Iowa rallies raised a relatively unknown Senator nearly to the level of his chief rival in national recognition and fund-raising ability.

Politics aside, what Oprah and Obama have in common is a keen ability to find (and transmit) hope, amid whirlpools of emotional pollution. Oprah finds something genuinely hopeful even in her most unsophisticated guests and in those who merely seem out to sell something. Obama finds hope even in the shell-game of politics and in the larger body of work of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The Senator's ability to see the hope and ignore the pollution in his pastor's sermons will not be his undoing, because we all achingly long to find hope and know intuitively that it is most often surrounded by anguish. Oprah and Obama help us understand that there is more hope in suffering than in Hallmark cards and polically correct pronouncements.

In late 2004, I was a consultant on Oprah Winfrey shows about emotional abuse in intimate relationships. The first two shows produced a fair amount of feedback from women complaining about the horrors of emotional abuse. But the third installment showed about 30 minutes of a 30-hour therapy of an abusive man, depicting, albeit in a highly condensed form, the excruciating process of change. Oprah's narration of the therapy and the obvious results of the reformed abuser and his newly confident wife started an avalanche of requests for treatment from men. In the first week after the show aired, we received more than a thousand emails and phone calls each day from men who recognized their problems with resentment, anger, or abuse and wanted help to change. The phenomenon of men coming forward to ask for treatment is completely unprecedented in research literature on abuse. Amazingly, the hope generated by Oprah and those TV shows continues more than three years after they were first aired.

Oprah Winfrey is unique among entertainment personalities in her ability to find and transmit hope amid the most painful examples of emotional pollution, as Senator Obama is unique among political figures for that same ability. They are successful because they cut through our cynicism and pain to touch the need for hope that may wither but will not die. They make us feel that we can be better persons.

CompassionPower
Oprah.com

Engines of Emotional Pollution II

Steven Stosny — Thu, 08 May 2008 08:56:08 -0700

In my last post I discussed the first two engines of emotional pollution: contagion and attunement. The second pair are negative bias and reactivity.

Negative Bias
To the great misfortune of human relationships, our emotions are negatively biased. Probably because negative emotions are more important for immediate survival - giving us the instant capability to avoid snakes in the grass and fend off saber tooth tigers - they gained priority processing in the primitive brain and continue to have great influence in modern times. So if you come home from work in a fairly good mood and find that your spouse is brooding or upset, attunement will bring him or her up a little and you down a lot. To keep from being "brought down" by the other's negative mood, many couples attempt to dull their sensitivity to the other's emotional world. This puts them squarely on the road to divorce, as it stenches the lifeblood of relationships -- compassion and appreciation -- both of which require openness to attunement.

Reactivity
You can think of emotional reactivity as a learned resistance to the unconscious pull of contagion and attunement. It can be obvious resistance, as in, "I'm not putting up with your attitude!" Or it can be passive resistance, as in trying to ignore you spouse's bad mood.

Of course, most of the time we don't want to resist contagion or attunement, because it helps us stay on the same page on a routine basis. Sporting events would be a lot less fun, if they existed at all, without the contagion of excitement. And while falling in love, the mere presence of your beloved fills you with fascination and joy. You thrill at the smile of your infant and revel in the excitement of a new friend. But as a function of attunement, reactivity also has a negative bias -- that which once thrilled you can eventually start to "push your buttons." Many of my clients who once loved it that their spouses greeted them at the door when they came home now resent them for "monitoring every time I walk in the door." She used to love his sense of humor, now she thinks he's sarcastic. He used to appreciate how she put him in touch with his feelings, now she's too emotional. These common relationship problems are reactivity confounding the natural process of attunement.

The aspect of reactivity that makes it difficult to see, let alone change, is its illusion of free will and ego independence, even "authenticity." You think that you are acting of your own volition and in your best interest, when you are merely reacting to someone else. We've all uttered (or at least thought) the most ironic of all statements, "You're not going to bring me down!" As long as you're in this reactive mode, you are down - reacting to negativity with negativity.

Trying to cope with emotional pollution on automatic pilot invariably increases reactivity and leads to the number one addiction of modern life: reactaholism. The reactaholic needs to react to others to know how he feels and what he thinks. You're probably a reactoholic if you feel that other people push your buttons. This unfortunate belief allows other people to live in your head and control your emotions. You become more reactive than proactive, more impulsive and less considered in your actions.

A quick test to see if you're a reactaholic is to notice how you approach a meeting. The reactaholic doesn't know what to do until someone gives him something to which he can react in a definite (usually ego-saving) way. Reactaholics need the low-grade arousal of reactivity to dispel self-doubt or to feel confident enough to form a decisive opinion.

Controlling people i.e., those who try to control others, are prime examples of reactaholics, although they don't seem to be. To lessen their anxiety about getting their buttons pushed, reactaholics try hard to control the behavior of others. My client, Shawna, like the vast majority of controlling people I have counseled, constantly told her beleaguered husband what to do. She had to; from her perspective it felt as if his behavior entirely controlled her emotions. If he would do something as trivial as absent-mindedly leaving his towel on the bathroom floor, she would feel overwhelmed with resentment and anger. "I get tense walking down the hall, because I know when I get to the bathroom, I'll see that he's left the toilet seat up again," she told me.

When Shawna considered making plans, she inevitably thought of how her husband might refuse to cooperate. To avoid such unpleasant thoughts, she stopped thinking about the future altogether, as reactaholics often do. This habitual avoidance of goal-setting is one reason that reactaholics never reach their full potential in life. Instead of planning how to achieve their goals, they simply avoid people and situations that push their buttons. Because so many people and situations have the power to do so, they never know how they will feel from one moment to the next. They can scarcely develop a consistent sense of self, for they will be different with each person who "makes" them react differently. If I'm one person with you and another with him and yet another with her, I won't know who the hell I am.

Reactaholism is the number one addiction because most of the others are vein attempts to numb the frustrating powerlessness of reactaholism.

Engines of Emotional Pollution

Steven Stosny — Mon, 05 May 2008 09:57:44 -0700

Operating almost entirely on an unconscious level, four mechanisms give force and power to emotional pollution. In fact, the four mechanisms - contagion, attunement, negative bias, and reactivity -- govern most human interactions.

Contagion
How do we know what they mean on the news when they say things like "the mood of the nation," or "the feel of the community?" These are metaphors that make no literal sense. Yet we understand perfectly what they mean, thanks to our intuitive awareness of emotional contagion. That's what makes you feel what the rest of the group feels. It's why experiments show that you are more likely to get impatient at a bus stop if other people are and wait more calmly if others seem resigned to the fact that the bus is late. And it's why the "electricity in the air" will get you excited at a sporting event, even if you were not particularly interested in the outcome of the game.

To understand the power of emotional contagion you only have to consider its survival advantage in early human history. Sharing group emotions gives us multiple eyes, ears, and noses with which to sense danger and opportunity. Hence it is common to all social animals - packs, herds, prides, and, in the case of early humans, tribes. When one member of the group becomes aggressive, frightened, or interested, the others do, too. Witnessing the fear or distress of another person in a group can easily invoke the same emotional state within us. Happy people at a party make us happy, caring people make us care, and the interested attract our interest. We avoid those who carry "chips on their shoulders" and those who "bring us down" or "make us anxious." And sporting events that lack at least a few excited spectators tend to bore us.

Like anything that affects emotional states, contagion greatly influences thinking. Opinion pollsters know that they get one set of responses to questions they ask of people in groups and another when they ask the same questions of individuals in private. It's not that these people are lying when in a group or that they change their minds when they're alone. It's more accurate to say that, at least on some issues, they have different public and private minds, due to the influence of emotional contagion.

The principle of contagion also accounts for "group think," which makes people act collectively against their own better judgment. The high-risk behavior of teen gangs occurs as emotional contagion spurs each kid to move far beyond his or her personal inhibitions. Similarly, corporate and governmental scandals reveal how otherwise good people can get swept up in a frenzy that overrides their personal morality. Emotional contagion produces solidarity parades, protest marches and, on the ugly side, "mob justice," lynching, riots, and looting. On a less dramatic level, it gives us constantly changing fashions, cultural fads, and political correctness.

Attunement
Attunement is a special kind of contagion that operates on a more intimate level. It automatically matches the intensity and tone of your emotions with those of someone else. In other words, you feel that person.

Social convention establishes norms for the range and intensity of emotional display. For example, you might feel like screaming on the subway when you read in the paper that your team blew the game on the last play, after you thought it was already won and went to bed. But you won't scream on the subway, just as you probably won't tell jokes at a funeral, even if you feel the dreary atmosphere could use some levity. As long as we stay within the boundaries of social convention, our bodies literally tune our emotions to one another. On those few occasions when you are consciously aware of it, it feels like your emotions are on the same "frequency" and "hit the same notes" as those of another person. They actually do synchronize. If you stop to think about it (and you usually don't) you know what the other person is feeling, because, in a very real way, you're feeling it, too.

Although our unconscious sensitivity to others is almost always active when we're not alone, it is not always accurate, i.e., we sometimes misconstrue what other people are feeling. However, we are far more accurate in sensing what others feel than in knowing what they think. This disproportionate accuracy between sensing another's feelings and judging their thinking leads to most of our misunderstandings of one another. Because we can pretty reliably tell when someone is, say, uncomfortable, we feel justified in guessing, albeit with far less accuracy, why they are uncomfortable or what their discomfort means. You might assume that your partner is aloof because he is irritated with you (or because you are irritated with him), when in reality he was still reacting to a harsh word his boss said to him before he left work. Attunement makes it pretty safe to assume what another is feeling but perilous to guess at what they are thinking or what their feelings mean to them.

Attunement begins with the first stirrings of life, as newborns naturally tune their emotions to those of their caregivers and vice versa - just try reading the paper when your baby is crying or calming her down when you're upset. When parents are anxious, infants are anxious, and when parents feel loving, their babies feel loving, too, as long as they're not experiencing physical discomfort. Throughout the lifespan, sensitivity to the internal experience of loved ones is the cornerstone of empathy, compassion, support, romance, and intimacy.

Unfortunately, the force of attunement is more powerful with negative emotions, such as resentment, annoyance, anxiety, or anger than with the positive emotions, which brings us to the third principle of emotional interactivity: negative bias. See the next post.

CompassionPower

Why We’re Vulnerable to Emotional Pollution

Steven Stosny — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:27:50 -0700

All animals, including humans, use emotional displays to interact with one another. Aggression is the most dramatic example. Dogs growl, cats arch their backs, snakes hiss, horses stand up and wave their front legs menacingly, bulls kick sand, apes beat their chests, and humans puff up their muscles. (Early humans use to roar, which is why you talk in a more menacing voice when angry and want to scream in traffic.) There are just as obvious though less dramatic gestures of courtship, affiliation, playfulness, and interest in humans and other social animals.

More recent observations suggest that all social animals, including humans, put out much more subtle emotional signals as well -- most of which are outside conscious awareness -- and that these, too, affect how we interact with one another. Like all social animals, we can pretty much feel when someone is putting out positive or negative emotional energy, even if he or she makes no overt behavioral indication. Although we can't tell what they're thinking, we can read the emotional tone of most people -- whether they are quiet or whether they are shouting -- with a fair degree of accuracy. Of course, the accuracy declines as we move further from loved ones, friends, neighbors, and members of our own culture.

How many times have you asked someone you know, "Is anything wrong?"

"No, nothing's wrong," is the abrupt response. You don't buy it because you know there is something wrong.

Even when we consciously try to shut out our unconscious perceptions of one another, we retain our natural sensitivity to each other's emotions. That's why you feel different when you ignore your spouse, compared to the way you feel when he or she is not in the room with you. It's why you feel different when you're the only one walking down your side of the street, compared to how you feel when the sidewalk is crowded with other people, whom you try to ignore.

This innate sensitivity to one another's emotional states derives from the social nature of our central nervous systems. From the beginning of our time on this planet, humans lived in groups and tribes. We are very much social animals, hard-wired to interact emotionally, in subtle yet profound ways, with everyone we encounter. On a deep, visceral level, we continually draw energy from and contribute energy to a dynamic web of emotion that consists of everyone we interact with and everyone with whom they interact. Each person you pass on the street subtly reacts to you and vice versa. Each person you pass in turn subtly influences each person he or she passes. In the web of emotion, you never react to just one person but to everyone that person has recently encountered.

Whether we like it or not, we are emotionally connected to virtually everyone we encounter. Our only choice is to make the connection positive or negative, to put out compassion or download resentment, to clean up emotional pollution, or contribute to it.

Crimes of the Ego: Emotional Pollution

Steven Stosny — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:24:28 -0700

Due to their immediate survival significance, negative emotions enjoy priority processing in the brain. This is one of nature's peculiar ironies, because positive emotions are actually more important to long-term survival. You have a better chance of living a longer, higher quality life if you experience more positive emotions than negative ones. You are certainly better off in the long run admiring the lovely green of the rolling hills, but you won't make it to the long run if you don't notice the snake lurking in the grass in front of you. Thus our brains are hard-wired to scan the immediate environment continuously for threat, which is why it takes so much effort to slow down and smell the roses.

The hard-wired threat-detector embedded in our central nervous systems makes a lot of sense in terms of keeping us safe from physical threats. Unfortunately, it has been hijacked in modern times to include threats to the ego. When ego grows, emotional pollution flows.

You can think of the ego as a compilation of the ways you prefer to think and feel about yourself combined with how you prefer others to think and feel about you. If a person needs to think of himself as important, he is likely to manipulate the impressions of others to make them think he is important. Psychologists refer to these attempts to manipulate the impressions that other people have of us as "impression management." Emotional polluters invest heavily in impression management. But they also have a safety-net when their efforts at impression management fall short. The polluter who fails to get others to think he's important will simply regard them as unimportant. Thus he feels more important by downward comparison to those who don't think he's important.

Emotional pollution becomes a major problem when assaults on the ego engage defense systems meant to keep us physically safe. That's why ego-threats can seem like life-and-death situations. (How else could a term like "death before dishonor" make sense?) This transfer of defenses dedicated to the survival of the species to the defense of the ego gives emotional pollution its terrible foothold on our psyches. Emotional pollutants make us feel put down, shut out, belittled, or diminished, whether or not we are consciously aware of the feelings.

Ironically, the defenses we develop to protect the ego against emotional pollution end up creating more of it, if we try to prevent others from making us feel put down, shut out, belittled or diminished by putting them down, shutting them out, belittling or diminishing them. The temptation is to dismiss the emotional polluter who needs to feel more important than you: "He's just a jerk." But then you're doing the exact same thing as he -- making yourself feel more important by regarding him as unimportant. That may defend your ego against his unfair assault, but when you react to a jerk like a jerk, what does that make you? Emotional pollution is an ego-defensive display of (usually subtle) psychological aggression that requires others to defend their egos in response. Thus it is inexorably self-perpetuating.

Although the ego is the point of attack, the toxic effects of emotional pollution go beyond the psychological. The defenses it invokes, which evolved to keep us physically safe, are emergency systems powered by corrosive stress chemicals that were never intended for use every day, not in anything like the frequency required to cope with emotional pollution. Thus we pay a high physiological price - in addition to the exorbitant psychological one -- for dealing with emotional pollution on a daily basis.

CompassionPower

The Cult of Feelings: Seeds of Emotional Pollution

Steven Stosny — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:56:21 -0700

The popular psychology movement in the United States consists of hundreds of self-help books, magazines, Internet blogs, TV talk shows, and radio advice/call-in programs. The movement derives from an outdated form of psychotherapy based on the superficial doctrine that how you feel is who you are. Thus we live in a "cult of feelings," where what you feel has become at least as important as what you do. (Think of all the news interviewers who shove microphones in the faces of politicians, perpetrators, and victims alike to ask the overwhelming question, "How do you feel?") Our pop culture places greater emphasis on personal feelings than personal values, on expressing how you feel rather than doing what you deeply believe is right, and on blaming (relief of guilt and shame) rather than improving. Displays of aggressive emotions -- to justify aggressive behavior, violence, or political criticism -- dominate TV and movie screens. Self-help books claim that to be "real" you have to explore all your feelings, without regard to the fact that "exploring" feelings amplifies and magnifies, i.e., distorts them, not to mention the fact that "exploring" your own feelings makes it difficult to see anyone else apart from your reaction to them. People are now entitled to express every negative feeling they have, without regard to the effects on others, just as they felt entitled to litter a few decades ago and to smoke in public a few years ago. The result is a world rife with emotional pollution that divorces the superficial experience of emotions from their deeper meaning.

No matter how many self-help books and experts on talk shows insist that your feelings are "valid" and "appropriate," they cannot feel authentically like your own so long as they are mere reactions to someone else. If we allow the meaning of our lives to be subject to the vagaries of our reactions to the subtle emotional displays of others, we cannot help but fall into the present day quagmire of emotional pollution.

To feel genuine and empowered, like a person of substance, folks need to know more than whether their emotions are "appropriate." They need to know what they mean about the self. The meaning of our emotions cannot lie in how they feel, but in what they tell us about the current fidelity to your deepest values. No matter how "appropriate" our entitlement, resentment, or anger may seem as a reaction to others, the more important question is this:

"Is my entitlement, resentment, or anger reflecting the kind of person I want to be?"

If not, I am blaming my failure to be the person I want to be on someone else.

Steven's Amazon blog

The Foothold of Emotional Pollution: Alienation

Steven Stosny — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:14:00 -0700

Why is it that you can feel compassion for a homeless person you see in the morning, yet when you spot him again at the end of the day, you're nagged by the thought that he won't even try to get his act together and look for a job?

What makes a disappointed child feel like giving up on everything when alone, but inspired to find something of interest as soon as she's with her friends?

How do we even know what they mean on the news when they use terms like the "mood of the nation" or the "feel of the community?"

These are not idle questions. Unless we understand how emotions happen in a social context and how they give meaning to events and behavior, there is no hope of knowing the self, let alone understanding another person or other cultures. There is a simple answer to the most resonant question about September 11, 2001: "Why do they hate us?" They hate us because we do not "see them." Couples divorce, children become alienated, and communities deteriorate for the same reason. We don't see each other because we react to a virtually invisible emotional tone that all people - indeed, all social animals - project.

Compelling evidence from a variety of scientific disciplines shows that we automatically and continuously synchronize with the facial expressions, voices, postures, movements, and emotional displays of others. This automatic emotional reactivity occurs in milliseconds, i.e., thousands of a second and is thus well outside conscious awareness. The milliseconds our brains take to process emotional tone is much faster than the formulation of thoughts, beliefs, and values. That is to say, we react to emotional tones emitted by others that have little to do with who they really are as people, and so we do not see them.

Because we fail to see our interactions with others in realistic, multi-perspective social contexts, we tend to regard our emotions in terms of whatever spouses, kids, bosses, underlings, clients, or some jerk on the road did or did not do:

"He really makes me mad."

"How can I relax when she's so uptight?"

"You're getting on my last good nerve."

These kinds of statements reflect a familiar and convenient way of thinking. They also underscore our inability to see the people we interact with apart from our reactions to them. Worse, they reinforce the self-alienation that comes from viewing our emotions as mere reflections of other people's behavior, which is like looking in the mirror and seeing someone else's face.

Social alienation interacts with self-alienation to make a potent fertilizer for emotional pollution.

The Challenge of Emotional Pollution: Put out Compassion or Download Resentment

Steven Stosny — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:27:34 -0700

The hidden effects of emotional pollution can be more harmful to your well being than breathing in someone else's cigarette smoke and more aesthetically disquieting than stepping over other people's trash. That's because emotions are far more contagious than any known virus.

Unfortunately, negative emotions are the most contagious. Due to their immediate survival significance, negative emotions get priority processing in the brain. It is more important to notice the snake in the grass than to appreciate the beauty of the lawn.

Think of how much overreaction you see in the course of typical day, while driving, in stores, at work, home, and on television. I'm not talking about dramatic flare-ups; think of the number of people you see who are not quite attuned to the moment and seem to bring emotion from somewhere else to the interaction you're observing. And what you see is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the effects of emotional pollution are unconscious, processed by the brain in thousandths of a second. For every overreaction you consciously perceive, there are hundreds of more subdued displays of negativity, which you are likely to internalize without knowing it. These can be scowls, impatient grimaces, vacant stares or looks of disgust, superiority, impatience, resentment, anger, or intolerance - so subtle that you aren't consciously aware of them or of how often your body and mind have to put up defenses against them. And here's the really sad news: Those very defenses - conditioned responses over time - are less likely to protect you from emotional polluters than to make you one of them.

If you are around a resentful, angry, sarcastic, narcissistic, petty, vindictive person, you are likely to respond in kind, at least in your head. Unless you make a conscious effort, they will make you almost as negative as they are. That much may not be surprising. The more alarming point is that you are just as likely to respond in that same negative way to the next person you encounter, unless, of course, he or she makes a special effort to be nice to you. But if your well being depends on other people making special efforts to be nice to you, in no time at all you'll become powerless over how you feel and, to a large extent, how you behave. You'll become a reactaholic, with the experience of your life controlled by an uncomfortable level of reactivity to emotional pollution in your environment.

In the world of emotional pollution, we either convince ourselves of a subtle sense of value for everyone we encounter, or run the risk of absorbing their subtle negativity; we put out compassion or download resentment.