Thread by @rdonoghue

Disliking something is only a motivation for action if something else is in play (usually a hot emotion). Otherwise, you’d just avoid it. Nobody gets online to shout about broccoli.

As a reader, look for that thing, ESPECIALLY when the speaker pretends it’s not there.

I should add, the antipattern here is not hot emotions, but rather the act of obscuring them (to others and possibly yourself).

At best, this is often “I am upset, but I can’t *say* I’m upset so instead I will argue that this upsetting thing is empirically bad”.

I am sympathetic to this. We’ve got a lot of social gravity telling us not to “be unreasonable”, and it’s hard to resist. Especially in print. Especially with strangers. We worry we might be seen as the bad actor. Or mean.

And that might even be true. Lots of expressions of hot emotions are harmful or upsetting.

This is a good reason to learn emotional skills.

It is a bad reason to pretend the emotions aren’t there.

Trying the end run hurts you AND it makes all the conversations around it worse. Because you cannot honestly speak to your hurt, you end up INVESTED in a worldview where the upsetting thing MUST BE BAD.

This might only be inconvenient, except those things are made of people.

I could be talking about politics or video games or the food network and it would all apply equally. And I know it’s not easy to fix, but I offer a fluffy sounding but very cynical tool to help: try joy.

Unlike upset and dislike, joy (or it’s close cousin, gratitude) CAN be shared directly without any weird proxy war. It has a different cadence and it offers good practice for talking about how you actually feel in a meaningful way.

Some like daily gratitude exercises for helping them appreciate life, and that’s awesome, but I consider them good training in the patterns of communicating in a more genuine and healthy way.

(Also, this is a process, not and end state. Screwing it up is something that I am pretty sure never stops. But at least you know you’re doing it.)

And to make the subtext text - the practice of speaking openly about “good” feelings is like lifting light weights so you can eventually speak openly about heavier things, like more upsetting ones.

Ok, coffee now, please.

Oh, life, you provide such examples.

Moments after posting this, I get a link that goop has a posted an article on using gratitude to e improve your sense of well being.

A cascade of emotions follows.

They include:
* frustration - people are going to think I cribbed this
* embarrassment - not only will they think I cribbed it, they’ll think I cribbed from a very bad source.
* shame - goop is not good. Am I in sync with not good?

There are more, but that’s a nice, tight cycle.

Easy solution is to point to the link with a wicked sarcastic remark about how bad goop is. There would be some sincerity here, because I don’t like goop, but that’s actually bullshit.

Because something is missing: I haven’t actually *read* the article.

It might actually be a fine article. Helpful and stuff. It could be good and useful stuff that I would share but I’m blowing off because of my little emotional tornado there. The article is less important to me than my feelings, so I create a story for those feelings.

Seeing that, I give myself room to shrug and drop it all. Maybe i’ll Read the article later, but if not, whatever. It’s done. I have seen my reaction and it no longer has power over me.

(Though i concede, public analysis of it has also probably helped with that)

I don’t share any of that because it’s super insightful or important, but rather there might be a chance that an emotional spin up like that (and the reaction that follows) is familiar to you, and you should know you’re not alone.

Ok, NOW coffee.

Ok, as it brews, brief clarification.

The problem is not that I *had* those emotions. I’m not proud of them, but those are things I genuinely felt.

The problem is that I almost picked a fight with goop when goop had not picked a fight with me.

The success was not ignoring these emotions, but understanding them. In this case, i could see them as fluff, but if there had been a more serious emotion (fear, for example) then i want to see that clearly because that’s *important*

That mini-storm of emotions can obscure more serious issues or lead to dismissing real concerns because they are mixed in with more easily dismissable feelings.

“I am annoyed by and scared of this person” is a feeling you want to watch. And you don’t want the charming person to address/dismiss the “annoyed” and leave you feeling like the “scared” can’t be valid anymore. That’s a BAD situation.

All of which is to reiterate: the problem isn’t feelings. It’s just a matter of what skills you learn and use with those feelings.