We live in a culture that values feeling:
- How do you feel?
- Do what feels right.
- What do you feel like doing?
- How do you feel about the heavy use of pastels in the baby’s room?
- What’s your feeling about the game tonight?
- If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.
- Have you experienced any loss of feeling in your fingers or toes since you ate all that arsenic?
Additionally, we have a tendency to look at emotions as something inflicted upon us:
- She made me angry.
- How does that make you feel?
- He made me cry.
- He makes me feel ugly.
- You make me feel like a natural woman.
So… we live in a society that emphasizes emotional states but at the same time has a tendency to minimize our accountability for those feelings and, by extension, how we manage them. We require standardized levels of competence in math, English, history, biology, etc. but have no standardized curriculum for teaching children how to manage their feelings.
A couple years ago, my wife and I were sitting in a waiting room. I don’t remember the room, nor do I remember what we were waiting for. What I do remember, however, was the little girl (probably between the ages of 2 and 3) who, at one point during a disagreement with her father about staying seated, held up her fist and said – with the utmost sincerity – “don’t make me hurt you!” My wife and I just looked at each other, quietly horrified.
I really wanted to wonder about what was happening. I wanted to experience confusion and ignorance about where a three year old girl would learn to shake her fist and make threats of physical violence. I wanted to think it was somehow cute and harmless. Of course, we don’t always get what we want. My wife and I both knew: the little girl learned how to express her anger from her parents; she learned that it’s okay to strike another person out of anger; and she learned that doing so was not something for which she had to be accountable – because they didn’t hold themselves accountable when they hit her. They probably didn’t even call it anger, they probably called it “discipline”.
Hurray for emotional imprinting.
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