Avoiding Emotions Is Avoiding Life

Why do we prefer to avoid strong emotions rather than experience them fully? What avoidance mechanisms do we often use, and what consequences might this lead to? How have religious practices over the centuries helped people ignore their feelings, and why is it so difficult to give up such practices? Read this translation of a short excerpt from the book by Italian psychoanalyst Antonino Ferro, Avoiding Emotions, Living Emotions (Taylor & Francis, 2011), in which he offers his (not always uncontroversial) answers to these questions.

I would like to reflect on how the avoidance of emotions becomes one of the primary functions of our mind. If this mode clearly predominates over others, it then becomes a symptom.

We have a wide variety of mechanisms for avoiding or evacuating unpleasant emotions from the psyche. This can take the form of an almost harmless projection of our own negativity onto external objects and events, leading us to condemn them. Or there may be dangerous mechanisms for transferring emotional content from the inside out, such as paranoia, schizophrenia, hallucinations, and delusions.

Emotions can even be displaced into one’s own body in the form of psychosomatic illnesses or into the social body in the form of manifestations such as mass aggression, deviant behavior, crime, and so on.

It bears repeating that avoidance is a psychological mechanism inherent, of course, in every person’s thinking. But if this mechanism prevails and unbearable emotional experiences cannot be “processed” properly, they remain in this “half-raw” state and inevitably settle in a person’s consciousness, forming a sort of deposit there.

These raw proto-emotional clumps then give rise to the full range of psychological symptoms: various phobias (if the goal is to avoid confronting unpleasant knowledge about oneself); obsessive-compulsive behavior (if the main goal is to establish control); hypochondria (if the strategy consists of shifting the emotion to a specific organ or the entire body), and so on.

Various forms of autistic manifestations also serve this purpose—to remain unaware of one’s own sensory experience. Studying José Bleger’s concepts of the “agglutinated core” of autism and the tenets of Thomas Ogden’s autistic-sensory theory regarding the core of autism helps to understand this phenomenon more clearly.

But now let’s look at some strategies people use to avoid confronting emotions—or, rather, their “raw” precursors that have never been metabolized.

One of the most “successful” strategies is narcissism.

Take, for example, my patient with a narcissistic personality structure.

He is a mid-level manager at a large financial group. During a session, he recounted two dreams.

In the first dream, he covers the distance from his home to my office (about a couple of kilometers). He tries to walk in a straight line, looking down on passersby as he goes. Perhaps he considers himself more educated than they are. But then it turns out that the real reason he strictly follows his chosen path is to avoid crossing the street unnecessarily—he’s afraid of oncoming cars that might run him over.

And if we view this dream as a message about his emotional state, we can assume that his emotions possess such kinetic force, such power, that they could simply “crush” him. Thus, as long as he remains at a safe distance from every dangerous, accelerating proto-emotion, he feels whole and unharmed, retaining the ability to maintain a “straight” line of reasoning.

The second dream is even more interesting. The patient dreams that he is the captain of a galleon, where everything must run perfectly. The crew constantly conducts checks: are the sails set perfectly, are there any leaks, and so on. Thus, everything is arranged perfectly, and the ship faces no danger. But the patient’s anxiety grows; he believes that if even the slightest thing is out of place, a catastrophe will occur. The sails will inevitably tear, and even a small leak will cause the ship to sink. To prevent this, he tightens discipline, then devises a dishonorable discharge, but even that isn’t enough; next comes a court-martial and even a death sentence.

We can assume that in this man’s life, too, everything must be perfect: grades in school, success at work, ideal dinners with friends. And if anything turns out to be out of place—it will lead to disaster. But why?

Because—and this is the answer we arrive at together—any imperfection triggers emotions that are difficult to manage; in other words, it’s as if he had no crew on board (that is, in his mental space) to navigate and cope with emergencies—emotional winds or strong waves.

The efforts my patient makes to achieve perfection and keep his ship afloat are enormous. But they are simply nothing compared to what he might face if new, powerful, and unfamiliar emotions are triggered—emotions whose emergence he is powerless to predict.

I believe that autistic behavior has the same roots. In autism, the consistency of every detail, the repetition of every gesture, as well as the miniaturization of emotions—or “bonsai emotions,” as one of my patients put it—serve to prevent the very same emotional storms that are impossible to cope with.

And in everyday life, let’s face it: we usually quell all our fiery passions through routine, repetition, boredom, or by intellectualizing that emotional lava that’s on the verge of erupting. Why does this happen? Simply to avoid pulling the pin on our emotional grenade.

For example, my patient, Carmelo, prefers a routine life with his unloved wife rather than taking a risk and finally reaching the Pillars of Hercules, which he dreams of every time he meets an interesting female colleague at work. And so, instead of committing to a new relationship, he prefers to stick with what’s familiar and safe. He carefully nurtures the domesticated aspects of his own personality and isn’t ready to set out in search of new emotional dimensions.

The strategies people devise to keep their emotions on a leash are extremely varied. Consider, for example, anorexia. We recall that people with anorexia consider themselves fat even though they are thin. In this case, the unbearable split-off parts of the personality (or proto-emotions) are projected in reverse and remain, as it were, invisible. But they can be discerned if we use a sort of “binoculars” through which we bring together the split psyche and see just how substantial and significant this enormous gap between actual weight and imagined weight is for the anorexic. Thus, it is not an awareness of reality, but precisely this splitting that paradoxically allows the person to feel whole and intact, yet has a devastating effect on their body.

I have always been a firm believer that such psychoanalytic conclusions can be drawn only within the context of a psychoanalytic setting in the therapist’s office. However, allow me to contradict myself by drawing on the opinion of Alessandro Manzoni, who speaks of the inscrutable nature of that complex fabric known as the human heart. Thus, I believe that various macrosocial phenomena also serve to block unwanted emotional states, but at the societal level.

Take, for example, fanaticism or a religion that guarantees the attainment of truth and the acquisition of unshakable faith and peace of mind. Let’s think about it: after all, it really is quite safe—to think of oneself as a divine whim without purpose or reason, without all those “before” and “after” moments, without wandering in the darkness where it’s too scary, where there is physicality, where there are many emotions. Well, religion really is the opium of the people. But let’s remember that in medicine, opium is used to relieve unbearable pain. And the idea that the meaning of life can lie only in life itself—and that there is absolutely nothing in it that transcends it—can cause unbearable emotional suffering that requires solace.

It seems that society in ancient times intuitively grasped the idea of the need to work through strong emotions, and at one time this was done within the framework of religious practices; however, in modern societies, the development of psychoanalysis at the intersection of other sciences offers new possibilities, and each of us can choose the approach that resonates most with us.

Translated by psychotherapist S.V. Belukhina. Read more…

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