Catharsis
If you have ever undergone a traumatic experience, the chances are you can recall some lugubrious afternoon on which you unburdened yourself of it in front of a helpless friend or family member. The question I would like you to consider is this: Did you really feel any better as a result? Did each word of your dark story carry away a little piece of the darkness? Did your tears, if you shed any, lighten your burden of sorrow by even the tiniest amount, even by an amount equal to the weight of those tears? It is more probable that you felt much worse: You shared your pain but you did not halve it, you doubled it, because pain simply grows to fill the space made available for it. Perhaps at last you looked to your humiliated confidant and realized your mistake. Perhaps you wiped away a tear, roughly, with your sleeve as he or she uttered awkward platitudes (what else, poor soul, could they do?) and placed a hand gingerly on your knee. If a little joke is ventured it is both to lighten the mood and to bring the miserable interview to a close. You understand this and smile feebly.
The popular idea that we should talk to others about our feelings instead of letting them fester is, I think, based on a false analogy to infection. The person who takes this point of view assumes that emotional pain is like a boil that needs to be opened and drained and that this is best achieved by telling others the worst things that have happened to us and how they made us feel. But if we must compare psychological processes to physiological ones, what is to stop us comparing an emotional scar to a sutured laceration instead of a festering boil? To heal it needs to be left alone and the worst thing one can do is poke, pick and prod it. In his book The Palaces of Memory, George Johnson observes that, “every time you walk away from an encounter, your brain has been altered, sometimes permanently. The obvious but disturbing truth is that people can impose these changes against your will. Someone can say something—an insult, a humiliation—and you carry it with you as long as you live. The memory is physically lodged inside you like a shard of glass healed inside a wound.” The simile is a little misleading because, unlike a shard of glass, a traumatic imprint shares in common with the brain that contains it a remarkable degree of plasticity and malleability, but the reminder that memories are physical is instructive. It is a precept of neurology that each act of remembrance strengthens the synaptic connections between the neurones representing that memory in our brain. Are we not therefore increasing our capacity to suffer each time we describe a traumatic experience? Recent experimental research, while it does not explicitly support this view, does call into question the value of talking to others about traumatic experiences. In one study discussed by Richard Wiseman in his book 59 Seconds, a group of participants at a Belgium university were asked to discuss a negative experience from the past with a supportive experimenter every day for two months. While at the end of the study the participants thought the chats had been helpful, they scored no better on an emotional wellbeing questionnaire than the control group. According to Wiseman, additional research suggests that in the short term it is actually best to distract oneself from negative memories, and in the long term, to draw some unexpected benefit from them. “This may sound like wishful thinking,” he admits, “but trauma has been proven in a number of cases to increase empathy, wisdom, gratitude, and so on.” And anyway, besides the assumption under discussion (the therapeutic benefit of talking about our feelings) is another, equally but less obviously false: that the desired outcome of every conflict is the mitigation of one's own suffering. Physical pain protects our body from harm and anybody incapable of experiencing it would be capable of calmly lowering himself into a bath of boiling water and not realizing his mistake until his skin began to peel off. Emotional pain, in a like case, reminds us of what it is in our best psychological interests to avoid. But perhaps there is an even more durable justification. Perhaps it is helpful to consider mental pain as simply one the substantive attributes of certain experiences, as yellowness is one of the substantive attributes of a lemon. To recall those experiences without the correct complement of mental pain is, therefore, to recall them falsely. |