Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Pain and Conflict part 2

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

Jealousy comes in two forms: jealous love and jealous self-pity. The self-pity form is the basis of sexual desire (this form produces dependency), whilst the love form is the basis of caring for another person, whether a partner or a child. Jealous love is non-sexual; when combined with anxiety, this kind of love can turn into possessiveness and the desire to control the other partner or the child. Hence a mother who is normally good and caring can turn into a controlling mother when she is under stress.

A strong passion in a relationship is an indication that jealousy is very active. The strong bond between two people is based on the love within jealousy. So long as the relationship is positive, then the jealousy is also positive and produces the intensity of joy between the partners. However, when a person is not having a good day, then his irritability and nagging and criticisms easily turn the jealousy into possessiveness and the desire to control the other person. Then such nagging is likely to be interpreted by the partner as fault-finding, and this can generate resentment in the partner.

Jealousy gets a relationship started, but once it has been going for a while, the best way to be assured that it will continue is to try and balance the roles of jealousy and narcissism within the relationship. Jealousy brings the partners together, but it also brings together all the frustrations that are automatically generated by having to live in an inharmonious world. It can be so easy to dump the frustrations of one’s job or the shopping onto the partner. To prevent this happening, some degree of privacy may be essential in a relationship if it is to survive for a long time. So narcissism has a value in allowing the partners to have periods of breathing space from each other. Each person can have time out on their own in order to wind down after coming home after a stressful day at work. Each partner can relax by themself for a time so that the stresses can dissipate. Then they can interact as usual with each other for the rest of the evening. The balance between togetherness and time out will have to be negotiated by each couple. It is by trial and error that a balance can be found.

Love is supposed to cement a relationship. However, few people have any clear idea of what they mean by love. Analysis reveals that loving oneself and loving another person are separate realities. Loving oneself is the basis of self-confidence and the ability to be an individual; this love is the love mode of narcissism. Loving another person represents the love mode of jealousy and is the basis of caring for others. A person who is harmoniously balanced will love himself and perhaps also love another person as well. A person can hate himself and love another person, but his self-hate will put limitations on his love for that person, by making himself excessively needy and dependent. A person can love himself and hate other people, but his social hatreds will similarly put limitations on his love for himself, by making him excessively egotistical.

The problems of jealousy in a family will impact on the child. A sensitive child can interpret the mother’s jealousy as a means to control and manipulate him, and so he feels threatened. This adverse reaction to jealousy has long-term effects. When the child becomes an adult, he will either be wary and fearful of entering into relationships with women or else he may desire such relationships but does not have much ability to relate sexually with women (because he is too scared of them). The most common way of overcoming this fear, at least temporarily, is to generate a lot of excitement. Hence the person seeks relationships that are exciting. However, when the excitement wears off, the fear returns.

Difficulties with other Emotions

I briefly note some of the other important emotions we need to be skilful with.

a). Since we are trying to resolve our weaknesses, two emotions which occur repeatedly during analysis are resentment and bitterness. Resentment arises when we explore our social traits and attitudes, especially those involving sexual issues. Resentment makes us clean up our morals. Bitterness affects us when we explore the patterns of authority and dominance in society; the bitterness propels us to be more self-reliant and less dependent on other people. These two emotions tend to make us hard in our beliefs about ourself and society, removing softness from our outlook on life. We become conservative and even right-wing. If we can persevere in our explorations of our mind, we will eventually lose this hardness and become more evenly balanced emotionally.

b). Another important emotion we regularly encounter is anxiety, usually on a daily basis. It is often attached to strong beliefs and is also experienced along with other emotions. It produces psycho-somatic symptoms like eye-ache, the need to bite one’s nails, some kinds of headaches, the need to smoke cigarettes, … During analysis, anxiety will often become very intense for a time. Anxiety unsettles us, and so provides the emotional dynamism to continue with the analysis till we have gone as far as we can go with it.

c). As we go through life, we often begin to become more sensitive. We may develop this sensitivity deliberately by stimulating our creativity, or it happens unintentionally through our experience of relationships. The overall effect is that when we begin to acquire sensitivity, our feelings about important things gradually increase in intensity too. An unwelcome difficulty here is that the stimulation of sensitivity also produces the development of fear within us.

Now we don’t usually learn much about life when times are good. However, when times are bad, we think about what went wrong and often resolve not to repeat the disasters if possible. So when times are bad, or when psychological relationships go wrong, then we increase the level of fear within us. The reason for this is that fear and sensitivity usually go together within the mind.

As our fear builds up within the mind, it becomes more and more difficult to harmoniously handle difficult situations. We begin to hate such situations. We lose skills in negotiation, or the attempts to find a middle way.  So we often graduate to some common negative ways of handling such situations: we prefer to avoid them, ignore them, or run away from them. We become conscious that such difficult situations cause us fear: the symptoms fear generates can be sweating armpits and hands, cold feet, increased pulse rate, head aches, panic attacks, etc.

Difficulties with Intensity

The way we feel about ourself and about other people changes as our emotional state of mind changes. Emotions have always been the most difficult part of life for a person to handle in a mature manner. Their function is to put intensity into various aspects of our life; for example, our relationships with people we love are more intense than our relationships with people we like. We usually do not mind when intensity is put into the emotions we like; what we dislike is when intensity is put into emotions that distress us. Unfortunately we do not have control over how intensity affects us. Our life becomes intense when the emotional influences acting on us become intense. Intensity affects the whole of the mind. Then we find that not only our “good” emotions become intense but so too do the “bad” emotions.

Sometimes intensity seems to disappear. Then we seem to be emotionally “flat”. This happens in states like depression. Some people think that sometimes we lack emotion in some of our responses: this is a common claim in criminal courts where the convicted person seems to show no emotional response to public condemnation of his crimes. What is happening here? Do we sometimes become free of emotion? No. At no time in our life are we ever free of emotion. When we are depressed, our mood is usually one of guilt, or self-hate, or self-pity. When we show no emotion in court, then our mood is usually hatred of the society that helped cause our inner turmoil in our childhood. Low-intensity hatred, whether self-hate or hatred of other people, seems to stabilise a person emotionally, so that whilst in that mood of hatred the emotional swings disappear, leaving the person unresponsive to a large degree.

Mood Changes

An issue that is likely to confuse us as we attempt to change positively is the link between personality and mood. If we don’t have any understanding of the subconscious mind, then we tend to think that we have only one consistent personality, ego, or sense of identity. But it is more complicated than that. What happens is that our emotions and moods regularly change throughout the day and night. This changing pattern affects all our beliefs and attitudes. The way that we feel about any situation will change as our mood changes. The more sensitive that we are, the more we are affected by this pattern of change and the more upsetting it can be. So we can either choose to believe that we have just one personality, which is highly changeable, or that we have several sub-personalities.

All the beliefs that are important to us are underpinned by emotional influences, that is, the beliefs that shape our view of ourself are always emotive beliefs. Beliefs that carry no emotional influence for us are simply superficial ones that we subscribe to purely for convenience or entertainment. Hence what happens is that as our emotions change, the emotional intensity that we are currently feeling changes as well. So if any strong belief is currently flowing through my mind for some time, then as my mood changes, the intensity which I subscribed to that belief changes too. In other words, a belief or attitude may be influential in our mind for some time, but during that time the emotion which energises it may change, and so the belief or attitude changes to some degree.

For example: we may be thinking about the issue of immigration to our country. If our mood is one of pride (in hate mode) then we may be passionately patriotic and antagonistic to immigrants in our locality. But when our mood changes to more social ones like jealousy (in love mode), then our antagonism fades and we may be more receptive to welcoming immigrants into our locality.

So a person may be vain for a few hours, then jealous a little while later, and then in some other mood a little later again. Anxiety may be present with some emotions and may intensify them. But like other emotions, the intensity of the anxiety varies. So if my mood is high (for example, love), then other people do not make me unduly anxious, but when my mood changes to a low one like self-pity or hatred, then my anxiety level rises when I am with people.

Subconscious Activities of the Mind

The subconscious mind has its own ways of operating and these sometimes have little resemblance to the ways of the conscious mind. I briefly describe four important ways.

d). First of all, the subconscious mind likes to pair things and issues and feelings. So, for example, what you love, you also hate. This pairing acts like a see-saw, with the conscious mind and the subconscious mind being the two opposing ends. Hence if you consciously like something, then you also subconsciously dislike it. And if you consciously dislike something, then also you subconsciously like it.

Quite often the most easily detectable form of this see-saw is the relationship between fear and excitement. This means that when fear is uppermost in our mind (we know that something is scaring us), then excitement about that same something is usually uppermost in the subconscious mind. When excitement is uppermost in our mind, fear about the same thing is usually uppermost in our subconscious mind. We are not usually aware that what excites us can also easily scare us too. This relationship becomes visible during psychological therapy.

For example, suppose a difficulty in our relationship with a significant other person causes us fear. If we then analyse our difficulty in a suitable way, as in counselling or psycho-analysis, our intuition starts functioning and we have insights into the difficulty. We then become excited (this stage is what I call catharsis).[²]. The fear is replaced by excitement. So for a short time the relationship, instead of being fearful, becomes exciting.

e). Another common tactic of the subconscious mind is that it likes to go round in circles. It keeps repeating its influence in the same old ways. It will not change until the person is prepared to make an effort to change it. The effect of this is that when we are in a difficult situation which is familiar to us, we tend to repeat our old ineffective way of handling it instead of trying something new. In order to change this behaviour we have to begin learning about ourself.

f ). Emotions are tied to our beliefs, attitudes and memories. This attachment means that our beliefs, attitudes and memories allow us to express emotion. However, the attachment also means that we sometimes adopt conflicting behaviours in our various relationships. Now emotions are always changing as they flow through the mind. So when an emotion rises up and makes its presence felt, what seems to happen is that we subconsciously think of, or remember, a situation in which we can express that emotion. For example, if narcissism becomes my current emotion, then I do a quick subconscious search and see if I can think of or remember an object for focusing my narcissism on. I remember a friend for whom I feel camaraderie (which is based on narcissism), and so now as I think of him I can bask in the narcissism. Perhaps a little later the emotion of envy rises up and again I do a quick subconscious search for something I can attach the envy to. I may think of my friend again, only this time I focus on what it is about him that I can envy. Because this searching is done subconsciously, we are not usually aware of doing it.

So overall, when an emotion pops up into consciousness, we need to find an object which allows us to express that emotion. The object can be ourself, especially for emotions like guilt and shame, or the object can be another person we know, or the object can be generalised into a class of objects (such as our responses to politicians, foreigners, rich people, poor people, etc).

g). When our emotions are currently intense, then they help to create dramas in our life. It is usually irrelevant whether the drama is good or bad. It is not possible just to have good dramas: when we focus on intensity in our emotions we get both good and bad results. We cannot have one without the other. Usually we want good dramas, since we like excitement; the drawback is that we have to learn suitable ways of handling bad dramas. Or we can repudiate the idea of drama and try and seek a life that is quite bland and unexciting. Blandness is really only suitable for periods when we want to relax from the stresses of life for some time. If we are full of life, a bland life will make us discontented quite quickly, once the novelty wears off.

[¹].  I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [1]

[²]. Catharsis is described on the Home page, in the article on Abreaction 3. [2]

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