Feeling Emotion
There are people who are cut off from their emotions. The kind of salesman who can sell a faulty car to a pensioner with absolutely no compunction. The 'ice maiden', the cold hearted woman who will use her allure to attract a man and use him for his money.
On the other hand are those who are emotionally sensitive. The person who is always wondering if something they said may have caused offence or if they made the right decision. The emotional introverts turn this inward and it can suffocate their life. The emotional extraverts turn this outward and vocalise their feelings. It's often been said that the best artistic heights are reached through suffering, and it's certainly true that many great artists go through emotional trauma. I've mentioned before ('Working on the Emotions') about how singers can open themselves up to their emotions, sometimes with devastating psychological and physiological results.
Women are generally closer to their emotions then men, and many women resent this. They feel it makes them less able to cope in a male-dominated world. To compound this is the issue that their emotional cycle can go haywire at certain times of the month. Scientists have examined the brain using a CAT scan whilst people are exposed to pain. They found an interesting phenomenon: in men the intellectual area of the brain was excited whilst in women the emotional area was excited. This has important repercussions in the way men and women perceive the world. It also explains why women go through such pain at childbirth - it sets up a strong emotional bond between the mother and baby.
As a reaction to this feeling of emotional vulnerability that women feel, there is a theme that runs through many women's magazines that women should be more selfish. I've even heard interviews with women who say, as a source of pride, that they are going to think only of themselves and others who say they are bringing up their daughters to think only of themselves. This is a ridiculous attitude and the saving grace is that these intellectual platitudes are incapable of having any effect on the powerful emotional drive. New years resolutions fail for the same reason.
In reality people who feel have a richer life than those who are cut off from their feelings. It's like marriage; there are highs and lows but most people who have been through this see it as enriching their lives. The solution is to learn to become detached from your emotions. This sounds like a contradiction, but it is possible to learn to observe your feelings in the same way as you can learn to observe other people. Of course some people never even learn that and react emotionally, even violently, to other people's actions. If you can develop this detachment you can have the benefits of feeling, of empathy and of being guided by your emotions, without being carried away by them.
