Feeling Delicious

A friend wrote me a discourse about depression and such, followed by the PS “I think you would argue that a ‘painful’ emotion is not a ‘bad’ emotion.” hehehe – he was right, that’s exactly what I was thinking!

There ain’t no such thing as negative and positive, good and bad, esp when it comes to emotions. They’re all different colours and tastes and textures. I choose to group emotions into taste categories, like sweet, sour, savoury, bland, tangy, spicy, etc.

I really like the concept of tastes and hungers re: emotions, coz hungers get satiated and return, tastes vary from moment to moment. They’re a message, a calling from deep within us, calling us to go open the fridge and search for meaning, pick up the phone and delivery menu, a call to action to make a change to our biochemistry, our focus, a call to give ourselves a boost of nurturing and nutrition. Emotions are that same call to action.

The biggest issue comes when we misinterpret emotions, or when they get stuck in an inappropriate trigger/anchor loop. And some complement each other, and some clash.

And it’s not just doctors that focus on ‘taking the pain away,” loved ones and bystanders do that too. Often loved ones can be the most potent enablers of all. Empathy is a bad idea if you use it to make people (or yourself) feel more comfortable staying in one emotion or another (even excitement), instead of interpreting those emotions as a call to action. If ANY emotion hangs around too long, you end up stuck and numb.

The key, I feel, is flexibility and interpretation, and not getting stuck on unaware autopilot, salivating on cue like pavlov’s mutts (aware autopilot is way cool, tho).

I fully, fully, fully agree with the inarticulate nature of ‘depression’. After working with some teens earlier this year, I actually did a post on precisely that, with a bunch of emo-vocab to play with…… (my most highly commented/replied-to post to date, btw) http://jdverse.wordpress.com/2006/06/15/make-or-break-words/