Emotion is Memory
In addition to all the other things emotion is – such as vivid response to the present moment – it is also, and always memory. Indeed memory is coded emotionally, not intellectually or factually, as we like to think. As we experience when we can’t remember something we want to know again very much; but it eludes us. The missing connective bridge to the memory will only appear when the feeling or feelings that originally filed it spontaneously appear. This happens because the psyche tries, whenever possible, to help our conscious desires – and usually will succeed if our consciousness will only get out of the way.
In being a vivid response to the present moment, emotion reconstructs what we already know about what just happened; which also may be new, or at least have new parts, which probably surprised us. Instantly we make it familiar, eliminating the surprise, by superimposing emotional memory, and the interpretation it arrived at in our last encounter, making the present just like the past. The most frequent example is when we perceive threat as insurmountable because it’s always felt that way, that instead of opportunity to change that dreadful pattern, we’ll most likely make a fool of ourselves.
Relying upon memory, and its traditions, we immediately orient ourselves, thereby ameliorating our fear of inevitable newness – even if doing so leaves us partly stupid about what’s really going on. We are so engrained in our habit of denying newness, and the angst it always brings, that it must hit us over the head many times before we hear the new part of what’s also old and familiar.
Our relative incompetence in dealing with newness is the result of a very simple problem – our great fear of fear. Anything new requires adaptation, which will most likely shake up – fearfully – more parts of our nature than we think have any relevancy to what we thought just happened. But that’s the subject of another article (See Fear – The Most Misused Emotion). Newness-embraced is like inviting a stranger into our home to live there… perhaps permanently.
Emotion is as much memory as it is response to something in the present. Indeed memory may be its largest part. We usually think of emotion as something free floating, spontaneous, having a will and a purpose of its own – perhaps the freest part of human nature. There is truth to this belief; emotion is spontaneous, which makes it our best judge of truthfulness. But emotion is not “free” as we like to imagine. Though definitely spontaneous and impulsive, emotion is very tied, and obedient to the habits that it originally created, throughout life derives from, and perpetually supports. In the big picture of a life, if untouched by careful exploration, feelings will permanently reproduce the emotional events of childhood, both positive and traumatic ones, superimposed upon whatever else may be happening in the present.
We do not control our fate; we just influence it. We are programmed by those who raised us, not as a villainous happening; just normally in the course of events, because of who they are and what they know, or don’t know, and what happened to them, or didn’t. We all know this in part; but we retain our belief in the conscious power of intentionality as the agency that runs our personal psychic experience. When it is emotional memory that runs it, convincing us beyond any reasonable doubt that the past is still running our life, though the characters doing it have changed; yet they’re behaving just like people have always treated us, good or bad, making the past still true in the present.
This spurious assumption is seldom examined; tragically one has to regard them selves as “mentally ill” in order to qualify for the learning opportunity of reexamining their assumptions – what we call “psychotherapy” – in order to explore, and improve upon their parent’s programming.
Intention is the big pretender in all of us, imagining itself to be the cause of everything, and in the process telling us a story in which we are the central character. Of course this is something we need to do to give our particular life meaning; but we need to learn how to do it with far less pretense. In its present form intentionality is a construct built by a child who imagines themselves omnipotent; yet who is also grown up enough to know its power isn’t valid in the world of science and objects – but convinced it remains true in personal matters.
Though psychotherapy is believed to be very incompetent, one of its remarkably simple accuracies is its ability to construct a diagram of any human character. Indeed one can predict the basic events of a person’s life by answering one simple question: what are the dominant emotions of this person’s daily experience? These will gather around two basic, but very different clusters – depression and happiness. Depending upon how severe and frequent the depression is, the attending emotions can include temporary disappointment and discouragement; or in contrast self-shame, humiliation and guilt-ridden hidden rage. And depending upon how much happiness must rely upon pretense, it will include denial of any problems, a love-conspiracy never to expose the unfinished business of each other’s life, providing a sense of relatively safe companionship. More fully funded happiness will include great personal satisfaction in career, most likely successful friendships that become the foundation of successful loving, and an ample supply of the joy of living.
Just within the last 10 years psychotherapy has finally learned how to be far more effective in treating even the most difficulty of problems to a much greater extent than most people realize. What this success has revealed is that whatever emotional experience we have as an adult is precisely the same one we had as children. Thus, present events are always a reenactment of past happiness or trauma. The one is predictive of the other in whichever direction we are looking. Emotion is like an elephant; it remembers everything in great detail.
My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com