Emotions and the Ethical Journey

Without getting into the science of how our brains work, suffice it to say that science today pretty much backs up what Aristotle, in ancient times, intuited by observation: that ethical choices require emotional feeling (passions), cognitive thinking (rationality), and will – a commitment to take action based, we hope, on balancing feeling and thinking. They’re also intertwined:  What we think about what we feel, and what we feel about what we think, influences how we act, and how we act determines who we are, in actuality.

And we know more than Aristotle did how difficult it can be to actually know our feelings and recognize them.  It is more difficult than Aristotle acknowledged to recognize thoughts as ideas in our heads, stories we tell ourselves, assumptions and conclusions based on our culture and experience, and not as truths out there in the universe.  And getting ourselves to act in accord with our values and what we want – to walk our talk – is everyone’s ethical challenge.

Here’s something we know that Aristotle might have intuited but didn’t really know: we are built for emotions.  We have a well-developed system to react when we feel fear.  We have the ability to feel sadness and grief. We can experience both care and lust. We have built-in urges to learn and to seek novelty and significance.  We have a whole system for dealing with play.  These are all emotional systems within the brain, which function with chemical and electrical systems – but which also affect how we relate to people.

Guilt, blame, shame and anger are built on these systems, and how much we are driven by guilt, blame, shame and anger depend on how well we have learned to deal with our emotions.  Childhood experiences – how we were parented – affect how our emotions get triggered, how we deal with our emotions, and therefore how we will treat ourselves and others -- and we can heal and change as adults.  Really difficult adult experiences can also impact how effectively we deal with our emotions – PTSD being an extreme example of this.

Emotions are momentary – when we grasp onto those emotions, we create another level of emotion that can hold us in their grip.  Blame, shame, guilt, anxiety – these are all based on emotions, but are ways that we hold on to the emotional feelings, multiplying it, letting them hold us within their grip.

Learning to unpack the emotions and motivations and experiences behind blame, shame, guilt and anxiety – that’s an important part of the ethical journey.  We all have them to some extent – they serve some self-protection story in our heads or we wouldn’t hold them.  But we are held back in our ethical journey when blame, shame, guilt and anxiety determine our actions.  We are less likely to see others – or even ourself – as beings of worth if we are in the grip of those emotions.

And so one aspect of the ethical journey is dealing with our emotional life – not turning it off, because that’s impossible, but learning to calm ourselves, be receptive to change, be less reactive to our emotions and more intentional about which we choose to act upon.