Emotional Ignorance ($)

Maybe humans aren’t so smart after all.

“We are dangerous when we are not conscious of our responsibility
for how we behave, think, and feel.”
― Marshall Rosenberg, psychologist

We are biased against the negative and biased against confronting the negative. What is negative is considered bad and talked about in hushed tones. This has been going on ever since people noticed that thinking about things has a way of making them happen.

Extolling the positive and condemning the negative is a theme that distinguished Christianity from its tribal competitors, according to Peter Kingsley (1999). Appropriating the good and projecting the evil elsewhere—a universal component of nationalism—has become so ingrained as to be considered a virtue rather than a misdirection. At the same time, everyone knows that the good and the bad jostle for time in our minds. This is true no matter what country you’re from.

Endorsing the good has become culture’s “high road” and none of us are immune. This might be fine as a guide to intentions, aspirations, and morality, but it’s not fine when it comes to health, recovery, and the repair of psychological damage. Various change agents—teachers, politicians, disbursers and enforcers—have dealt us traumas of anxiety, fear, and deprivation as what they see is their moral prerogative.

As a therapist, if you can’t help your clients integrate their dark sides, then your future impact will go down the bleak road of cognitive behavioral therapy. Those who can’t see the negative are easily misled by promises and attractions. Enduring change must build on a firm moral foundation. The 1968 science fiction sex comedy “Barbarella” satirizes emotional ignorance and moral failure.

Sex is not the problem. The Seven Deadly Sins are symptoms, not causes. Thinking is not the solution because thinking can be manipulated. The thing about emotions, and what makes emotions so important, is that they grow slowly and can’t be ignored. Ideas guide our mouths but our hands and feet follow our emotions.