Why is this important?
Useful suppression
First let us recognise that sometimes emotional suppression is needed. If you are locking yourself to a gate or facing a heavily armed row of riot police, you may need to suppress some of your fear about what will happen to you. This strategic suppression is different from long term or habitual suppression, as it can recognise (rather than deny) the existence of the fear, but just not act upon it.
The harms of suppression
Emotions are part of you, if you suppress them you are suppressing your full self and its capacities.
Emotions are a great motivator. If you suppress awareness of them, you can lose motivation to act, and you can loose the ability to sublimate them. Love of the earth and distress at the harm it suffers, for example, can motivate a person to attempt to protect the earth, or at least to reduce the harm they do.
Suppressing emotions almost necessarily leads to suppression of parts of your awareness of a situation. It can limit what you know. You may steer away from other people and areas that resonate to produce pain and upset. Lack of awareness creates an unconscious dynamic, that may tend to produce bite-back, and disruption of your daily life. Your emotions may be telling you something useful that should not be ignored.
Suppressing emotions takes time and energy away from action and interaction. You use up energy, focus and time keeping your muscles tight, distracting yourself, condemning others morally, insisting on your righteousness, being manically active and distracted etc…
Suppressing emotions can leave you caught between collapse and rigidity. Again, the attempt to relieve pain by suppression can remove capacity to act fully and responsively.
Suppression looses you an awareness of processes you share with others, and which can be used to build closeness, trust and action. By not facing or discussing emotions you render them individual rather than social. You retreat from others rather than bond together. Your miserable experiences seems to become your individual problem, not a collective problem. Perhaps you even fear upsetting people if you talk about how you feel about climate, and are therefore helping to promote a social repression of awareness, or you just act as if those who talk about climate emotions are somehow inferior, or not really engaging with the reality of the topic, and that helps shut the whole discussion down.
Being aware of modes of suppression, also helps us to realise how anti-climate propaganda media invokes these common modes of suppression around climate for political effect. It mocks those who are concerned, it claims they are impractical idiots, who want to send us back to the caves. This aggression makes it hard for people in both ingroup and outgroup to express their concern or distress as they know what will happen to them. It tries to displace its audiences fears and anger about the disruption of their lives by climate change, onto those who would do something about this disruption. It implies that you would be left alone and untroubled, if you left things to the market, or acted to further suppress awareness of the problems. If you look at popular right wing discussions, they are full of emotion and evocation of emotion (primarily anger and superiority), and they work politically in the short term, although the repression will become more disruptive the longer it is ignored. They encourage people to find the truth that already agrees with their emotions. The audience and ingroup are active and resistant to change. These audience members may fear loss, but the loss is not associated with the changing climate. Suppression of energy seeks an outlet, and proto-fascism, and social myth (massive numbers of Satanic pedophiles in high places), is one such outlet which in the long run will not help those who support it.
Suggestions
Awareness of emotions is a first step. Sharing your distress, confusion, ignorance, or whatever you discover, with those you trust outside your own family. This will be slow and awkward because it is not something most of us are familiar with, especially if you are male, but it probably has to happen. This produces what some people call ‘climate conversations’, in which the focus is shifted, temporarily, away from finding solutions and acting, into something more contemplative, more building of connection. Hopefully it will build awareness of more general connections to the world. We live in interactive networks with the world, perhaps the conversations can extend to attention to the non-human world and how we fit in with that.
Gain more neutral appreciation of the techniques of preventing, or ameliorating, climate change. Perfection is not possible, but that does not mean we should go along with the impossible, highly unlikely or desperate. We don’t have to know everything to act, we learn through doing.
Empathy with the earth. Just allowing yourself to relate to the world. You don’t need much nature, just a bit – a weed bursting through the pavement. What is it you want to save? Probably not modern life as such. Would you rather have lions, elephants, sharks and kangaroos or TV dinners (I’m told that term is now archaic)?
On this blog I’ve repeatedly suggested the importance of quiet listening to other people and to the world, as a way of relating to complex systems and coming to have a feel for them. Active listening involves accepting the other as they are, not trying to change them. This relieves the need to be a performer in possession of the perfect dogma. You don’t have to know what is coming next, or have all the answers, or avoid change, to move forward, or to be at peace in life. To listen to others with care, you may also have to listen yourself with care and attention and recover your repressed; learn to let feelings be.
There is a recurrent insistence in Depth Psychology, that sometimes to often unpleasant symptoms or feelings are trying to get our attention, or distract our attention. In other words, they are pointing at, or away from, something we should take account of. Deep listening may be one way of getting access to this hidden awareness, as may looking at dreams. It may help to tell each other dreams, and see what happens – but please do not interpret someone else’s dreams, your interpretation may well be correct if you had had that dream, but not for them, and premature interpretation can shut down exploration. With enough sharing, personal dreams can become a group dreams.
Compassion for others, even with those you disagree with. They may be wrong, but most of them are not evil, and will be trying to find their way through their own social and reality maze. But if you are angry with them, just accept it, you don’t have to act on it, or display it.
There are two, known and related, processes the ‘Pygmalion effect‘ and the ‘Golem effect‘. Basically if you treat people as if they are intelligent, capable and kind and foster their abilities, most of them will become more intelligent, capable and kind, if you treat them as stupid thugs, that is what many of them will become (at least in relation to you). We become who we are through interaction with others. So treat people well, even in opposition.
Having pleasure in your actions. Your actions have to reinforce your desire to participate, and attract others.
Once you have regained some of your emotional being then you can begin the process of sublimation, of using that energy being aware of what you are doing. There are no instructions…. For Jung, for example, sublimation is not really a matter of will power but a somewhat mysterious and unpredictable result of learning to ‘assimilate’ and work with the creativity of unconscious processes which, in turn, leads to personal transformation. For the purposes of these posts, the term ‘unconscious processes’ can include the workings of the non-human world, which are likewise creative and part of our lives, and which ‘rebel,’ or disrupt us, if we attempt to suppress them or direct them in inappropriate ways.
Remember people will not be helped by an overwhelmingly negative view of the future, yet they don’t need to be deceived. In complex systems even small actions can have large effects, especially if they are taken up. Every action which contributes to reduction of ecological destruction is worth performing. Anyone can pick plastic out of a river, or off the street. Many people can choose to spend money on making a better future, or on products which are ‘greener,’ such as putting solar on their rooves if they can afford it. They can write to people in power, they can vote, or otherwise participate in politics. Alone these actions may not achieve much, but if others start emulating them, then awareness can keep on building up and produce real change – it may also encourage further change in the person doing the action as they gain confidence. Doing something repeatedly without apparent effect may have beneficial long term consequences. Doing something ‘true’ always helps adaptation. The point is that we (plural) become who we are through interaction in a situation, and the situation, or the world, becomes what it is because of those interactions. No action is too small as long as it is repeated, and it has some effect.
Because we live in complex systems, it is normal for actions not to have exactly the result we intend. This is not your fault, not a reason for attacking yourself (although if you do attack yourself, accept it and let it pass rather than keep it up), but it is an opportunity to learn, and to remember all actions and policies are experiments. We learn to do better by doing and modifying as we learn.
Finally, we can embrace Climate Generosity where we don’t wait for people to act, but we team together to give things to others who might want them, to help energy (or other) transitions, such as giving and organising solar panels for community buildings, or helping to organise bulk buys. This helps build action and community, and appears to give people a sense that they are doing something. The chance could be high that others, seeing it happen, will join in. It also makes it clearer where the obstructions are, and what can be done to avoid or change those obstructions. This can be a form of communal learning.
Successful local action may be needed before we can get political parties to really support a movement against climate change, because they know they have a local base and don’t have to be quite so respectful of institutionalised destruction..
Conclusion
Lets be clear here. Being aware of emotions and techniques of suppression, does not mean that we do not need good clear analyses of what is happening. One of the themes of these blogs is that what a person thinks and understands about the situation influences what they feel and how they act; if they are fed lies then they will feel as those lies direct, and face the consequences of that. However, we need to engage with what we feel in order to act, in order to translate our knowledge that something needs to be done urgently, into action, rather than trying to go along with general indifference, or blaming other people.
It also is a call for something I do badly, and that is to write engagingly with full acknowledgement of the range of human experience and psychology, so as to involve people with their whole beings. In academia people tend to write drily, using what they usually call ‘reason’, and criticise and reject those who don’t. Or they may acknowledge subjectivity, but write in such a way that only the already initiated can understand what they are saying. Academic work is useful, but it probably will not save the world, because of the dry and deadening traditions that have grown around it, and because it tends to speak to only a few parts of human social being. In that way what academics do may be complicit with the suppression that leads to lack of action, even though that work is vital.
The point here is not to retreat, but to recognise emotional life, recognise the suppression, analyse the suppression, treat it seriously, work it out in our lives and through our interaction with others, so that people together (and individually) can act effectively with their full natures. If we know we are frightened, then maybe we can not just avoid that fear, but act to reduce that fear, and start acting as full human beings to imagine and make the new society we need.
Tags: depth psychology
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