If you ask me, one of the more unsettling things about being human is that we tend to experience our selves as intentional agents capable of rational thought and logical decision making; while at the same time, all of our behavior – including that ostensibly rational “thought” – is substantially influenced by mysterious forces called feelings over which we have limited control. This is quite a predicament.
Even more confusingly, emotions also represent much of the reason we want to be in relationships in the first place—i.e. how they make us feel, and how it makes us feel to not be in them.
When we fail to do what we intend in those relationships, we often arrive back at emotions as the culprit. All told then, it’s not surprising why some among us might be inclined to view feelings as more or less a vestigial remnant of evolutionary history, rendered obsolete – if still troublesome – by the higher process of logic and reason.
So, what’s the purpose of emotion, why would they have persisted so broadly in the tooth-and-claw world of evolutionary history? Or in the terms of previous posts, what is the function of emotion?
Before I go on, though, I’d like to note that this post is very much an overview, attempting to sketch out the conceptual landscape of human emotion and attachment as relevant to relational functioning, but stopping short of the detail probably necessary for effective practical application on any particular topic. So, just be aware that this is more about establishing some important landmarks, and mostly leaving the question of actually navigating them for future elaboration.
Emotion, Functionally
As articulated in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, our emotions are bound up with a “fast” unconscious/intuitive perceptive process running in parallel with a “slower” conscious/explicit process, which combine to result in our overall behavior and decision-making. Mechanically, emotions can be understood to motivate behavior of a certain type, corresponding to the particular emotion felt, simply representing a predisposition or tendency to behave in a certain way. In much of the animal kingdom, emotion is the basic mechanism that organizes behavior according to the present environment, motivating the organism to behave in ways likely to promote its survival in a given situation or context. Mechanically, an organism’s emotional state serves to modify the “reinforcement value” of stimuli in the environment, so just as hunger represents a predisposition to eat and to enjoy eating, anger represents a predisposition to do things that cause damage to an opposing force, and to enjoy it. Referring back to the “loop” of perception and action discussed previously, that same emotion may shape the organisms perception of the environment as well, by attending more to certain types of stimuli and less to others, such that a person who is currently “sad” will be more likely to perceive the world as “sad,” further motivating “sad” actions, and so forth.
To sum that up, from the perspective of the “conscious, rational mind” we closely identify with our observing “self,” emotions represent a source of both information and motivation. Emotions are “chosen” by (typically unconscious or “intuitive”) perceptions, in order to motivate action appropriate to the present situation. So, I might expect to feel the emotion: fear in response to my perception of the present environment as of the dangerous category which, in turn, motivates behavior of the escape category. Fear then, can describe both the situation and the appropriate behavior, effectively serving as a signal of what category my unconscious “situation-categorization system” has assigned to the present environment, or more intuitively, something like what my body thinks is going on here. This then also implies what my body thinks I should do about it.
In the context of the “evolutionary metaphor” I outlined in this post, emotions straddle an ambiguous middle-ground between behavioral “organism” and “environment,” in that they are responses to the environment, which shape that environment… influencing both what works in the environment and how the environment works, almost like applying a filter to the perceived environment without altering the “real” one. Likewise, in the “predictive modeling” framework discussed in this post, (and serving as the primary focus of Mark Solms’ The Hidden Spring) emotions are seen as responses to – or signals of – “prediction errors,” reflecting a discrepancy between predicted outcome and observed outcome, which then function to motivate behavior to reduce future prediction error.
Human Attachment
Intimately interwoven with our emotional functioning, humans are often described as having something like an innate drive or need to interact and connect with other people. Scientifically, the field of “attachment theory” within psychology is concerned with this characteristically human tendency to equate the states of our relationships to others as of vast importance—often rivaling or surpassing other survival needs and even our own wellbeing. In other words, we seem innately wired (by evolution) to have strong emotional reactions to our relationships, or lack thereof; such that things like separation from your attachment figures is biologically wired to prompt the emotions typically associated with “threats” to physical safety, and thus motivate behavior to mitigate that threat.
So, an emotion like “fear,” is often prompted by both physical danger, and social danger—escaping a predator might be emotionally synonymous with escaping rejection, abandonment, or interpersonal intrusion. This makes sense, in that – especially in early childhood, where humans are entirely physically dependent on their parents – a threat to connection is a threat to life. Even in adulthood, throughout our evolutionary history, our personal survival and wellbeing is largely dependent on our social connections, such that social “threat” and “safety” are often also literal. More generally, though, our relational lives are full of parallels with survival—though there’s no physical combat happening in an interpersonal conflict, we intuitively perceive attack and defense.
The “attachment system” can be thought of as prompting emotions in response to the state of the attachment relationship. So if I’m either further away from – or closer to – you than my evolutionary and learning history “thinks” is safe, I will typically feel some kind of distress—fear, anxiety, sadness, or anger. Though our individual preferences vary, all of us have preferences about how close we like to keep other people, which can arise either from learned experience or innate predisposition. In “learning” terms, we would expect it to be “reinforcing” when our behavior functions to keep other people at our preferred proximity – when they’re close enough that we’re not afraid of being abandoned, but not so close that we feel intruded upon – and “punishing” when our attachment figures move out of those same bounds.
The idea of “attachment styles” was originally born from the observation that young children seem to fall into one of a few general categories in terms of the behavioral strategies they employ in response to the absence of their caregivers. The idea of “attachment anxiety” is something like an aversive experience that arises in response to perceiving a relationship as being not as it should be, which then motivates behavior to return the relationship to the way it should be. Attachment styles, like “anxious,” “avoidant,” “secure,” and “disorganized,” are then names for ways of responding to attachment anxiety, or for confronting threats to attachment—generally some version of either withdrawing from the connection or pursuing it. As this relates to our conscious perceptions, we may see things as we need to see them – and feel what we need to feel – in order to maintain preferred attachment proximity.
One of the relatively unique features of our species is that we have the ability to “regulate” one another’s nervous systems, in the sense that certain kinds of contact with attachment figures functions to soothe our states of autonomic arousal and/or emotional distress. In the case of parents and children as well as “pair-bonded” adults, this is a central mechanism in the maintenance of attachment in both productive and destructive directions. Often called “interdependence” in its more effective forms, we can usefully come to depend on our attachment figures to perform this function, which under “good” conditions renders members of functional attachment relationship far more effective in confronting the outside world than they could hope to be on their own, but under “bad” conditions, can sabotage the effectiveness of all participants in the larger environment.
In adult attachment relationships, this concept of emotional interdependence is particularly relevant to the task of navigating conflict between the partners (i.e. when we want different things, or at least one of us perceives the relationship as “not as it should be”). Unsurprisingly, the success or failure in the task of navigating intra-relationship conflict over time tends to be a primary determinant of the success or failure of the relationship as a whole (depending on how you look at it, you might even say they’re essentially synonymous). In turn, successful “conflict resolution,” often depends on the success or failure in the task of “co-regulation” (soothing one another’s attachment-distress ongoingly as it is triggered by the conflict)… at least according to a couple of the largest contemporary “brand-name” schools of couple therapy (referencing “EFT” as developed by Sue Jonson, and “PACT” as developed by Stan Tatkin).
Emotional Interaction
Closely related to our evolutionary wiring towards interpersonal interaction, we seem wired to be highly adept at perceiving others’ emotional states, to the extent that we have identified anatomical structures in the brain specifically adapted to this task. Given that our relevant environment is other people and their behavior, and that emotions have such a strong impact on our behavior, then accurate perception of others’ emotion is a primary factor in accurate prediction of their behavior, and therefore effective response to that behavior. In other words, if you can accurately determine what someone feels about the present situation (often you) you can make good guesses about how they are likely to behave, as well as how they are perceiving the situation.
Unsurprisingly, we often respond emotionally to other people’s emotions, and especially in intimate relationships, the interaction between the emotions of the participants – having feelings about each other’s feelings – is often the primary thing going on. So, while the members of a couple might have a lot of very smart-sounding explanations of why they’re saying certain things to one another – often to do with facts, moral justifications, philosophy, logic, and opinions about what really happened – our “conflict process” can often be boiled down to things like “I got angry because you got angry.”
In a relationship, then, it’s inevitable that our emotions function to control each other’s behavior. This is perhaps most strikingly illustrated in infancy and early childhood, where children first learn that their caregivers respond to them differently based on what they are feeling, such that children may feel what they need to feel to get their needs met, even if their own wellbeing suffers in other ways as a result. If a parent is too overwhelmed to respond to anything but the most extreme distress, for example, children may learn (typically at an unconscious level) to behave in ways that will prompt their own extreme distress. This can apply just as much to adult attachment relationships, where my experience of – and behavior in – our relationship will depend significantly on my perception of your experience of our relationship. In other words, I might end up making myself miserable in order to keep us together, if our relationship is more stable when you’re trying to cheer me up than when we’re just sitting there trying to figure out what to talk about. On the other hand, a feeling itself can represent a threat to the attachment, exemplified by the experience of “falling out of love,” or the more mundane example of not having a good time while we’re hanging out.
Emotional Patterns
Within a relationship, the reciprocal influence of our emotional states often give rise to “chains” of emotional reactions to emotional reactions, which form coherent patterns that can “pop up” all over the place. Often intimately intertwined with threats to – and maintenance of – attachment, these interpersonal emotional structures can appear dissimilar in terms of the visible behavior that make them up, while sharing a common series of emotional “steps” which prominent couples therapist Sue Johnson usefully described as an “attachment dance.”
For example, I might find myself feeling anxious in response to a perception of you as disinterested in contact with me, and habitually act on that anxiety with a behavior you perceive as a threat to your autonomy, which you then respond to with a behavior I perceive as as an anger-inducing commentary about my neediness, which I then respond to with a behavior you perceive as a similarly anger-inducing commentary about your emotional insufficiency, and so on. A pattern like this could “look” or “sound” any number of different ways in terms of the details of what we say or do in relation to one another, while the underlying “emotional structure” stays relatively consistent from one day to the next.
One of the most ubiquitous such dances is generally called the “pursuer-withdrawer” attachment dynamic, in which—responding to a shared attachment threat, an “avoidant” partner takes steps to distance from their partner anticipating safety in solitude, while an “anxious” partner actively seeks the anticipated safety of reunion. The more you pull away, the more I want to pursue, and the more I pursue, the more you want to pull away—each of us motivated by emotional responses to our perception of the relationship. Similarly, it’s common for one partner’s experience of anger to make the other angry, leading to a rapid “escalation” of tensions, or for one’s avoidance of the other’s “punishing” emotional states to prompt further punishment, and so forth.
Often, these patterns have their roots in partners’ prior relationships, especially those with primary attachment figures in childhood. As children, we often learn to feel about ourselves in a way that preserves our attachment to our caregivers, which often boils down as “believing we deserved to be treated however we happened to be treated,” in that it typically helps preserve attachment to parents’ if we feel as if their behavior in relation to us “makes sense.” Our strategies for “managing” caregivers’ emotions through our own emotional reactions are then naturally deployed in adult attachment relationships when we see our partners feeling similar things about us that those early caregivers did.
In pop psychology, the name codependence (originally based on observations of the emotional patterns common among partnerships including one substance-addicted partner, and popularized in Melody Beattie’s 1986 self-help book Codependent No More) is often given to the more obviously problematic and extreme patterns of reciprocal emotional control. To the extent that I have to avoid your negative emotional reactions by any means necessary, (often because your emotionally-motivated behavior is very scary or damaging) my behavior may “enable” – or in other words, function to preserve or even intensify – your problematic behavior over time. Relatedly, to the extent that I experience my own emotional wellbeing as secondary to – or primarily dependent on – your emotional state, (common for people who were primarily reinforced in childhood for the behavior of “accommodating to others,” or punished for displays of “selfish” enjoyment) I may be incentivized to apply my limited efforts towards controlling outcomes which ultimately depend on your choices, which (recalling the idea that coercion elicits resistance discussed in this post) may also tend to resist my efforts at influence.
We can sometimes develop a pervasive pattern in which we tell ourselves or others some version of “I can’t do the thing I actually believe is healthy, right or reasonable because I’m too afraid of how my partner will feel,” implying a pervasive sense that keeping my partner within a “safe” emotional range takes precedence over my own values, wellbeing. or integrity. We’re talking about a very similar process when we complain about “feeling responsible” for other people’s feelings. Especially if we’re in an emotionally/practically interdependent relationship, I might tend to experience your emotions as a problem I need to solve, which – again – makes a lot of sense given your emotion’s influence on your behavior, and your behavior’s influence on me.
Breaking out of these emotional/attachment patterns typically involves (at least what feels like) a risk to the attachment. If you’ve developed a pattern of responding to my anger or distance with increased kindness and caring, for example, it will likely feel like you’re risking the relationship if you “stand up to me” rather than submitting. This can often be viewed as preferencing short-term over long-term outcomes… where your submission works to pacify me in this particular fight, but reinforces my aggression or withdrawal in the long-term. The policy: we don’t negotiate with terrorists illustrates the same principle… disincentivizing hostage-taking over the long term, but relying on one’s willingness to forfeit the life of the current hostage. More generally, the more that partners develop a habit of mitigating attachment-threats with these short-term solutions, the more pressure they will likely feel over time to compromise their own and the relationship’s wellbeing in order to mitigate situational conflicts. Put simply, over time, “conflict avoidance” functions to increase rather than decrease overall conflict in the relational system.
It might be worth noting that the question of emotional “locus of control” is relevant to most interpersonal emotional patterns, in that depending on the circumstances, you may have either more or less “leverage” than I do to influence my emotions, for better or worse. On the one hand, it’s my mind that’s ultimately most directly connected to my emotional system, and I therefore have uniquely direct access to information about what’s going on with it, and it’s ultimately only me that can make private cognitive choices about things like “how to look at” a particular situation. On the other hand, it’s certainly not unheard of for others to be more aware of what I’m feeling than I am, especially if – for whatever reason – I’ve been reinforced for the behavior of denying or ignoring certain emotional states. Complicating this question even further, especially if you’re an important attachment figure for me, your ability to “soothe” my emotional distress may surpass my own. Especially if you don’t have a personal “stake” in the situation – it’s often far easier to tolerate and help regulate others’ pain than it is to tolerate and regulate our own.
Communicating about Emotion
Our emotional states have a profound impact on our relationships whether or not we’re consciously aware of them, and whether or not we choose to talk to one another about them. Given how much we perceive about each other’s emotional states nonverbally, it’s not as if “naming it” is often a surprise to anyone. However, especially within the fields of therapy and couples counseling, much ado is made of communicating explicitly about emotions. So, the tough-minded rationalists among us want to know: What use is it to just talk about feelings all the time?
Most centrally, especially in intimate relationships, it’s common to focus on trying to solve practical problems or intellectual “disagreements” when the core of a given conflict is emotional. We might find ourselves in a lengthy argument about the correct amount of butter to apply to toast when “really” one of us is angry at the other for forgetting to put butter on the grocery list. There are often two simultaneous “conversations” proceeding in parallel – one emotional and one (ostensibly) rational – and problems are likely to arise if one is mistaken for the other. In conflict, we’re likely to want to emphasize the adult-sounding “rational” argument and minimize our “childish” feelings about it. Explicitly including the emotional component of the conflict, then, gives us the opportunity to address the conflict, potentially with drastically increased efficiency.
Beyond that, the simple act of explicitly naming one’s own emotional state may accomplish some important functions in interpersonal systems, including that:
- External behavioral markers of emotions are often ambiguous – annoyance might look very similar to anxiety, from the outside, for instance – so that telling you what I think I’m feeling may relieve you of the effort of figuring it out.
- “Naming” my feelings verbally gives you information about my current behavioral and perceptual bias. Telling you “I’m sad” allows you to better predict my behavior, better interpret the reliability of my perceptions, and better consider your own behavior in interacting with me.
- Naming one’s own emotion demonstrates awareness of that emotional state, which tends to signal a greater degree of self-awareness and self-control than if you can tell I’m angry but I seem unaware of it.
- In many situations, it’s also a cooperative rather than competitive gesture, signaling that I want to give you as much information as possible so that we can work well together rather than keeping my cards close to my vest.
- It may prompt reciprocal articulation of feelings from other participants, potentially contributing to a collective sense that it is “safe” to do so, which may have advantages for the system.
More generally, though, this brings up a central question of how the discussion of emotion functions in a relationship, in shared decision-making, and especially around decisions where partners have conflicting desires or needs. As we negotiate alternative actions that affect us both, we are often in a position of trying to compare “quantities” of emotions, or to assign them values in economic or rational terms: Does my potential enjoyment of the concert matter more or less than the potential reduction in guilt you would experience if we have dinner with your parents instead? In talking to each other about what we are each feeling (or anticipate feeling in the future, were we to take one course of action or the other) there is often an implicit question of how much time or money or effort a quantity of enjoyment or reduction in distress is worth.
So, because these emotional quantities cannot be directly measured, and (especially in love relationships) we generally want our partners to be happy, (or at least be perceived as wanting it) we’re often in the position of “taking their word for it” about what would make them happy, and how happy or unhappy various options would make them. In one way or another, we’re often asking ourselves how much “say” our feelings get in our decisions, and how important it is to each of us to demonstrate our willingness to act in service of one another’s comfort and pleasure. It’s for this reason that the behavior of verbalizing (especially “negative”) feelings about your relationship or your partner often functions as punishment (referencing the discussion of punishment and avoidance from this post.) Though your individual results will vary, the more you habitually imply your partner is “at fault” for causing your distress, or that they owe it to you to fix it, the more likely you are to get a response based in avoidance rather than sustainable collaboration.
Emotional Engineering
Given the profound influence of emotions on our lives and especially our relationships, it’s no surprise that most of us would like more control over them—by which I mean we wish our conscious, “rational” process could have more influence over what we feel. This might sound like a lost cause, given the foregoing discussion of how “unconscious” the mechanisms behind emotion are, but it’s not quite that hopeless. That’s because while I can’t directly control or consciously choose what emotion to feel, my conscious process can influence my emotional system – through a few different mechanisms – to the extent that I can shape my perception of my environment, or that environment itself.
So, to the extent I can intentionally focus my attention on certain stimuli and not others, or choose to tell myself different stories about what is happening between us, I may find that my emotions respond differently to otherwise unchanged events in my relational environment. The “reinforcement learning” paradigm is perhaps more obviously useful when it comes to emotions than anywhere else, in that far more obviously than our conscious, verbal thought-process, our emotional responses are shaped by experience rather than reason. In other words, it’s generally not very effective to tell ourselves, or be told things like “there’s nothing to be afraid of,” or “you’re overreacting.” On the other hand, the advice commonly given to creative writing students – show, don’t tell – is often a useful way to think of emotional learning. Arranging to be shown that “there’s nothing to be afraid of” – or showing your partner the same – can often affect change where verbally telling someone why their emotions should be different does little to change them. Our much-lauded rationality can get us into trouble when we expect our emotions to “obey reason,” or I expect myself or my partner to feel what it’s “reasonable” to feel, rather than what we’ve learned to feel. In overlooking this distinction, we can often put ourselves in situations that make the problem worse, not better.
Further, it’s quite common for our “rational” minds to actually induce emotions quite contrary in motivational force to our intended aims. When I consciously ruminate about all the bad things you have done recently, I will reliably steer my emotional system towards annoyance and anger, generally to the detriment of the quality of our relationship. I also might not choose particularly goal-aligned behavioral responses to my anger—among the various ways to act out anger, for example, openly and thoughtfully discussing what I’m angry about might have different outcomes from, say, closing drawers loudly.
Though somewhat dubious in terms of scientific validity, the idea of “emotional intelligence” (as articulated in Goleman’s 1995 book of the same name) describes a person’s ability to perceive their own and others’ emotions, as well as to effectively manage and leverage those feelings in service of their particular goals. Putting aside the technical details, the important point is that we are all inevitably confronted with this task, and much of our success in the world (and especially in relation to other humans) depends on our abilities in this domain. A related insight is that, in our attempts to behave in alignment with our values and logical conclusions, many of us learn to habitually attempt to overcome and ignore – rather than productively integrate – the influence of our own emotion. In doing so, we miss out on the crucial information and motivational force emotion can provide, often exhausting ourselves trying to “swim upstream.”
The alternative, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes with the metaphor of an “elephant and rider” (symbolizing a person’s emotional and rational systems, respectively) is to instead improve the quality of the “working relationship” between one’s emotional and rational process, to more effectively use, rather than fight the overwhelming strength of emotion in guiding behavior. That strength can feel all the more overwhelming in the context of a relationship, where it’s not just our own “elephant” we’re dealing with, but a pair of them, that often seem to come up with their own ideas about what’s going to happen—apparently quite apart from the wishes of their bewildered riders. Developing our understanding and appreciation for the “nature” of these elephants, though, offers us the chance to enjoy the huge advantages of leveraging their shared power effectively.
Sources
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) How Emotions are Made: the secret life of the brain
Melody Beattie (1986) Codependent No More: how to stop controlling others and start caring for yourself
Peter Fonagy, Gyorgy Gergely, Eliot Jurist & Mary Target (2002) Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self
Daniel Goleman (1995) Emotional Intelligence: why it can matter more than IQ
John Gottman (2011) The Science of Trust: emotional attunement for couples
Jonathan Haidt (2006) The Happiness Hypothesis
Susan Johnson (2004) The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy
Susan Johnson (2008) Hold Me Tight: seven conversations for a lifetime of love
Daniel Kahneman (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow
Carol Garhart Mooney (2010) Theories of Attachment: an introduction to Bowlby, Ainsworth, Gerber, Brazelton, Kennell, and Klaus
Stan Tatkin (2011) Wired for Love: how understanding your partner’s brain and attachment style can help you defuse conflict and build a secure relationship
Stan Tatkin (2018) We Do: saying yes to a relationship of depth, true connection, and enduring love
David Wallin (2007) Attachment in Psychotherapy
