Parasitic Emotions
- Leticia Rullán Sánchez de Lerín
- Jul 28, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 8, 2024
"Many times we encounter fury - blind, cruel, terrible, and angry -,but if we take the time to look closely, we find that this fury we see is just a disguise, and that behind the disguise of fury, in reality... sadness is hidden." - Jorge Bucay
The Nature of Emotions:
Emotions are natural responses generated by our bodies in reaction to changes in our environment or within ourselves. From the first months of life, we express basic or primary emotions like surprise, joy, disgust, sadness, anger, and fear. These fundamental emotions are universal and play a crucial role in our development and interactions.
Emotions are vital for human beings. They provide quick and genuine reactions to our experiences, helping us evaluate situations, understand their significance, and determine our needs. For children, learning to identify and become aware of their emotions is essential for developing good self-esteem, healthy relationships, and overall mental health. For adults, this capacity is key for the differentiation of self, which means being able to separate feelings, thoughts, self, and others.
Seems very easy, right? But in the reality that I often see in my office is another one - couples involved in heated arguments where anger appears to be the main emotional driver. "I'm so red", "This thing that you did really triggered me, you are...." this dynamic ends up being destructive and lead to the wear and tear of the relationship.
How can we turn this into a healthier, more honest and caring discussions? What is behind that anger?
Central and Parasitic Emotions:
Eric Berne, psychiatrist and creator of Transactional Analysis, explains how the nature or authenticity of our emotions can be altered throughout our development. In his theory, Berne gives a fundamental role to our primary attachment figures and the way they model and react to both their own emotions and those of those who depend on them.
In this context, parasitic or substitute emotions (or Rackets, as Berne called them) appear to cover up natural or central emotions. They hide what we are really feeling, as these emotions would have been hidden, unattended, unrecognized, problematic, or rejected by our primary attachment figures at the time. The most common example is feeling rage when the emotion that the situation should evoke is sadness, or feeling anxiety to try to avoid anger.
When a person finds themselves in an emotionally trigerring situation (e.g., noticing that my partner is distant), the corresponding natural emotional behavior is activated (feeling somewhat sad), but if there is a prohibition or any other blocking reason (crying was "for the weak" at home, or my parents never allowed themselves to be sad), instead of releasing the natural emotion, the person resorts to another emotional reaction easier to manifest, with which they feel safer (in this example, anger). We might believe (and say) that we do experience the "forbidden" emotion, but it is a superficial recognition, as we will unconscious tend to activate the racket that has been recognized and legitimated by that attachment figure.
Common rackets to genuine emotions like love, joy, pleasure or power are feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, fake rage, jealousy, fatuous generosity, guilt, spite, false fear (phobias), false admiration, fake sadness, insecurity, shame.
Common rackets to genuine emotions like fear, sadness or rage are false joy, ostentation, hostility or rivalry, dependence, anguish, resentment, anxiety, superiority, disconsolation and hopelessness, guilt or shame, phobias.
Parasite Emotions and Relationships:
As we see, emotional confusion is generated when we learn to camouflage emotions, seeking substitutes to feel more adapted. In a relationship, this hinders the couple's capacity to broach relevant and sensitive topics and discuss them healthily, creating an emotional armor, as described in "The Knight in Rusty Armor," where not allowing oneself to feel "uncomfortable" emotions results in a suffocating barrier that is difficult to remove.
And as rackets are usually persistent, longer, and disproportionate to the situation, they also contribute to the development of toxic relationship patterns, as discussed earlier, in which one or both partners is unable to recognise their true uncomfortable emotions and throws them projected to the other.
It is worth noting that fostering the confusion. Don't forget that everything that stays inside us comes out in other ways!
Healthy Emotional Development:
Parents and primary attachment figures play a crucial role in teaching healthy emotional responses. Here are appropriate behaviors for various emotions:
LOVE, AFFECTION: Accept it, reciprocate, share it.
JOY, PLEASURE: Approve and share it.
FEAR: Protect, help, accept. Touch.
SADNESS: Allow, validate and facilitate expression and activation.
RAGE: Allow expression and analyze the problem that caused it.
Finally, I leave you with a metaphorical story about parasitic emotions:
Sadness and Fury:
In an enchanted kingdom than men can never reach, or perhaps where men eternally wander without realizing it...
In a magical kingdom, where intangible things become concrete...
Once upon a time... there was a marvelous pond. It was a lagoon of crystal clear and pure water where fish of all existing colors swam, and where all shades of green were permanently reflected...
Up to that magical and transparent pond came to bathe, keeping each other company, sadness and fury. Both took off their clothes and naked, they entered the pond.
Fury, hurried (as fury always is), rushed—without knowing why—bathed quickly and even more quickly, left the water...
But fury is blind, or at least does not clearly distinguish reality, so, naked and in a hurry, she put on the first clothes she found upon exiting.
And it happened that those clothes were not hers, but sadness's. And so dressed in sadness, fury left.
Very calm, very serene, always willing to stay where she is, sadness finished her bath and without any hurry (or rather, without awareness of the passage of time), lazily and slowly, came out of the pond.
On the shore, she found that her clothes were no longer there.
As we all know, if there is something sadness does not like, it is being naked, so she put on the only clothes by the pond - fury's clothes.
They say that since then, many times we encounter fury, blind, cruel, terrible, and angry, but if we take the time to look closely, we find that this fury we see is just a disguise, and that behind the disguise of fury, in reality... sadness is hidden.
Bibliography:
Bucay, J. (1999). Cuentos para pensar. Editorial Del Nuevo Extremo.
Greenberg, Leslie. Emociones: una guía interna. 2002. Paidós
Nolasco, A., & Cebrián, V. D. Diseño de un entrenamiento en identificación de emociones en formato de tarea competencial que mejore la capacidad de reconocimiento de emociones faciales. Variables Psicológicas y Educativas, 151.
Rivera Arrizabalaga, A. (2015). Arqueología de las emociones.
