You can’t choose your emotions. Bold statement, I know. Yet I felt compelled to write about this since so many people believe that you can choose how you feel. Here’s my take on this.
Even though some see emotions and feelings as two different things, I them as different names for the same thing, so I’ll be using them interchangeably in this post (as I do in most of my other posts about emotions). Further, I see them as automatic sensations that arise beyond one’s control. Thus, I believe that most of those who claim to be able to choose their emotions are merely suppressing/ignoring them and thinking they have mastery over what they feel. More on that later.
What I see as my best, strongest argument against this is that if humans could choose their emotions, then nobody would ever feel any differently than they wanted to at any time. To show the absurdity and impossibility of this, ask someone who claims that emotions are a choice the following: if somebody breaks into your house and kills all your family members while leaving you alive, could you choose to feel only positive emotions and avoid feeling any negative emotions? I don’t believe anyone could, even someone who claims to be able to do so. Perhaps enough healing work over a long enough span of time could remove all negativity from that event. However, that is a far different thing than being able to successfully prevent that negativity arising in the first place.
In my most peaceful emotional states, I have been immune to feeling bothered by certain things that have upset me greatly in much lower emotional states. However, I’ve still been able to feel the full range of emotions, including anger, sadness, fear, and other forms of negativity. Even in those states, I’ve not been able to decide which emotions to feel and which ones to avoid. My lack of resistance to any and all feelings in those peaceful states is what allows them to pass quickly and return to those peaceful, easy feelings.
This is not limited to me. There is a woman known as Patient S. M. who, due to the destruction of her amygdala, is almost completely unable to feel fear. Tests have repeatedly found that the only thing that can cause her to feel fear is simulating suffocation (such as through inhaling an excessive amount of carbon dioxide), which is also believed to produce a deep-seated fear response in all other humans. She is unable to prevent fear from arising in those suffocation tests, and she is unable to make fear arise when watching scary movies, walking through haunted house attractions, handling snakes and spiders, being kidnapped at knifepoint by strangers, and any number of other dangerous situations she’s been through that would make most folks feel terrified. To me, this is a strong real-world case for the impossibility of choosing emotions.
I was certainly unable to prevent massive sadness, sorrow, depression, and grief from coming up nearly all day every day for months after my dog Sawyer died. The tears flowed more during that time than they ever have for me before or since then. I can hardly remember the depth of all that pain at this point, yet I’m sure I’d still be drowning in it if I hadn’t experienced it fully. I feel so confident saying that because of past instances in which I suppressed the pain and didn’t feel any better until I finally felt through it all. In many cases, I’m still working on feeling through all the pain, such as the painful experiences from when I was a kid. Thank goodness I allowed all the pain around Sawyer’s death to come up without resistance. Here’s hoping I can successfully do that with all the other pain as well.
While I don’t know why some folks believe they can choose how to feel, I have a guess. My guess is that someone who is especially skilled at letting their emotions run their course without resistance might mistake the swift passage of negative feelings for being able to decide not to have them. It’s also likely that someone who is used to suppressing unwanted feelings can think that refusing to fully experience them is the same as preventing them from happening in the first place. Of course, suppression doesn’t prevent or get rid of feelings. All it does is make them stick around and cause lots of trouble on the emotional, mental, and, in many cases, physical levels. And for anyone who thinks they can make decisions free from emotion, sorry, that’s not how humans operate. Humans make decisions according to their values, which are based on emotion. Reason comes in after the fact to justify decisions that have already been made. Jonathan Haidt talks a great deal about this in The Righteous Mind. He’s one of many who have discussed the inherent emotionality of human beings in contrast to the reasonable, rational foundation that many assume that at least some humans possess.
If I haven’t convinced you by now that humans can’t choose their feelings and that we’re all fundamentally emotional rather than reasonable, that’s ok. I know I didn’t come to those positions by reason, so I don’t expect anyone else to do so. Whether or not anyone else agrees with me on this, I can still use what I’ve learned to make my own life better, freer, and more peaceful. And that’s such a good feeling.