Emotions And Blocks

The extent to which the explorer will have been able to enter deeply into any of the emotional expressions explored will vary. Some people may have felt each motion deeply and the guide will have been aware of this. At the other extreme, the explorations may have been only a series of acts which evoked no feelings. This does not necessarily mean the explorer is dead to feeling, though this may occasionally be the case: there may be some restraint to expressing emotion in front of the partner; there may be an awkward sense that this is not real. While this is true, many professional actors can move their audience because when they really give themselves to their parts they genuinely feel the emotion. A recent magazine article by a trial lawyer described a similar phenomenon: at first he decided he would work at hamming it up for the jury, simulating indignation or sorrow, then he discovered to his surprise that in his "act" he was really feeling these emotions.

Most likely the explorer will have experienced some real emotion in one or two but not all of the explorations. For example, to imitate crying and give into it may be easy for some people. Others may find it easy to show fear (they have less fear of their fear, as it were). Others may be comfortable with anger but not fear. I would guess from my experience giving workshops on Emotional First Aid, that the deliberate exploration of joy may have been surprisingly difficult for many. Joy can be for some people even more embarrassing than crying. The roots of this are largely in society's fear of envy, what the sociologist Helmut Schoeck in his monumental study Envy calls 'envy avoidance'. If you give some thought to this taboo subject, you may find that you repress quite a lot of your expression of joy because you are afraid of other peoples' envious reaction. Difficulty in showing anger, fear, or grief is more readily understandable: many parents discourage these expressions in their children.

Even if the work suggested in this book does not prove effective for you, a frank discussion and sharing of feelings about emotional expression may be useful. It is nothing to be ashamed of to admit that because of the way anger was treated in your childhood, you now have some difficulty with it. People often do not realize that even spouses whom they love and know well may have a different emotional range. You may even find that you have chosen each other partly because of a complimentarity in emotional expression or blocking. One of you may be capable of expressing grief when distressed, the other more capable of expressing rage. There is no moral judgement here and no point in expecting a person to show an emotional reaction with which they have difficulty.

On the other hand, work with the emotions may be helpful. Even in therapy, despite the fact that some stunt-oriented therapists may push their patients into emotional release for its own sake, this is not in itself a goal: the goal is becoming able to open up to a full range of pulsation and feeling in the body. But it may have become apparent in these explorations that the blocking of all emotion is achieved by either chronic or temporary tension of certain muscle groups, just as is the blocking of pulsation. For example, the person who has difficulty crying will most likely have difficulty in letting the chest down in breathing out.

A further brief series of explorations may help put you in touch with the ways in which emotional expression may be blocked.

Fear

Ask the explorer, lying on their back, to look at you and say repeatedly: "I am not afraid." You can contradict this, in a gently taunting: "Yes you are, you're scared." Get them to argue with you and to make appropriate faces and gestures. The words "I am not afraid!" may be accompanied by defiance, and such gestures as clenching the fist, narrowing the eyes, and jutting the jaw out. You may notice that the explorer begins to get angry.

Anger

Ask the explorer to look at you and say repeatedly something like: "I never get angry." Again contradict them: "You do, you get mad often," or some such phrase. You may find, though less obviously than in denying fear, that they make many appropriate gestures, such as opening the hands as if to show they are not going to hit out, or opening the eyes wide in innocent protestation. Some of these gestures may resemble fear or, occasionally, sadness.

Grief

Ask the explorer to look at you and repeat: "I won't cry." Again contradict: "Yes you will, you're going to cry." (Avoid the urge to be sadistic or bullying here; simply be firm and insistent). If the explorer is smiling nervously, stop them. You may notice some of the same physical signs as when the explorer denies fear, but the jutting out jaw and defiant look may lack conviction and the jaw may tremble and the eyes water, as if the angry denial of needing to cry in some way evokes it.

Joy

Ask the explorer to repeat: "I'm miserable, I really am." Again contradict: "Come on, you're feeling good, you're cheerful underneath." Here the person may show all the signs of sulking: pouting or pushing up the lower lip (looking down in the mouth), turning the eyes down, turning the head away in a refusal to share pleasure.

Physical Patterns

If you are able to do these explorations without hamming them up too much, if you can remain serious, you may perceive the basics of emotional dynamics. It is as if emotions have a physics of their own. The main points to emerge from the kind of dialogues suggested here are:

Fear and anger tend to work in opposite directions. If you are repressing or denying fear, you tend to assert anger. If you are repressing or denying anger you tend to assert fear in the form of an exaggerated submission or cooperation.

On the physical level, fear brings an opening of the eyes and mouth and hands; anger brings an antithetical closing or narrowing.

In the eyes, fear is characterized by perceptual diffusion: the wide eyes in real fear are accompanied by dilated pupils which seem to want to take in all the details of the environment over a wide range. Conversely, in anger the eyes take on a sharp focus with the pupils tending to constrict and the attention concentrated on specific objects.

All this fits in with what is known of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the part of the nervous system which governs involuntary events such as pleasure or pain, nausea or emotion. (The central nervous system (CNS) is what governs voluntary events such as analyzing a situation or deciding to make a move). A physiologist, Cannon, used the well-known phrase "fight or flight" in acknowledging that the same "emergency" branch of the ANS was activated in both fear and anger; it is as if fear and anger are opposite sides of the same coin.

Grief and anger are mixed. You may have noticed that an attempt to deny grief with an angry expression is not totally effective. Many of us have experienced "crying with rage." We may prefer, especially as children, to be tough and express our anger or indignation, but somehow our body lets us down and we find ourselves crying.

Grief and joy also work in opposite directions. This may seem obvious. But note how even physical expressions are opposed: in grief the person is down in the mouth, the body drags down, the person wants to turn away and hide; in joy the person's mouth turns upward, the body takes on a bouncing springy movement, the tendency is to turn toward another person to share the feelings.

You may also have noticed other facts: in fear and grief the body area seems to shrink in size as the person wants to cower away or hide; in anger and joy the body area seems to expand, either to present the maximum possible threat or in a joyful extension outward in all directions toward the environment. However, in both fear and anger the body tonus tends to be hard: the tensed pulling-back in fear, the rigid puffing-out in anger. In grief and joy the tonus tends to be soft: sobbing leads to soft trembling or convulsive movements in the body; joy is flowing and mobile.

Emotions and their bodily reactions can be summarized in terms of pulsation as follows: Fear is a hard contraction of the body; anger is a hard expansion; grief is a soft contraction; and joy is a soft expansion.

The implications here are that if there is a serious block to the expression of one of these four basic emotions, then there is a corresponding inhibition of part of the expansion/contraction of the breathing pulsation, or of mobility and action (which require some hardness of tonus, though not rigidity) or of feeling (which requires some softness of tonus, though not flaccidity). By extension, part of the pulsation of orgasm (see chapter 7) may be blocked.

This is not to say that you should work to become an athlete of the emotions with all four of them expressed in a versatile easy fashion. Some emotions are genuinely painful. Deep sobbing, for example, is something most of us have a resistance to, although once we give into it, it may be a relief. Where an emotional expression has been long blocked it may never come through as vigorously as if it had never been blocked. No one is perfect, and character consists partly of the unique combination in each of us of feelings and blocks to feelings. But these explorations may help mobilize some of the pulsation in you, and at least shake loose some of the inertia and deadness which sometimes accompany a long-repressed emotion.

Discovering some of your emotional blocks may open the way to making contact with your muscle blocks in general.