What if emotions are not good or bad? What if they are just emotions? The research I have been studying would indicate that a wide range of emotions are necessary for a human to develop a balanced and healthy psyche. Humans who have not experienced too much of one type of emotion, whether it is the ones we think of a good or the ones we think of as bad doesn’t matter, if there is an abundance of one type of emotion, the person seems imbalanced mentally.
Example: A child grows up in an abusive, unstable, traumatic environment. The amount of joy felt during that time might be sparse or rare, and the amount of physical and mental pain, fear, panic, anger, etc. would be intense and far outnumber the amount of time spent in joy. This is a person who will tend to feel the traditionally labeled negative emotions much easier than the positive ones. It might be hard for them to feel comfortable in pleasurable situations or to feel good about an accomplishment or to experience real love. They will require time and professional help to find a way to heal the many hurts they experienced.
Example: A child grows up in an environment where their needs were met quickly and without fail. They had as much love and attention as they needed, and also were not scolded, told “no”, or allowed to experience stress or failure of any kind. Everything they did was perfect, and they only ever experienced joy and pleasure. The amount of what we might consider positive emotions would far outweigh the person’s experience of what we might call negative emotions, like frustration, struggle, pain, etc. When this person enters a world that is no longer as controlled as the one, they grew up in, it might not work quite the way it did when they were young. They might meet with failures, resistance, delayed gratification, or any number of things that do not go their way. They have no experiences of these types of things in their past, and so, might feel quite unbalanced having to manage them for the first time as an adult. This person has no negative experiences to draw on to manage their current stress or struggle. They have no experience overcoming and dealing with struggle, so they will feel completely unequiped to handle the most basic forms of stress. This person will also require professional help to manage their emotions and navigate a world that does not revolve around them. They may become a narcissist, someone who is lonely and struggles to maintain relationships even with healthy partners. They will tend to believe the world should be easy and just give them all they desire and “deserve”. They may have no ethical or moral compass to guide them.
While these are two extreme examples, it isn’t hard to see that too much of any one thing can cause a person to struggle in life. We might either think too much of ourselves because life has been too easy, or we think too little of ourselves because life was so damn hard. Neither of these is what we would want for our children, and creating a balance of life experiences isn’t an easy thing to do. Parents who suffered a great deal as children tend to try to remove as much suffering from their children’s paths as possible. They don’t realize that their struggles are what made them who they are and will make fine humans out of their children also.
In the plant and animal world, it is the plant that struggles to survive the most that tastes the best and has the most nutritional value. Plants bred to not need to struggle against elements or insects don’t taste as good and lose a lot of their nutrients. It is the struggle that creates the chemicals in the plant that we can use in our bodies to nourish us. Animals who are strongest are the ones who had to fight to survive, who struggled to find water, shelter and be a part of a pack.
Humans who do not need to struggle in life, don’t appreciate or understand the struggle of others. They don’t know why others are talking about things being so hard because for them, it isn’t. They will never get how hard it is to just feel okay in your own skin unless they have ever felt like they weren’t.
Achieving a balance of emotional experiences in life is not as easy as just saying, “I am going to experience as many emotions as possible and make sure they are in balance of the ones that are hard and the ones that are pleasant.” We don’t get to pick the experiences we have in life most of the time. Things just happen to us, or for us, depending on our perception. We can direct those experiences to a certain degree but ask most people if they were able to control what experiences they had in their life with any certainty, and people will probably mostly just laugh at you. I get that the humans out there with the most privileged lives who experienced very little struggle might tell you that they are in total control and their lives are wonderful. They might say that, but if you looked closely at life, you might see that isn’t as rosy as they are indicating. They have just been trained to only see the things that align with things going their way, and they dismiss anything that hasn’t. Not a bad skill to have sometimes, maybe? It’s a bit delusional though.
The main thing to remember is that no living thing learns, grows, and becomes their best self or the strongest they can become without effort. If we have nothing in life to struggle against, to rise above, to learn to deal with and manage, we are weak, entitled, and wilt at the slightest stressors. All humans have the potential to grow up to be the best version of themselves. To do that, they need a life rich with experiences of all kinds to give them balance and opportunity to learn, struggle, and develop who they are. Without that humans are less than they are capable of being.
-Namaste