Pursuing Social Harmony – Politeness Vs Negative Emotional Expression
I believe that society is failing in our pursuit of social harmony by placing the act of being polite front and center and discouraging the expression of any form of negative emotion or thought, despite those emotions being very real and impactful to our psychological and physiological well-being. To further our failures, we are encouraging each other to focus only on positive expressions of emotion, despite feeling any form of positivity or not. We are force feeding emotional repression at an alarming rate and standing with our hands raised in confusion, wondering why suicide rates and anti-depressant medication prescriptions are growing at such a steady rate, bringing us back to a renewed focus on social harmony that is destined to fail unless the realization is made that success cannot be obtained if the misconceptions we base our efforts upon are not changed first.
The first misconception being that negative emotions serve no greater purpose and therefore are considered bad, and the second being that it is impolite to discuss these emotions with others when we feel as though something is amiss , with emphasis being placed on the further misconception that doing so only serves to damage the social relationships we maintain that are already hanging on by mere threads as it is. Sigmund Freud would have his hands full in evaluating the emotional repression found within our current society, bringing attention promptly to the risks involved in ignoring our negative emotions rather than finding solutions or coping mechanisms in which we should operate by instead.
But negative emotions are useful and can be extremely beneficial when we take the time to identify and label the emotion we are experiencing, evaluating the origins from which it was created to form a solution to the problem our brains are alerting us to. Our brains are evolutionary complex and amazing, with each one coming equipped with its own warning and response system installed directly into the amygdala, the site where fear is created that often leads to other negative emotions. Anger, anxiety etc. for example. A release of reactant chemicals going to the sympathetic nervous system triggers the fight or flight response, causing us to react to this warning that something is amiss by way of it’s impact on multiple body systems.
If you remember becoming angry and noting an elevated pulse along with a more rapid pattern to your breathing, as well as the heat rushing to your head, making your ears ring, you have experienced the effects of this on your cardiovascular, pulmonary, and circulatory systems, probably having been completely unaware of this fact. This is our brain making it clear that our personal stance on a gi...
