Misplaced Anger

Shu

Spiral out, Keep going..
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I'm strongly aware there is a growing stigma among my community. With more and more locks in place upon emotions and such, it's getting harder for humans to develop.

What do you think?

Here's my ideology of today's society.

1) There are not enough mentors that stay on the path.
2) There are more and more questions around the fragility of our beloved mile high societal standards.
3) Children are having a harder time learning to evolve emotionally, due to what used to be free in terms of expression is being either countered or completely knocked to the floor. Any child that acts of out of line is asked to leave their society by the head/professor/coach.

What does this do in a child or even an adult? Misplaced aggression is at the top of the list in my opinion. The idea of being nice in order to get by wears on even the youngest and untainted of souls. The need to attack even the smallest of issues in someone becomes more of a reality. What is drama to us, is reality to them. They can't see that in all aspects it will be trivial, but to them it's like they need to make a point. The misplaced aggression turns to passive aggression or explosive aggression. What used to thought to be a good person, all the sudden turns into a rigged arse and starts being a cynic about everything in people.

All it takes is one drop of toxicity to enter the body and then boom, some one is spreading rumors and trying to achieve things at your expense. Honesty seems to be avoided as long as there is a smile still on the snakes face as they say.

Those kids are turning into adults where they go off to the military or go off the the corporate world. Those adults in the corporate world are now becoming your bosses. Where again, you trusted them with their smile, but in turn they turn out to be a vindictive person where everyone now sees them as insensitive. All because of why? The way they grew up and reacted to locking down emotions.

You probably are asking, "Shu, what the hell do you mean by locking someone's emotions.. that's not technically possible?"

Here's what I mean:

1) An adult tells a child to stop crying when they are sick/hurt. (the parent might have a headache because of a long day)
2) An adult tells a child/teenager they are doing well in something, but in fact they are not. Wrongful rewarding leads to someone only trying at the bare minimum. It makes them feel good, but if they are always told they are good, what do they base their goals in?
3) A Boss gives their employee a gift of monetary value at work as an incentive for doing well, when in fact it's to keep them there. By most HR policies this is against the rule unless it's via employer.
4) Medicating a child for something before trying to understand their actual problem. Do you know how many adults now are on Aderol and such drugs, due the inability to be without now?

Each of these had a play on emotions and locking them. It carries into adolescence and into adulthood as well. So again, what's your take? Do you think this generation has a huge issue with misplaced anger?

If so, why or why not?
 
I would mostly agree with that. I think a large part of the problem is the inability to have an outlet for honesty and emotions. Everything you do is scrutinized, and it all can potentially hurt someone's feelings, meaning you shouldn't express it. Just as an exploratory example, it's not okay to be completely behind the LGBT community in defending their rights, but also simultaneously think -on a personal, reactionary level- that it's kind of gross to see two men or two women kissing. But is there really anything wrong with such a reaction as long as you're not parading it around in an insulting way? Being straight myself, I wouldn't feel offended if someone who was attracted to the same sex found it gross to see two people of the opposite sex kissing. I would understand, because attraction is an instinctual thing; they can't choose to find it any less gross than I may find the opposite. Sure, there's something to be said about keeping your mouth shut because you're in the majority, and you don't know what it's like to be a constantly persecuted minority. If enough people are constantly saying that it's gross, it can feel like the world is turning on you... like you're doing something wrong by thinking differently. But I think it comes down to fighting the right battles, and understanding the intentions of the individual. Disregarding someone as a bigot for something as simple as being grossed out by a kiss is extremely short sighted, and only serves to make more enemies. Those people no longer feel like they're allowed to be themselves in certain situations, and that box of situations where you can be yourself is getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller.

EDIT: I just wanted to make clear really quickly (though I shouldn't have to say it) that with the above paragraph, I'm not implying that LGBT romantic scenes and stuff shouldn't be part of media, or people in the LGBT community shouldn't be allowed to kiss in public and the like. Not at all. Just saying that it shouldn't be a big deal if someone personally finds it unappealing.

On the contrary though, I don't think this is much different from where humanity has always been; it's just a change of topics, and a change of speed.

Even just half a century ago, the near-universal thought in America was that if you were gay, you had to figure out how to not be gay, or keep your mouth shut about it. That really isn't any different from telling people to quell their honest emotions in modern times, on the modern gamut of topics. If you were attracted to someone of a different race, that was a bad thing. Just like today, if you wanted to take a career path that was more personally fulfilling than 'responsible', you were wrong, and you were a bum. I don't think that has changed. I think what has changed is the amount of people who can quickly tell you that you're wrong for being yourself, and why that is so. The internet is an amazing thing, but it also allows for instant judgement with little repercussions. This leads to it feeling like everyone and everything is constantly bearing down on you, asking you to be a certain way. It makes nearly everyone fake, at least to some degree, just to avoid the constant ridicule from people who you otherwise would probably get along with rather well. And it makes those who refuse to be fake retaliate, by being far too 'honest' to the point of just being mean and becoming the thing they're trying to avoid bowing down to.

The most frustrating area for me deals with kids and the act of bullying. Bullies suck. But that's why I think it's fair to let children fight their battles, rather than asking them to avoid the problem. Back when my parents were kids, they got in fights all the time. Sometimes they even got in fights with teachers. But people didn't do insane stuff like shoot up schools. They punched each other a few times, and then most of the time moved one. The outlet was the fight. But beyond that, they were also allowed to stand up for each other. It wasn't 'wrong' to stand up for yourself or your friends. The important thing is to not let things get out of hand. But when you force everyone to bottle things up, some of them will eventually burst.

I was a good kid. Even up through middle school, I would cry at the thought of getting suspended, or getting in any 'major' trouble. So I know how it felt when they started cracking down, and preventing kids who had problems with each other from interfacing about it. I felt trapped between the bullies and the rules. It was majorly anxiety inducing, like I had no way out. People do the worst things when they're in that position. I suppose it's lucky that I decided by high school that I just didn't give a f*ck, and I was going to ignore the school rules to do what was right. And the second that I started getting back in the faces of the bullies, they were so taken aback that they stopped. I never had to get into a fight, because I made sure they knew I would throw punches if it came to that.

I think the fact that kids aren't allowed to do that is what causes them to take drastic actions, because they don't understand how temporary their situations are, nor the gravity of said drastic actions. So much importance is placed on realistically trivial things, that they never quite learn what is and isn't a response that makes sense, or an appropriate reaction that fits an action. And the fact that the media plasters the faces of kids who kill people all over and gives them spotlight certainly doesn't help. It gives them the incentive to do something more drastic, as a way of getting the attention for their problems that they feel they need.

The point is, everyone is so easily angered by everything these days, that nobody knows which moments of anger to take seriously anymore. Again, I don't think that's different from the past; what's different is how easily and quickly people can express that anger to a wide range of people. Everyone is angry at you for something now, because everyone can interface with everyone else. And that makes people feel so boxed in and confused that they might make irreversible, major mistakes just looking for a way out.
 
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I think the brain is plastic; i.e., that it changes structurally in response to certain experiences. You may be born with a genetic deficiency which projects you out in the direction of developing bipolar disorder, but genes are not the sole determiners of your destiny. Given the right experiences, practiced often enough, you can increase the number of connections in your insulae and prefrontal cortex which can moderate the oversensitive emotions of a bipolar patient's amygdala.

That is just in adulthood. In childhood, when the brain is highly plastic, experiences have all the more influence. One such influence we have on children is that we teach them that labels of their emotions and thoughts are adequate explanations for their behavior. The baby cries. The parent says, "Oh, you must be sad!" And later in life, the parent asks, "Why are you crying?" The child, grown old enough to speak, says, "Because I'm sad." Slowly but surely, we build up the belief that what we do cannot be helped. We felt a certain way that demanded we do it.

But it isn't so. It is entirely possible to feel one way and act another, or not act at all. What's more, it is even fulfilling to do so, to an extent. While playing a board game, I feel frustrated that the other player is winning, but I smile and display good sportsmanship because I value maintaining the friendship more than spouting off about how unfair it is that my friend is getting all the positive cards in the Community Chest pile. All mature adults learn to do this, and yet we never talk about "suppressed" emotions "spilling" out, because the flash of frustration is so brief, so small. You see, our brains become so practiced at inhibiting that frustration that it becomes almost effortless.

The reason why we see "misplaced anger" isn't because we teach children to suppress their emotions. Rather, it is because:
  1. We rejected classical education as superstitious nonsense. Because it didn't have replicated and electronically recorded data behind it, we ditched the method of having children ruthlessly memorize the building blocks of their educational subjects during their formative years, with the idea that they would later combine these building blocks into creative thought. We ignored that possibility that the old methods might have been empirically supported by generations of trial and error, even if we didn't have a graph in front of us telling us so. And thus we abandoned all the psychological advances that came with those methods, the fanatical exercise it gave to the parts of the brain that regulate emotion.
  2. We have accepted a push-button world. In our quest to make life easier for ourselves and our progeny, we have invented tools that make work easier. But because the work is theoretically easier, we and everyone around us assumes that we are capable of doing more in a shorter amount of time. Thus, we are constantly rushing between this activity and that, never stopping to enjoy the activities for their own sakes--which builds attention and emotional regulation. Instead, we have installed DVD players in minivans, because heaven forbid my child should go five minutes without entertainment. We feed the problem this way. Behavioral psychologists are hired to make tablet games so entertaining that you will not want to put them down, and then behavioral psychologists are hired to fix the resulting deficits. But it extends even further than technology. Heaven forbid I should feel any anxiety ever; give me a tub of Xanax so that I never have to. Heaven forbid I should be bullied and learn to feel confident apart from someone else; no, let's con other kids into being sycophants that will coddle me. We like our machines and want to believe that we are like them, that it is just a matter of pushing the right buttons, that the hard wiring will do the rest. But we're not machines. We are dynamic life systems that evolve in a direction of equilibrium. We habituate to entertainment and seek bigger thrills; we grow tolerant to medicine and have to take more to get calm; we like the feeling of being comforted and continue trying to make everyone like us all the time. And to top it all off, we tell ourselves we are preparing children for the inevitable future by sticking them in computer labs for part of the way; but because of high teacher-to-student ratios, the unmonitored children make a beeline for Ebaumsworld and entertain themselves away.
  3. We have stopped teaching how to dissociate our emotions from our senses of selves. Japan always had Zen Buddhism to teach this very explicitly, but even the Western Christian tradition had it in St. Paul's doctrine of the spirit warring with the flesh. We rejected this sort of thing in favor of Romanticism. Or rather, the Germans rejected it in their rebuttal to France's imperialistic Enlightenment, then the rest of Europe jumped on the bandwagon and conveyed the tradition down to today. We accepted the idea that emotions are "authentic" and important and worth everything to fulfill. We lost the idea that we are not the same as our darker impulses, or that just because those impulses happen does not mean we are outside of samsara, or outside illa gratia Dei. We lost the idea that we can tame "the Flesh" or that it is even worth taming. And when our senses of self are fused with our emotions, why, what use is there in letting emotions lie as just emotions that don't influence our actions? If they are identical with us and meaningful lives for us, then surely we must act on them! But it's this sort of mentality that leads, psychologically, to emotions feeling like they are truly unmanageable when they become very powerful. And this in turn leads to dramatic acts of violence, political agitation, paralyzing social anxiety.

The solution, I think, is something like Mindfulness. However, explicit Mindfulness is altogether too foreign to the Western tradition to be successfully imported in areas beyond the cosmopolitan big cities. Mindfulness, I think, has to be ported into Western culture a different way.
 
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