If everyone's emotions are valid, how come I have to go to work?
So the title is obviously a glib joke, but I do also mean it a bit seriously. I'm not sure what to make of the "your emotions are valid" crowd. My experience has always been that "your emotions are valid" does not get to apply to me. Perhaps it applies to other people, but if I just go around acting like all my emotions are valid all the time I become rude, weird, a bully, insufferable, and other things.
So what's going here? I think at a high level there are potentially a few versions of this argument.
Your emotions are valid and should be respected, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to express them.
I'm not sure if anyone is actually making this argument. I included it only because it seems to be the only reasonable interpretation that I can imagine. It's self-evidently true that people are often meant to hide their emotions. Perhaps version of this argument is the purely empathy-based sort of interaction you get to witness from time to time. A quick stereotype of this example might go something like this: "Your emotions are valid, so here's a hug. Now go out there knowing that I said your emotions are valid, but don't actually go and express them. It's just as bad as it was before, I just want you to know that I accept you."
If this is what is meant, then I think this could be the right answer, but it's also a worthless answer. A lot of the time in a normal social interaction, people can tell what you really mean. That person appreciates you, but also appreciates that you were kind enough to self-censor. They can read you, and read the room just fine, but (correctly) read your self-censorship as an act of politeness or kindness.
In other words, you're meant to censor your emotions, and everyone appreciates it. They expect it. Is there really so much value in knowing you're valid but still needing to employ censorship and mild dishonesty? Perhaps for some people? It doesn't feel like it does much good in my opinion. It's also the case that you do have thoughts which are not shared -- which for even those people who want to say you're valid -- would recoil and think less of you. I assume everyone has these thoughts, but maybe I'm just an extreme case and other people are painfully mundane? This feels too self-centered to be true, which is why I cannot fully land on this argument as a full solution.
If you didn't have past trauma, then you'd only have socially-acceptable emotions.
I heard this version of the argument some months back when discussing the topic with a friend. She's a psychotherapist, who also likes tarot and other mystical things. I was explaining a pretty general and long-standing problem of mine: when is it appropriate to be emotionally candid, and when do I need to put on a face for other people. At least for me, that decision never seems self-evident. Being emotionally open with people all the time is obviously fraught with difficulty. Most people don't want your honesty, even when they earnestly believe otherwise.
Her response to a bit of my argument was effectively that a lot of that emotional incompatibility merely comes from past trauma. She didn't dig into it much, but the obvious implication was that if that past trauma were resolved, then one would be emotionally adjusted such that they didn't encounter these sorts of difficulties. I'm still wondering precisely what she meant by this. I'm actually very skeptical of the "past trauma construction of personality." (a term I did not coin, but also does not seem to have gained wide adoption.) Did she mean that one wouldn't have inappropriate emotions if they had fully resolved past trauma? Did she mean that I would just have a better read on people if only my past trauma were resolved? I'm not sure, but neither seem plausible. Nearly everyone has thoughts they can't share with people, even if these thoughts are not especially interesting or complex. (eg: most teenage boys) It's hard to imagine the rampant immaturity and sexual energy of a teenage boy being in any way related to "past trauma."
This goes along with what (to me) is an obvious objection to the whole idea that your feelings are valid. What if my feelings are "I hope she gets drunk enough that she forgets to keep pulling her top up." Or perhaps: "You know, it would be good if people who played loud bass were dragged out of their cars and beaten senseless." These sorts of "thoughts from your id" are the kind of thing you're never supposed to voice, even in an anonymous blog with literally zero readers. Is my friend really suggesting that if your emotional trauma is resolved, you just don't have these sorts of thoughts? This doesn't seem plausible. To me this almost feels like the mark of puberty. You gain some sort of social awareness and learn in a more deep and nuanced way just how few of your thoughts you're supposed to voice. In other words, everyone learns when to self-censor and when to express themselves freely.
Her other possible meaning -- that someone who is better emotionally adjusted merely has a healthier idea about when to voice their emotions -- is more plausible on its face, but I still think it's troubled. Does every single autistic or spectrum-y person (the exact sort of person who would be prone to struggling with whether or not their thoughts and emotions were safe or appropriate to share) riddled with past trauma? I cannot imagine this could possibly be the case, even if it were somehow true that spectrum-y people had more "unresolved trauma" than the general population. I'm sure there are other groups who struggle with this as well, and you cannot entirely tie their struggles back to past trauma.
In any case, I didn't dig into this with her because I have such a poor view of the "past trauma construction of personality" and she has clearly based her career on this. I didn't want to offend her. It's very hard for me to imagine a world where most people never need to employ self-censorship on a regular basis. Most political dramas portray just how crucial clever signaling and self-censorship is to any sort social or political success. And we all know people in our lives who are incredibly socially fluid. Perhaps a senior executive at work. I'm sure they spend most of their waking hours filtering and framing their language. Both myself and a senior executive must do this; the primary difference seems to be that the senior executive seems to enjoy doing this, while I find it unbearable. (and also that they're good at it, perhaps in part because they enjoy it)
Your emotions aren't really valid, but I speak in aspirational, emotional metaphor when discussing topics that are important to me.
Something I learned far too late in life is that much of human speech is aspirational. A comment from an online discussion actually tipped me off to this fact at an embarrassingly late stage in my life. The article in question was 'Bring your whole self to work' is bad advice, Ivy League psychologist says—here's why
In response to the discussion, a user's comment explained:
Most people are far more emotional than logical (possibly as a consequence of a lack of basic education in logic). They are not precise with their language, and they are not logically consistent in their words and actions. A lot of them (most?) tend to say things that make them feel good, or that they aspire towards, not things that are actually true. It's not even a conscious choice to lie, they're too used to being like that, and there isn't enough peer pressure to change since most people are like that, too.
The framing for this comment would be something like the flip side of the usual comment that spectrum-y people take everything literally and miss social nuance. This is true! But, if you take the spectrum-y perspective, the world is full of landmines. A blunt example would be something like the following: You're trying to change a lawnmower blade, and I explain to you that "Even though people tell you that you must disconnect the spark plug prior to unscrewing the blade, it's not actually important to do." You foolishly listen to me, and in cranking the blade you actually jump-start the lawnmower and permanently mangle your hand. Outraged, you turn and ask me why I lied to you. I explain "What? That was just an aspirational metaphor. You were just supposed to know that you weren't supposed to take my advice literally in that case. Of course in other cases, you're totally supposed to take me literally. It's on you to figure out when." Now in fairness, that example is probably too blunt and too over-the-top. But in a "speaking from your id" sort of way I do think it paints the picture nicely. The lack of nuance in the situation frames the argument for a presumably normal person and portrays just how difficult it would be to pick out the nuance of a more realistic social situation that a spectrum-y person would struggle with. In other words, it paints a picture for a normal person just how baffling the situational "don't take this statement literally" situation can be. If I had chosen a more realistic and nuanced social situation to draw my example, any normal person could plainly see the error; the bluntness of the example helps paint what a nuanced social situation might look like from the eyes of a spectrum-y person.
I've been a bit long-winded here, but I'm fixated on this problem because I learned it so late in life, and has caused me trouble. Now obviously per the article, when someone says "bring your whole self to work" this is plainly a trap. Do not bring your whole self to work. Everyone knows this, and they find it out early, even if they do have social deficits. What did trouble me is why the hell do people even bother saying this sort of thing? What sort of work is "bring your whole self to work" even doing if everyone who is socially well-adjusted knows immediately that this is just a metaphor and you definitely should not take it seriously? Why do people like to hear it? Why do people feel compelled to say that sort of thing when they're messaging for an organization? The quoted comment is the only satisfying answer I've heard to this problem. Much of speech is not merely non-literal. Much of speech is also aspirational This floored me when I first read it, and explains a lot.
This is probably a conversation for a different essay, but I also think it explains why somewhat-autistic people are the most likely to fall through the cracks of any social ideology; they took the ideology literally instead of as an aspirational metaphor. I think this also explains how social ideologies crumble and new social ideologies form. The aspirational metaphor was never true, but when its emotional power fades, its words no longer do any work. eg: Were we ever post-racial? No, but we wanted to be, and that was a nice thing to want to be. When people believed that this ideology wasn't working very well, the aspirational (and definitely non-literal) language for that movement fell apart quickly for people. Interestingly, once it falls apart people seem to jump immediately to the literal interpretation rather than the metaphorical interpretation. Attacks on phrases like "I don't see race" comically point out just how impossible such a statement could have ever been. Did people in the past really think couldn't tell if a person was black or white or something else? Obviously not. It was a great aspirational metaphor when people believed in the ideas behind it. Once those fell apart, people read the statement literally. And taken literally, it's a completely literal statement. So why the hell did anyone say "I don't see race?" Because it would have been really nice if it were true.
In any case, I think many other people do believe something along these lines: "The pleasant things I want to be true are an aspirational metaphor, and for most normal people, such a metaphor is a really pleasant thing to receive. But, you're a fool if you take the metaphor literally." Confusingly, you could never get most people to make such a literal statement. The conflict seems to exist inside them non-verbally. To explain it in strict, literal terms would presumably be a somewhat autistic thing to do. If you asked them, they would usually just repeat the aspirational metaphor, but in different terms. They seem to think that you just haven't grasped the idea, and need to hear it phrased differently.
So what does this all mean?
I think probably no one cuts up these three arguments and leans heavily on one. (although I do wonder if there are some minority of people who actually think this sort of problem is all due to past trauma.) I imagine they glide seamlessly in and out of the arguments I've laid out above as each argument addresses a different part of the problem.
So, if everyone's emotions are valid, how come I have to go to work? I don't want to go to work. I don't want to need to understand how to self-censor so as not to offend people or make them uncomfortable. I don't want to take metaphorical ideas and adopt them as my own so that it seems that I am a team player at my job. A lot of people don't like their jobs, but I don't hear this side of the argument very much. I don't actually mind work. It's good to work hard. But why, if the purpose of an organization is to accomplish a task, would it be bad if I failed to read the room and said the wrong thing to my boss, or conveyed a locally-inappropriate idea? The answers to this question are obvious, of course. A well adjusted person knows that you must align with the aspirational metaphor. A well adjusted person might not find it so difficult to do so. And perhaps if you don't have so many hard edges, people would accept you for what you really think. I'm not sure what to say, but this just doesn't seem to trouble other people the way it seem to trouble me.