Sartre: Emotional Baby Boy, Emotional Man



From this reading, the main point that has continued to eat at me, and, from the discussion, seemed to be eating at other students, is this question of our emotions. Can we control them? Must we take responsibility for our emotions?
Intuitively, I notice the reactionary nature of many emotions. Many emotions occur in reaction to something. It’s this feeling in my gut that feels as natural as breathing. Because of this, I do not think I can comfortably say that I have full choice over all my emotions. It seems that many of my feelings just happen. Now, does that mean I’m not responsible for how I act in the wake of these gut feelings? No. Does that mean I can’t be proactive about my emotions to try to control them beforehand? No. I don’t think we are slaves to our emotions, but that doesn’t mean we choose them.
There are two very different examples from my personal life that I think illustrate some of this difference for me. In the first instance, I did exert a lot of control over a feeling I had. In the second, it’s more ambiguous as to whether I could control an emotion.
When I was younger, I was an extremely jealous person. I was jealous when people had things I didn’t, when people performed better than me academically, when people were more well-liked than me. Instead of being happy when other people succeeded, I felt insecure about my own shortcomings. And I hated this about myself. It made me feel awful, it put a strain on my relationships, and it wasn’t benefitting me. I decided I was going to work on it. I became cognizant of when I felt jealous, and instead of feeding that emotion or trying to repress it, I tried to be honest with myself about why I was feeling insecure, and worked on building my own self-esteem, and my empathy for others. After working on it for a long time, I no longer consider myself a jealous person. Jealousy isn’t an emotion that naturally happens for me like it used to, and when it does, it’s a lot easier to cope with. Still, it wasn’t like I flipped a switch and decided I was never going to be jealous again; it took a lot of work to retrain deeply-rooted attitudes.
On the other hand, I am also a person who lives with mental illnesses. I feel uncomfortable saying people can just choose their emotions, because my illnesses cause me to feel things that I would never choose to feel. I take medication and go to counseling to deal with these emotions, and that helps immensely. That might make a person feel like I am choosing my emotions, because I choose to go to counseling and take medication. But counseling can’t “fix” my mental illness, it can only give me skills to control my reactions to the illness. And my medication literally alters my brain chemistry, so I feel reluctant to call the effects of it a “choice.” You can choose to take a drug or have a drink, but it feels awkward to say you can choose whether it makes you drunk or high, right? Once you’ve taken it, the effects just sort of happen to you.
Anyway, I found all the readings very compelling, and I’m still wrestling with this concept of free choice and feelings. In the meantime, here’s a song I like about being emotional.

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