Topics Emotion

Question Today I had a big fight with my sister. We were both sulking, upset and angry. I told my father that I was really hurt and he said that it is not worth being hurt when there are people right now in Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, the Congo and elsewhere who have lost their homes, family members and futures in the blink of an eye. And that if you told those people that there were two girls in New Jersey who got to go to school every day, who had a comfortable house, an intact family and never had to worry about food or money or safety, they would think it was ridiculous how sad and hurt and angry we were being. I understand my dad's point. He is saying firstly that we should be grateful for what we have and not bitter about the small things that are not going well. And secondly that we should think of our problems in perspective in terms of what the rest of humanity may suffer. But can the above idea ever really act as consolation, or should it? It seems that you can't put emotions in perspective - does the fact that something worse exists somewhere else make a bad thing less bad?

Accepted:
August 15, 2006

Comments

That something much worse exists does not make a bad thing less bad. But it may well make you feel much less bad about it. And that's what a consolation is, really: something that makes you feel less bad. In this case, this can be achieved by gaining a broader perspective: by seeing the wrong you suffered in comparison to other wrongs (and, I might add, also in comparison to all the good times you have had, and will have again, with your sister). However big and irreparable the hurt felt at the time, it's really just a blip on a larger canvas.

What is it to keep one's emotional reactions in proportion? There is a philosophical issue here that seems worth raising: emotional reactions are not simply sensational reactions to the world, they can be cognitive reactions too. Emotions can sometimes tell you things about the world that one's beliefs aren't registering. Perhaps your upset about the argument with your sister contained a cognitive response that was appropriate to the scale of the argument with your sister, in which case the emotional content in itself should not be changed by the thought that there are many situations in this world that would be infinitely more upsetting and difficult to bear. The advice that one should keep one's emotional responses in proportion - making sure the cognitive content is correct, if you like - might sometimes require one to let it go, but equally it might require one to stand by the upset and conclude that the argument one had this morning was indeed really upsetting. If so, one needs some other way forward than remembering how much worse things could be - talking it over with one's sister or whatever, explaining why one was so hurt, asking if she felt the same, and so on. Keeping emotions proportionate to the facts cuts both ways.