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by alanwatts
3132 days ago
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>Also there's no such thing as a negative emotion. Everything we feel is a necessary (or at least programmed) reaction to our experience. Have you ever met someone with emotional issues, i.e. anger management issues? There are indeed many people with habitual "programmed" emotional responses which are detrimental to their well being and are extremely difficult to manage. You might like to read the works of the evolutionary pyschologist and athropologist Dr. Paul Eckman. He posits that emotions are valuable life saving forces that help us act quickly in critical situations without having to think. However, our emotional habits have also evolved over many thousands of years, and so many of the emotional responses which may have saved our life as a paleolithic hunter gatherers may no longer be relevant and can have the opposite effect in a civilized society. |
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As far as I know, the problem with anger management is not the anger itself, it's how you deal with it so it doesn't overwhelm you, and so you can have less of it. What I mean is that it's a symptom, not the issue itself. It's normal to be angry when someone is a jerk to you, it's healthy even, and so it's not* inherently "bad" (as we so often portray anger and sadness). The problem is when you let it get away from you.
I hope I understand correctly that your last paragraph is agreeing with my comment. If not, then I should have extended the notion of "necessary" to "useful", in the sense that you are describing. However the problem with evo psych is that it's largely non-falsifiable. The part you are describing is somewhat an obligatory aspect of evolution, but evo psychologists and anthropologists tend to draw conclusions that aren't rigorous (in my opinion). This is coming from someone who has 30 credits in Anthropology from a few years back :)
Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information. I do agree that other people may find Dr Eckman interesting... I don't but others might ;)