Emotional Free-Body Diagram

Remember those free-body diagrams from high school physics class? I was talking to a mentor of mine this week about a concept I call emotional free-body diagrams.  To jog your memory here is the  real version of a free-body diagram.

Purpose of a free-body diagram in physics is to isolate the object that you are studying so that you can more clearly see the forces acting on it  thereby making it easier to draw conclusions about it.

 Emotions are very similar. Here is what an emotional free-body diagram looks like:

“That's a normal distribution curve” you might say. Yes, but please unhook the meaning you have for this image for our purposes. 

This curve broadly represents the fluctuation in the intensity of an emotion. It applies to any emotion, whether happiness, sadness, anger, or fear. When we experience an emotion in its purest form, it begins, gathers intensity, reaches a peak, starts to dissipate, and eventually subsides. While an emotion may go through multiple and varied waves, this diagram is a simplification of that process.

What complicates emotions are the defenses we have throughout the process of feeling them. For instance:

While there are many ways to defend against emotions, we’re going to focus on two main types. The first is defending against feeling a specific emotion at all, and the second is defending against the resolution of a feeling. People who are more avoidant tend to defend at the beginning of a feeling arc, while people who are more anxious tend to defend against the resolution of a feeling. We will not be getting into the details of why and how people do this because that is not the point of this piece.

The point here is that ideally, we want to feel the emotion without defense. That is how the emotion on its own is loosely like the free-body diagram. We are removing the emotion from all of the defenses that interfere with its action so we can experience and learn from it. (It is very important to study the defenses against the emotion too, but again, we are oversimplifying so we know what the goal is.)

People use defenses because, in the past, either feeling the emotion or resolving the emotion did not have the desired outcome, or they were not supported in feeling or resolving the emotion. When we engage in therapy or personal growth work, part of what we want the final outcome to be is the ability to feel all of our emotions without defending against them.

The reason we want to feel all of our emotions without defending against them is that emotions are messengers containing important information for us. Moreover, emotions tend to resolve on their own when we turn our attention to them and truly feel them. While this may sound like a simple concept, I have noticed in my personal and professional practice that simply feeling an emotion can be quite elusive for many people.

The challenge arises because defenses were originally put in place for good reason. Dropping these defenses is anxiety-provoking for both avoidant and anxious defense styles. To resolve the issue, we must undergo a kind of exposure therapy with emotions, eventually recognizing, “I felt the emotion. Even though it was uncomfortable, nothing bad happened, and I gained some important information by doing so.”