Similarly, you do not have to be a researcher to know when an alert baby is comfortable. They have the curious glint in the eyes, the smile that tugs at your heart, and the sounds of squealing, gurgling, and laughing that create sympathetic delight in your body. You can sense an infant's spontaneous happiness without words. In fact, the joyful sight and sounds of a happy baby are contagious. Pay attention when you hear a baby cooing or a child laughing, and notice how your body responds. I remember once sitting on an airplane when a toddler's uncontainable giggles became audible in the silence immediately after landing. All of us began to make knowing eye contact and smiling at one another. As the spontaneous sounds continued to fill the cabin, our adult smiles finally burst into audible laughter. We just couldn't help ourselves. We all walked off the plane feeling great!
Although infants cannot tell us about their discomfort in words like older children, they give clues through their bodies. Pain is communicated through babies' bodies in changes to heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure. Infants act differently when they are in pain than when they are comfortable. Although each infant responds individually and may be inconsistent, there are certain behaviors like fussing, crying, furrowed brow, squeezed-shut eyes, and a quivering chin that reflect discomfort.
Discomfort is a visceral or physiological experience even when the source is emotional. Neuroanatomist A. D. Craig suggests the definition of human emotion to be both a subjective feeling and a body experience. He points out that, given this insight, emotions are not simply occasional events, but ongoing and continuous, even when they go unnoticed as unconscious human emotional acts.3 In other words, our feelings are constantly changing and creating different body experiences even when we are oblivious to them.
Although you may not remember your very early experiences, you too were born with the three spontaneous states of curiosity, comfort, and discomfort. Through the years you have evolved more complex feelings, but these primal emotions still strongly motivate behavior. As a growing baby, then child, you organically sought intuitive ways to maintain comfort. It all happened through your body, not your head, because your intellectual mind was immature.
The techniques you learn in this book will show you how to unravel primal discomfort dammed in your body. As it quickly and naturally evaporates, you can remember your inherent curiosity and childlike joy, regardless of age.
The Most Commonly Dammed or “Damned” Feelings
As adults, our central motivators continue to be maintaining comfort and avoiding discomfort. It is no surprise, then, that emotions that get dammed up consciously and unconsciously are related to discomfort. They are those we consider “negative,” such as fear, anger, sadness/grief, and envy. These are the emotions we often avoid, forget, resist, ignore, bury, and control because they are uncomfortable. Those young and old alike who have not learned to delay gratification demonstrate how strongly we want what we want and don't want what we don't want. Just observe the persistent drive in young children to get their way.
Fear
One primal discomfort is fear. When we feel afraid, there is a disturbance in our body, mind, and spirit. The fear stimulated by chest pain and shortness of breath in panic attacks highlights the direct connection between our bodies and emotions that bypasses thinking. Feelings acting through our bodies can be quite convincing in making us feel we are dying.
Fear expresses in various ways depending on personality and beliefs about the world. An acutely fearful experience elicits a biochemical reaction that expresses as fight, flight, freeze, or faint. When your concern is about future safety, anxiety arises. Fear directed to past experiences results in shame, regret, and guilt.
What is your initial response to fear? Your secondary response? As you look back over your life, you will notice whether you have a tendency to flee, fight, freeze, or faint. None of these responses is better or worse; each is a natural pattern of responding given your genetic predisposition and life experiences. By identifying reflective habits, you can compassionately understand yourself and realize you have additional choices to feel comfortable.
Anger
Within anger is an implicit fear of loss of control/comfort—like a child throwing a temper tantrum: “Something's not going my way, and I don't like it.” Yes, our infantile need for comfort continues regardless of age. The good news is when the crying baby in us gets loud, our adult self can listen, soothe, and learn to understand the cause.
Anger is commonly misunderstood. Synonyms that surface in an online thesaurus search describe anger as a very strong attitude: “bitterness, cantankerousness, vexation, acrimony, antagonism, violence, peevishness, petulance, ill humor, ill temper.”
Do you sense the implication? There is a subtle suggestion the angry person has a difficult personality. Who wants to be labeled that way? Over the years, many of us have learned to shut off feelings of anger for fear of sounding ill-tempered, demanding, and antagonistic.
Growing up with a first-generation Italian father, my childhood experiences with raw anger were somewhat frightening. When I visited Italy in college, I witnessed angry outbursts frequently and began to understand my dad. The dramatic verbal expression of anger I saw there is common and fleeting; it is not necessarily personal or threatening. In fact, you frequently see it between people who are strangers on Italian streets. It is a dramatic acknowledgment that something has happened you did not expect and do not like. The speaker lets it be known in a passionate voice that there is a perceived offense, and then it is done. It is interesting to note that in stroke research anger did not increase the risk of stroke or ministroke, but hostility did. Anger like I saw in Italy is fleeting, whereas hostility is enduring. Furthermore, the incidence of stroke in southern Italy where my grandparents grew up is significantly lower than in other European countries.4 (Diet differences, however, were not considered in the study.)
Anger, like all emotion, is feedback from our built-in navigational system. It warns us we may be facing a potential violation externally or internally. As we understand from hardwired home security systems, most violations are false alarms without an actual intruder, but we just don't know until we investigate. Though rare, when a real burglar is in the area, we definitely want to be alerted so we can protect ourselves. Anger operates like a personal emotional security system. Feelings of anger warn you something dangerous could happen and further investigation is indicated to determine if action is needed to stay safe.
You can see how disregarding angry feelings may keep you from recognizing a real violation in your midst and you could get hurt. In fact, Siegman and Smith, editors of Anger, Hostility, and the Heart, found when they reviewed the literature preceding 2013 that repressed anger is associated with autoimmune diseases.5
I remember that in my early twenties as a single, “nice Catholic girl” afraid of being “bitchy,” I distanced myself from any hint of rising anger. As a result, I constantly felt confused. Clarity about friends and dating relationships evaded me, and I frequently postponed discerning decisions because I was living in a blur. Eventually, the influence of the women's movement dissolved these old assumptions, and I grew brave enough to sense and acknowledge angry feelings. Wow! What a breakthrough. I finally knew enough about myself to trust I could keep myself safe—my feelings would tell me when I needed to investigate. I was empowered to determine who/what was safe or not.
On the other hand, assuming all anger means a real burglar is in your midst is inaccurate and will lead you to feel the world is a more dangerous place than it is, which could compromise a healthy sense of trust. When we constantly assess our anger as a real violation without investigation, it snowballs into an attitude of anger or hostility, defined by researchers Siegman and Smith as a cynical and negative expectation of life.