SUFFERING FROM EMOTION

 

Unless you suffer from some sort of a psychological condition, the chances of you crying over a sad scene in a book or a movie are never zero. You can act tough and slurp the tears up before they manage to leave your empty globes, but we both know what you just experienced made you deeply wounded and maybe even disturbed.

Each and every one of you, dear readers, will convey a more personalized display of this sort of emotion. Some might cry quietly as the tears roll down, burning their cheeks, sneaking sniffs from time to time, others will have a full-blown crash out, very warranted in my opinion, with snot and tears mixing and screams heard from afar, as they “just can't’ contain their emotions”. Others will close their eyes in self-preservation, will think of it for a fleeting moment, then let it pass and get submerged in the next scene.

To evoke such emotion in oneself, the media portraying it needs to be well executed as well. It is, after all, the external factor digging out feelings out of your Pandora box. How well the set is, the character’s proximity to us and how good of a job the actors portraying it did, the story itself and how much we see ourselves in it, and also the music playing from pitch to rhythm to words spoken, they are all pieces of a machine, if well perfectly calibrated, can turn even the toughest of us into a cry baby, whining and wailing reaching for a comforting embrace.

Yet again, I can’t look at my beautiful self in the mirror with my pink nose and red swollen eyes and not wonder, how can I feel so much for people whom I know for a fact are just fragments of someone's imagination? A made-up story that is realistically impossible, actors who after finishing that last sob award scene, went and moved on with their lives. But, here I am, on my third breakdown of the week over the mention of their names. It is quite excessive even by my own standards, the amount of tears I squander over never-existing people. I would have taken it as an anomaly within me if I had not known many like me, suffering from the same curse; Birds of a feather, always crying together.

 As to the reason for this whirlpool of emotion, it would not be that passing crying moment by the female lead as she argues with her lover, it tends to be a cumulative of life events, unfairness and overall miserable circumstances lived by a character that leads you to get such a strong reaction. An everlasting impact that makes you cry at the mention of a banana and a fish in the same sentence, even though it has been a decade since you first watched that show. Reliving the same feelings of dread over again, just like the first time, veterans with PTSD ain’t getting anything on us.

So to circle back to my original conundrum, WHY DO WE SUFFER FROM EMOTIONS?

Mayhaps we are just like our ancestors named us; Snowflakes. Or in urban dictionary slang, we are Empaths. To me, the Gen Z version hits the spot better, suffering from empathy, it might be just that indeed.

Well that concludes this article, we found the answer. It's empathy. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

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Ugh! Stop looking at me! Okay! fine!! fine! I will answer this properly.

 

Empathy as a word is not new to our inner ears’ ciliary cells. We usually define it as the capacity to put ourselves in another person’s shoes, or sandals, or whatever that guy is wearing. Maybe they’re bare foot, then you’ll have to be barefoot as well, probably?!

It’s our reaction to observing others' ongoing situations of stress.

I will not go into detail on the difference between empathy, sympathy.

I changed my mind , I found a good quote that will do. “Empathy is our ability to understand how someone feels, while sympathy is our relief in not having the same problems”. 

So now, we define the emotion, but why do we feel it in the first place?

From an evolutionary standpoint, developing empathy for others is a brick necessary for the maintenance of our species; It’s a tool designed to get us to help each other, to help us understand and even feel/experience the hundreds of other POVs we may encounter. It helps us maintain relationships, and with that mankind in itself in continuum.

We distinguished two components in empathy, cognitive and emotional. Let's expand on that a little bit further.

COGNITIVE EMPATHY

It’s the ability to UNDERSTAND.To be able to perceive the emotions of others. I would say it’s the ability to read the room, the faces and predict the context. I can go further as to say it’s the capacity to read someone’s heart, a telepathic superpower of some sort. The cognitive aspect of empathy can be learned and mastered over time, through personal growth while being challenged in the WWE of life.

EMOTIONAL EMPATHY

For this, I present to you three components I stole from a website I found talking about empathy:

-the capacity to feel the same emotion as another person, to rejoice in their happiness, and feel deeply for their sadness.

-To experience a feeling of distress in response to witnessing another person's agony, we must distinguish this distress from mirroring, as the person does not feel the same physical pain felt by the other.

-The aptness to be compassionate for another.

“Many of the most noble examples of human behavior, including aiding strangers and stigmatized people, are thought to have empathy roots,” according to Hodges and Myers.

The answers above are not really satisfactory so I dug in a little bit deeper and opened the second link after a google search; What is the physiology of empathy ?

Neuroscientists, aka my favorite kind of “ists”, came up with two theories explaining the source of empathy.

1) The simulation theory; we simulate the emotion of others in ourselves, so we know firsthand what it feels like.

From a biology standpoint, and on a cellular level, scientists discovered a specific kind of cell named “mirroring neurons” that are found to fire when we observe others displaying any sort of emotion, channeling the same pathways in our brains as if it were us who experienced that same situation. On a macroscopic level, the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain responsible for a higher form of thought, showcases an overlap in the activation in the areas of both self-focused and other-focused thoughts and judgments as well. 

To quote, “When we witness what happens to others, we don’t just activate the visual cortex like we thought some decades ago,” said Christian Keysers of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam. “We also activate our own actions as if we’d be acting in similar ways. We activate our own emotions and sensations as if we felt the same.”

Experiencing pain;

To research the process of receiving pain stimulants and feeling empathy for another receiving the same kind of pain, University of Vienna conducted the following experiment;

Participants receiving placebo painkillers reported lower pain after receiving a shock than the control group, also, these same participants reported a drop in their perception of the actor’s pain while receiving the same shock. We can say that our ability to feel the pain greatly influences our perspective on how others feel that same exact pain. On another note, another group was given placebo painkillers with a dose of naltrexone(an opioid antagonist preventing the brain from regulating pain). The results after conducting the same experiment show a reversal of the placebo effect, the pain directly felt by the participants, and the pain experience from seeing the actors were near baseline rates. This laments the importance of the pain system in conducting empathy.

2) The theory of mind: the ability to “understand what another person is thinking and feeling based on rules for how one should think or feel, cognitive thought processes to explain the mental state of others, By developing theories about human behavior, individuals can predict or explain others’ actions.

Both theories can stand, it’s most likely that both processes overlap as we have the neurological aspect of mirroring neurons and also what we learn and our cognitive reasoning.

So to resume, for those of us who feel too much for others, there is a likelihood that your brain is prewired to do so from an evolutionary standpoint needed by your ancestors. You have a little extra mirror neurons here and there, or a bit of a thicker prefrontal cortex, maybe. Combined with a nervous system that makes you feel a twinge more pain than others and a dazzle of an upbringing suitable enough to bestow upon you the ability to understand the ache felt by other people.

As we are done with the scientific part, it’s my turn to freestyle this little verse for yall.

We are able to feel the soreness and sadness displayed by a screen simply because we have known pain. We have cried the same tears the actor cried, not once or twice, but for some, they spent more time shedding tears than conjuring giggles. The pain is deep within our souls, nesting, waiting,re-awakening when the situation allows it. I cry not only because you feel sad but because I know how that sadness feels. I empathize not because of human survival, but because I know how the lack of it feels like. Some salt rubbed over a wound. I hang onto a new pain, adding it to the collection of misery I piled over the years, protecting it, cherishing it, saving it for when I might one day need it. Over time, the made-up stories replace my own, memories mix, making me unable to distinguish the pain that is mine from what is not. Bit by bit, some of that weight lifts, and it all begins to fade under my hoarding mess.

As I cry over fictional beings, I think, how stupid can I be? In that same sense, crying over my own memories becomes ridiculous to me.

Without empathy, humanity would cease. A world reigned by selfishness and nonchalance, where everyone is screaming Me! Me! , and only Me, is not a world where life can be sustained, a world where our species would achieve greatness, a world where I would want to live. 

I hold into my empathy like a rose with a thousand thorns, digging deep into my flesh and bones. it will with no doubts hurt me, create some damage along the way. But I will always look at the rose and smile, beauty is born through pain, life is maintained through emotion. 

 

Ihssane Mahfoudi