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CIAO DATE: 8/01
The Republic of Feelings
On The Issues
February 2001
A growing body of evidence suggests that repressing one's feelings may have greater psychological benefits than expressing them.
To be openly in touch with one's feelings is today held up as a personal ideal. Older virtues associated with a stoical and more reticent attitude toward life are sometimes looked upon as obstacles to self-healing, self-discovery, and self-esteem. But is being aware of and expressing one's feelings really such a good thing? Some psychologists are beginning to raise questions about the automatic value of emotional expressiveness. Also, a growing number of social critics see in the constant pressures and demands for emotional openness a serious incursion into our privacy and freedoms.
A small number of researchers are taking an empirical look at the general assumption that speaking out and declaring one's feelings is better than holding them in. Jane Bybee, a Suffolk University psychologist, studied a group of high school students, classifying them as either "repressors," "sensitizers" (those keenly aware of their internal states), or "intermediates." She then had the students evaluate themselves and others using these distinctions. She also had the teachers evaluate the students. She found that the "repressors" were less anxious, more confident, and more successful academically and socially. Bybee's conclusion is tentative: "In our day to day behavior it may be good not to be so emotional and needy. The moods of repressed people may be more balanced."
Her study is small and its findings are qualified, but it flies in the face of conventional "emotivist" doctrine; it is unconventional and daring to put to the test of actual experience the accepted view that emotional openness is beneficial. Bybee's is not the only study to question emotivist assumptions.
In a 1997 article in the Lingua Franca, writer Emily Nussbaum summarized the small but impressive body of psychological research that makes "the case for repression." She reports the research of George Bonanno of Catholic University (now at Columbia University). Bonanno's studies challenge the commonly held assumption that venting negative emotions like grief by talking about them openly is necessary for regaining mental health. His studies showed negative effects: Grieving individuals who express strong negative emotions about their loss are worse off than the so-called repressors, who recover more rapidly. Bonanno checked his results by using "double blind" and controlled methods. For example, he had outside psychologists examine his bereaved subjects and determine which were healthier in recovery. The ones who repressed their grief turned out to be considerably healthier than the strong emoters. More recently, Bonnano and a team of researchers at the National Institutes of Health have found that, among adolescent girls who have been sexually abused, those who showed emotional avoidance were doing better than those more openly expressive of anger and grief.
Bonanno's work strikes at the contemporary axiom that talking it out is the way to mental health. So do some studies of Holocaust survivors. According to Hanna Kaminer and Peretz Lavie of the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, survivors who have been induced to "talk it out" fare significantly worse than repressors. "Repression has been understood as a pathological phenomenon," write Kaminer and Lavie. "Our findings contradict this assumption." Their conclusion is the very opposite of the conventional one: "Help survivors to seal off the atrocities that they experienced."
Without presuming to judge the very complex issues at stake, we should note that in most past and present societies, "repression" of private feelings is a social norm. From a historical perspective, the burden of proof rests on those who believe that being in touch with and openly expressing feelings makes people better and healthier. In most cultures—including our own until quite recently—stoicism and reticence are valued, while the free expression of emotions is deemed a personal shortcoming. All of the world's major religions place stoical control of emotions at the center of their moral teachings. For Buddhists, the ideal is emotional detachment, for Confucianism, dispassionate control. "Be in touch with your feelings" is not one of the Ten Commandments.
Are We Too Self-Involved?
Compared with members of other societies, contemporary Americans may be far too "open" and self-involved. Those who promote the ideal of personal openness ought to seriously consider the possibility that Americans may need more, not less, reticence. Encouraging someone to be a "sensitizer" instead of a repressor may be harmful: It may encourage a preoccupation with oneself, to the unhealthy exclusion of outside interests. Children are at special risk from well-meaning educators and group leaders who increasingly demand of them that they be open about their private feelings.
The contemporary faith in the value of openness and the importance of sharing one's feelings is now so much a part of popular culture that we find even such staid organizations as the Girl Scouts of America giving "points" for being open about grief. Lingua Franca writer Emily Nussbaum reports that a Girl Scout Troop in New York instituted a "grief patch" in 1993—"troop members could earn this medal by sharing a painful feeling with one another, writing stories and poems about death and loss and meeting with bereavement counselors."
My son David is often taken aback by the pressures to conform to the ideal of freely expressing private thoughts and emotions. He came to me one evening when he was in the seventh grade utterly confused by his homework assignment. Like many contemporary English and social studies textbooks, his book, Write Source 2000, was chock-full of exercises designed to improve children's self-esteem and draw them out emotionally. "Mom, what do they want?" David asked. He had read a short story in which one character always compared himself to another. Here are the questions David had to answer—and his replies.
"Do you often compare yourself with someone?
'Sometimes.'""Do you compare to make yourself feel better?
'No I do not.'""Does your comparison ever make you feel inferior?
'No.'"
I was amused by his terse replies but rightly concerned, as he was, that he would not get a good grade on this exercise. At the same time it seemed to me that the assignment violated a healthy normal child's right to be left alone. The intrusive, probing questions were introducing a level of self-consciousness that my son did not have and did not need. In the end he handed in his laconic answers and paid the price in an indifferent grade.
From Well-Adjusted to Anxious
In a fine scholarly book called The Myth of Self-Esteem, John P. Hewitt, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, examines the ethical hazards of using the classroom for getting in touch with one's feelings. In a typical classroom self-esteem exercise, students complete sentences beginning "I love myself because . . ." or "I feel bad about myself because. . . ." Hewitt points out that children interpret these assignments as demands for self-revelation. They feel pressed to "correctly" complete the sentences in ways the teacher finds satisfactory.
Teachers . . . no doubt regard the exercises as being in the best interest of their students. . . . Yet from a more skeptical perspective these exercises are subtle instruments of social control. The child must be taught to like himself or herself. . . . The child must confess self-doubt or self-loathing, bringing into light the feelings that he or she might prefer to keep private.
Bybee, Bonnano, and the other skeptics of emotivism are also suggesting that therapeutic pedagogies may actually be harmful to children—turning well-adjusted "repressors" into anxious "sensitizers."
Civil libertarians oppose repressive and intrusive laws that affect our personal well-being and freedoms. We need also to be aware of the social and personal blight spread by the promoters of "openness" and "self-esteem" in the new Republic of Feelings.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident fellow at AEI. This article appeared in the fall 2000 issue of Free Inquiry and is reprinted with the permission of that magazine.
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