BOUNDARIES, VALUES, AND UNLEARNING SOCIALIZATION
IN CONVERSATION WITH KARLA MCLAREN
I don’t know about you, but I have a love/ hate relationship with emotions. Mostly, I’ve struggled to express them (which basically makes me a human), but I’ve also been fascinated by their energy and how they show up in my daily life. When I stumbled upon The Language of Emotions a few years back, it felt like I had discovered the Rosetta Stone. The author of this brilliant and enlightening book on emotions is Karla McLaren.
Karla McLaren, M.Ed. is a social science researcher and empathy pioneer. As an award-winning author of numerous books, she has focused her life’s work on a grand unified theory of emotions, “which revalues even the most ‘negative’ emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. She is the founder and CEO of Emotion Dynamics LLC and the developer of the Empathy Academy online learning site.”
Needless to say, Emily and I were beyond thrilled when Karla agreed to speak with Bonds about emotions and anger. We hope you enjoy Bonds’ interview with Karla and walk away feeling more empowered with a greater understanding of your own emotions.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.
Sylwia: The Language of Emotions rocked my world when I first read it. Specifically, your explanation that there are no “good” or “bad” emotions. Where do you think this idea that emotions are “bad” comes from?
Karla: The main mistake people make with emotions is that they attribute the difficulties they are experiencing to emotions. When things are hard, you might feel grief, rage, or depression and people think these are terrible emotions. People blame emotions instead of understanding what's actually happening, which is that things are hard and the correct emotions will come to help you deal with what's hard. Emotions are here to help and so, when we label emotions as “bad” we are shooting the messenger.
The way most people have learned to work with their emotions is to only like the ones that arrive when things are going well, like happiness and joy, and to avoid, or even hate, the ones that arise when things are very difficult. Often, people don't understand how emotions work and they blame emotions for things that the emotions did not create. What I've noticed about the difference between negative and positive emotions is that negative emotions challenge the status quo while positive emotions go along with it. If we never felt the emotions that show up as negative, then there would be no way to challenge inequality, injustice, trouble, or abuse. If you only have access to happiness-based emotions, you've got no power in your life and I often wonder if that's intentional.
“If we never felt the emotions that show up as negative, then there would be no way to challenge inequality, injustice, trouble, or abuse.”
All emotions are necessary, and by learning how to reframe emotions and work with them, you become more capable as a relationship partner and as a person in the world.
In your book, you write “all emotions are true, but not all emotions are right.” This stopped me in my tracks and I had an “AHA” moment. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Karla: All emotions are true because they're always responding to something that is true or feels true, but sometimes they're not right. You or I can misread a situation; let's say someone comes up to us and says something that we consider rude and we become very, very angry. That emotion is true because we thought it was rude, but sometimes we need to check in and say, “did you mean to suggest that I am ignorant?” or whatever it was, and let the person talk. Then maybe, you'll realize, “Oh, that's not what you were saying.” In that case, the emotion was true, it just wasn't right because you needed more information. A lot of times people take their emotions as the absolute truth; “I felt anger, so therefore you were abusive or you attacked me.” It's not always true. It’s so important not to treat emotions as if they're never wrong.
The fact is, your thoughts and perceptions are often wrong. In optical illusions, your eyes can be fooled all the time, and all of our senses can be fooled. It's important to be a good friend to our senses and not just take everything at face value and it’s important to develop the skill to know when you need to get more information about what your emotions are telling you.
Your book explains many emotions but I’d like to focus on anger. I think most of us are used to anger in the way it is presented in popular culture which is usually exhibited by loud aggressive sounds. What does healthy anger look like and what do we need to know about it?
Karla: Anger is always about boundaries and it is a deeply relational emotion. Anger should always arise when someone steps across your boundaries or breaks your boundaries. Learning how to work with anger as itself and learning how to set boundaries appropriately is a huge practice for anger.
There's a problem for women, at least in our culture, because women are generally not allowed to be angry. There's a name for women in our society who are angry and it rhymes with “witch.” How do women set boundaries if we're not allowed to work with anger? It's very difficult. We've had to be nice and liked and always friendly. If women don't know how to work with anger, it's because they were very well socialized to not. An unlearning of the extensive socialization must take place.
“How do women set boundaries if we’re not allowed to work with anger?”
In your book, you offer an example of how to react in a situation when we feel anger arise. I understand it intellectually when reading how to react appropriately to anger but when I was trying to play it out in a recent situation, I failed miserably. Would you be willing to talk through a scenario of how to respond to and channel anger constructively?
Karla: The questions that people used to ask themselves when feeling angry were, “what must be protected and restored?” And what we saw as a result, was that people would go to fight. Protect means fight. They didn't even realize the word restore was there. So, people were just going to fight and protect and defend and that's not what was intended.
What needs to be restored is an important component. So, we added a question before those two, which is - “what do I value?” “What do I value?” is the first question we ask anger, because that's what anger is about, it's about values. It's about our voice, it’s about our sense of self, it’s about boundaries we set around ourselves. And so, “what do I value?,” really, really calmed and soothed that violent impulse that people think is anger but isn’t actually anger. “What do I value?” becomes the question “do I value this relationship?” “If no,” then I can end it, right? “If yes,” then I need to set a boundary in such a way that the other person can hear me and that is relational rather than just walking away.” Then the question about restoring becomes clearer - “If I value this relationship, then I need to set a boundary and restore the relationship.”
“What do I value?” is the first question we ask anger, because that’s what anger is about, it’s about values. It’s about our voice, it’s about our sense of self, it’s about boundaries we set around ourselves.”
It feels like a long process, especially, since a lot of people get angry and they just explode, but it takes a lot less time to set a boundary than to explode. After you explode, you then have to go fix it if you have any kind of checks and balances on your behavior. Something that you did in a second of exploding might take a couple of weeks, or months, or years, or never, to fix. It actually takes less time to slow down and ask what you value first and then protect and restore.
In your book you talk about how we see emotions as things that happen to us, rather than as tools that we can use, can you speak more about that?
Karla: I think grounding helps me be prepared for anything; like with sadness, I welcome sadness, knowing that it helps me ground and helps me let go of things that aren't working. Before I knew what sadness was, I made the “attribution mistake,” where I thought sadness was coming to steal my things. I thought that sadness was happening to me; I would fight it, I’d say “shut up sadness.” I probably didn't cry for ten years because I thought crying and sadness were weaknesses. So, when sadness would come up, as it should, I would experience it as sort of an attack on me, instead of thinking, “oh this awesome sadness, now I can get grounded, clear myself out and get ready for the next thing.” I didn't know what my sadness was doing, except that it was disturbing me!
I see so often that emotion will come up because it has a very specific job to do and people don't know what the emotion is, they don't have any practice with it and they experience it as abuse-like. They’ll think “Why is that damned emotion here? We were having a nice talk, we were having a lovely day at the beach but this damned emotion came!” I notice so many people think emotions are coming at them instead of trying to help them.
If a reader would be interested in learning more about emotions, where would you recommend they start?
Karla: I would say, look at my website karlamclaren.com, because I have a lot of free information, lots and lots of it. If there is a specific emotion they would want to learn about, all of the emotions are listed in alphabetical order, and there's a whole post on each emotion (sometimes more than one). There they can get a sense of what this work is like and what they can do with their emotions. Then, if they’re interested, they could go get a book or take a course at Empathy Academy. But start free. Free is good.