Emotional Correctness

When the columnist Molly Ivins learned in 1999 that she had stage III inflammatory breast cancer, friends urged her to confront her feelings. Ivins tried it and found the experience “awful.” As she wrote in Time magazine: “I am one of those people who are out of touch with their emotions. I tend to treat my emotions like unpleasant relatives — a long-distance call once or twice a year is more than enough. If I got in touch with them, they might come to stay.”1

In an age when talking about one’s feelings has become a mark of personal authenticity, Ivins’s spirited refusal to open up is a breath of fresh air. Over the past thirty years or so, emotive outpouring has become routine on television and radio and in our leading news magazines. So powerful is this trend that Ivins’s reluctance to dwell on her feelings about her cancer seems almost an affront. Merely suggesting to someone that she is talking too much about herself can be taken as “a form of abuse,” observed Wendy Kaminer in her 1992 bestseller I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional.2 “What might have once been called whining is now exalted as a process of exerting selfhood,” Kaminer continued, and “self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.”3

More than a decade after Kaminer’s incisive exposé of confessional culture, the New York Times Magazine carried an article with the improbable title “Repress Yourself.”4 The author, psychologist Lauren Slater, sought to show that science was bearing out the value of self-restraint. “New research,” she wrote, “shows that some traumatized people may be better off repressing the experience.”5 Slater cited recent studies showing that heart attack victims and bereaved spouses who “minimize, distract, and deny” felt far less anxious about their illness or loss months later.

Slater wasn’t talking about everyone, of course. But she wanted to show that recounting one’s anxieties (again and again) or pondering them (over and over) is not required for psychological health. It soon became clear that Slater had tapped a rich vein of rebellion against the still-pervasive idea that the well adjusted are those who focus attention on and talk about their feelings. Wrote one appreciative reader, “Maybe the talking cure would be helpful if you talked once, but most shrinks want the patient to go on and on, reducing you to only your horror story.”6 Another recalled Don Imus’s remark “that in at least one of the early ‘sessions’ at the New Mexico ranch [for children with cancer], the children said, ‘Send those psychologists home.’”7

By some definitions of “emotional intelligence” Slater and these readers are to be pitied. They are emotionally obtuse. Their reticence is supposed to put them at a disadvantage. But is this true?

About thirty years ago, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin named John R. Marshall sought to confirm the already dominant view that openness was critical to mental health. In his essay “The Expression of Feelings,” published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Marshall noted that most mental health experts as well as the general public held the belief “that if a person can be convinced, allowed, or helped to express his feelings, he will in some way benefit from it.”8

“Surely,” Marshall postulated, “a concept so ubiquitous should be relatively easy to validate.” But when he reviewed the literature for evidence of the benefits of sharing one’s feelings, he found a confusing muddle of “ambiguous and contradictory studies.”9 The intervening years have produced a sizable and compelling body of research demonstrating that the expression of feelings is not a sure pathway to fulfillment. On the contrary, it often leads to unhappiness.

Consider anger. Charles Darwin was one of the first to observe that the verbal and physical expression of anger often begets anger. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, he wrote that “the free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it” and that “he who gives way to violent gestures will increase his rage.”10 A century later, experimental studies were confirming Darwin’s observations.11 By 1973 the president of the American Psychological Association, Albert Bandura, was calling for a moratorium on the use of “venting” in therapy.12 That same year the psychologist Leonard Berkowitz, renowned for his work on aggression, wrote an article in Psychology Today called “The Case for Bottling Up Rage” in which he criticized “ventilationist” therapists.13

Following these pronouncements, data have continued to spill out of journals confirming, with few exceptions, that physical and verbal expression of anger is usually self-reinforcing.14 Nor does talking about negative experiences necessarily ameliorate the anxiety accompanying them. Despite the claims of Jon G. Allen, a psychologist and author of Treatment Approaches to Coping with Trauma, who states that “the universal prescription for trauma [is to] talk about it with any trusted person who will listen,” a number of studies show that talking per se has little effect on emotional recovery.15 For example, Yale psychiatrists found no relationship between the degree to which Gulf War veterans talked with family about their experiences and their ratings of residual war-related anxiety.16 After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Northern California, a Stanford University psychologist found no difference in distress between college students who talked about their experiences and those who did not.17 Other researchers found a similar lack of protective effect of so-called social sharing on symptoms of distress.18

What about self-absorption? Intense contemplation of one’s inner landscape, especially during times of distress, has long been considered necessary for deeper self-knowledge and, ultimately, for mental well-being. But this, too, turns out to be psychological lore. An incident from the life of John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century philosopher and one of the founders of utilitarianism, is exemplary.

Happiness was a state that Mill deemed the greatest good and believed it came from the pleasurable fulfillment of human desire. Now one might think this philosophy favors therapism since it seems to demand that we all pay a great deal of attention to our feelings and desires. But Mill found otherwise. A section in his autobiography called “A Crisis In My Mental History” describes his painful discovery that self-preoccupation can be disastrous.

In the fall of 1826, at age twenty, Mill suffered a debilitating, long-lasting depression. Antidepressants were not available to him. Nor was talk therapy; it was thirty years before Freud was even born. Mill’s depression persisted and deepened. Relief came only by accident. Mill happened to read a very moving story that caused him to forget about his own psyche for a brief spell — and the depression lifted. This experience had a profound effect on him, leading the philosopher to adopt what he called an “anti-self-consciousness” theory. Here is how Mill describes the lesson he learned:

The experience of this period had [a] very marked effect on my opinions and character. . . . Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit. . . . Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. . . . The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on [some external end].19

It is possible that Mill’s depression was starting to fade before he found relief through literary distraction. In fact, an improvement in mood may be what gave him the capacity to be distracted in the first place; after all, a prominent symptom of major depression is the inability to focus on a task. In Mill’s case, even if his depression were starting to melt as part of the natural cycle of remission, his ability to distract himself surely accelerated his recovery.20 Ample research demonstrates that purposeful distraction can lift one’s mood when depressed, just as ruminating about problems and the meaning of negative feelings can amplify them.

Now, two centuries after Mill and three decades after Marshall, despite a large body of research challenging the virtue of dwelling on and expressing one’s emotions, those bedrock principles of therapism remain alive and well. We do not suggest that naturally passionate or voluble people should suppress their emotions or their desire to talk. But we caution against pressing, shaming, or subtly coercing anyone into trying to feel more deeply or be more expressive than befits his natural style.

Starting a Conversation: Respond to “Emotional Correctness”

In the text boxes below, consider how Sommers and Satel respond to their writing situation by answering the following questions: