Thou shall try to understand

You need not express how you feel in order to heal. While individual traumas from direct personal tragedies or loss could be healed with a lot of time spent talking them out with someone or a group, there are other traumas that seem to be better off if you keep them to yourself. That is what a study led by Mark Seery published in the June issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology revealed. This flies against popular opinion that we have to express what we feel all the time after common tragedies. They found out that people who did not choose to express how they feel after known tragic community episodes, in fact, were better off in terms of their “post-traumatic stress symptoms, their physical health and generalized distress.” This means that those who chose not to express themselves were generally healthier than those who vented.

They did this research to challenge the assumption that if you were not able to express your feelings after a collective tragedy, you will develop some physical symptoms related to stress. They sent out the questionnaires immediately after the tragic event and continued to ask the respondents in the two years that followed.

However, the study was very careful to state that they did not include those who experienced direct personal loss of a family member or friend from the collective tragedy such as 9/11. They qualified the findings of their study by saying that those who experienced the stress of 9/11 without having to directly suffer a loss, should not be forced to vent their feelings if they do not want to.

I latched on to this study not because I am all for hiding emotions but because it enlightened us that perhaps “expression” need not always mean “talking it out.” I also think there are other ways of dealing with trauma other than having to articulate it in words so maybe there should be another study to find out if the subjects did other things to “heal.” Some people take up another hobby; some move to another place; and some try to learn and understand more about the circumstances surrounding the tragedy. It may never fully explain why the tragedy happened but for some people, even a bit of understanding helps. I personally also think that even with direct personal loss, people should not be forced to express how they feel. For myself, I would rather make sense of my own personal loss on my own rather than talk about it. I partly do it by revisiting the places and doing things that gave meaning to my past and layering on something from my now cultivated strengths. Partly too, I bathe in the rich silence all my own when I can hear with sparkling clarity the lesson that emerged from that loss so I can go on with the now. It is with a perspective — that scoping view of loss in the larger context of life, that I heal. 

And it is not only in healing that keeping your emotions in check could serve you well. Another study that appeared in the May 1 journal of Psychological Science by Adam Galinsky of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois found out that the best way to reach a deal is not to appeal to the emotions (empathy) of the other party but to understand his interests, his point of view. This was a surprise to me because I have always thought that appealing to how the other party feels would lead to a deal more than when you use an appeal to reason. They called this approach “perspective taking.” It is when you understand the interests of the other side by seeing it from his end. This should not be confused with “empathy” where you try to strike a deal by capitalizing on the feelings of the other side.

They experimented with over 150 MBA students where they first divided them into pairs to play buyer-seller roles. Those who had successful deals reached were those pairs who employed a “perspective-taking ability.” On another test, they were divided into three groups — one group was told to consider what the “seller” was thinking and what purpose the seller had in that particular deal; the second group was told to concentrate on what the seller was feeling and the last was the control group who was simply told to do its role. It turned out that it was the first group that had had a lot more chances to strike a deal than the two other groups. The last test had a different pair of roles — an applicant-recruiter but it also resulted in the “perspective-taker” striking more deals than the other approaches.

I hope we do a test of this on Filipinos to see how much of our emotions play in the deals we try to strike among ourselves in the midst of our social, economic and political lives. Maybe it will do us well for science to distill this kind of behavior for us to ponder. I am guessing that we have let too much of our emotions drown our ability to understand other points of view. Most of our public debates are awash in emotions — generous appeals to our pleasure and pain centers, as if nature deprived us wholesale of the ability to think clearly. Of all the missing Thou shalt’s in many great books, I think “Thou shall try to understand” is the one most conspicuously missing. Too bad since a most loving life seems to be one filled with a growing “understanding” and that “understanding,” science seems to say, could help us be better human beings to each other.

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