Monday, March 08, 2010

Emotion

Emotion came up on the post about Fight To and Fighting From. It comes up a lot. In a duel or a sparring match we are not just fighting a practitioner or a style, but a mass of tactics and subconscious rules and emotions. We fight angry people and fearful people- cold rage to resigned terror; timidity to thrashing panic to rage. You can't separate the emotion from the person from the conflict. You can, I suppose. Tell me how it works for you.

We all get emotional about different things, to different degrees. We are comfortable with our level of emotion. What we feel and what we do with those feelings is natural and understandable. Someone feels a little more and they are a worrier or a whiner or a hater. Feel a little less and they are a robot, a cold fish, something alien. Not to be trusted. Cold blooded. Act out more and you're out of control, irrational. Act out less and you are repressed.

We are all our own gold standards for what is acceptable emotion.

So in a normal office, there will be a group of good people who get along... and one slimy, rumor-mongering deceptive manipulator. The manipulator will run roughshod over the nice people. His victims see him as evil. He sees nothing wrong with what he does. Then one day someone will step up and actually be assertive: "I know what you're doing. Knock it off." The manipulator deflates and walks away mumbling, "What an asshole." You see, in the manipulator's mind he never directly confronted anybody, so what he did wasn't aggressive or bad...

One level higher than you are willing to use strikes you as wrong. In the Conflict Communications course, we've identified six levels of this (hmmm, and six levels in the force continuum I usually use-- subtle influence, maybe?). For those who have spent time at the highest levels, where conflict is resolved with force, the conflicts that arise at the lower levels seem petty, almost unreal.

So it is easy for us to say, "Honey, just stand up to him. You'll be fine." And we don't appreciate that for people used to being good and getting along, stepping up just to the assertive level can feel like crossing boundaries, like doing something bad.

And when we say, with all sincerity, "I'm negotiating, son, right up until it is time to knock you on your ass," we don't understand how the casual acceptance of higher levels of force (that to us seem prudent and justified) sometimes horrify people who think that yelling or even standing up for yourself might be going too far.

"I understand that you are trying to hurt my feelings, young man. But no one has tried to kill me today, so I'm in a pretty good mood."

You know that stereotypical dream where you go to work or school and realize you are naked? Those quit happening the first time I thought, "Well, if it bothers anybody, that's their problem," and went about my day. There's nothing to be embarrassed about if you are still breathing and others had tried to stop that.

So for writers: angst is not terror.
This is for me, I know I'm not your target audience... but damn, people. Please. If your protagonist is in fear for her life, if she is looking into the eyes of a man who wants to beat, destroy, kill and humiliate her it is a different animal than dealing with a broken heart. Do not try to extrapolate from the embarrassing pimple you had in eighth grade to the terror of imminent annihilation. Do not try to recall your childhood heartbreak of flushing you goldfish down the toilet to write touchingly of a couple who just lost their baby. Please.

I know some will anyway. It might be okay for the readers who also have never been to the deep places. But the rest of us can tell.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ever compare the OODA loop to the old four humors?

Observe= Melancholy
Orient= Sanguine
Decide= Choleric
Act= Phelgmatic

Bruce

Anonymous said...

Quote
"So in a normal office, there will be a group of good people who get along... and one slimy, rumor-mongering deceptive manipulator. The manipulator will run roughshod over the nice people"
IMHE I find that the manipulator is that nice charming girl, who has a smile for everyone, and everybody things she is wonderful and hasn't got a bad word to say.......maybe there is a difference between a good manipulator and a bad one

Kai Jones said...

You can't separate the emotion from the person from the conflict. You can, I suppose. Tell me how it works for you.
(1) I don't have time to figure out somebody's emotional state, although I probably have a good sense of it since I've been around human beings for my entire life. (2) Emotional state is not a good predictor of next action, because some people hit when they're angry while others hit when they're scared; some retreat when they're angry and so on.

We are all our own gold standards for what is acceptable emotion.
Except you can learn that you're not the gold standard. You can learn that you're exceptional and incorporate that into your perceptual and decision-making filters. Okay, maybe not everybody can, but I can, so it's possible.

The manipulator deflates and walks away mumbling, "What an asshole."
Yeah, no. That is not my experience. Because current standards for social/work behavior allow (even reward) passive aggressive behavior but punish active confrontation, in an office it's dangerous to confront. You could be the one disciplined or fired. (Notice that in public schools, the kid who quietly taunts, shoves his way to the head of the line, etc. doesn't get punished, but the kid who shouts at him to stop gets punished.) Even worse if the manipulator is the boss, or the office manager, and is supported for other reasons by higher management. What has worked for me is to be sympathetic to the manipulator: see them as human and show them I'm human too. Not only do I get better at tolerating and ignoring their moodiness and attempts to manipulate, they stop thinking of me as "one of them," relax a bit toward everybody (because they're getting sympathy) and act a little better.

Do not try to extrapolate from the embarrassing pimple you had in eighth grade to the terror of imminent annihilation.
This. But also, people respond differently to the same thing. And, this is what humans do: use our own experiences to extrapolate what other people's experiences are like, how we might react in the same circumstance. Getting it wrong is also human.

When I read that stuff, I don't think "no, that's not how it works." I think, "I have trouble believing that response; what kind of a person would react like that? How else are they different from me?"

Steve Perry said...

So ... as a writer you are limited to writing about things you have personally done or felt? Can't write about a villain who murders somebody unless you have murdered somebody? Can't write from the female head if you are a man, or vice-versa ... ?

No extrapolation from smaller to larger?

Just asking ...

jks9199 said...

The last paragraph in Rory's post reminds me of something that we have to teach rookies...

It may be the twenty-fifth burglary (or whatever) that you've responded to. You see it every day as a cop. But, to the victim, it's the first. And it's big and important... no matter how minor, routine or silly it seems to you.

We each experience events and emotions in the light of what we've seen and done before. It's dangerous to impute our experience on someone else...

Ann T. said...

Dear Rory,
The books you describe--it depends on the book. I think this is particularly true in a lot of modern fiction. Much of this is like a factory after awhile, where best-selling authors are committed to writing a book every year. After awhile, they start phoning it in.

There's no chance of renewal. It's a strong person who risks the contract for a new period of exploration.

So, I often see this arc where people are putting their themes and craft together, then get close to perfection, and then start living off repeated paragraphs.

But in part, to properly comment, I'd have to know which book you're discussing. :-)

Ann T.