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An Easy Trick to Control Emotions by Dr. Deb Hirschhorn
Dr. Deb
An Easy Trick to Control Emotions
By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
On January 24, 1984, The New York Times bravely published a write-up of a forthcoming book sharing formerly hushed-up letters written by Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, “a Berlin nose and throat doctor with whom Freud carried on a … 15-year friendship” (according to the online, unredacted version of its original article, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/24/science/freudsecret-documents-reveal-years-ofstrife.html).
It appears that Freud did not easily or readily give up his original conclusion that “hysterical symptoms” came from childhood molestation. The French medical establishment vigorously opposed this theory and wanted to instead attribute hysterical symptoms of women to “fabrication and fantasy.”
What was the truth?
A researcher, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, was appointed project director of the Sigmund Freud Archives. This was a body of formerly unpublished letters that Freud had written to Fleiss and other people. These letters indicated that Freud not only thought – originally – that these hysterical women were telling the truth about their childhood abuse but that even his own father was not a moral man.
Freud apparently waivered in his conviction that abuse was the real cause of hysteria. The theory was presented to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology on April 21, 1896, but two things happened to make him wonder if he wasn’t wrong: One, the frequency with which he encountered women (and some men, including his own brother) with hysteria was hard to swallow. Two, social pressure in the form of the outrage of the medical establishment.
A year later he wrote Fleiss that he was starting to reject his theory, but later that year, he wrote again that his “confidence” in it was increasing.
We now know, of course, that his original take was the correct one. According David Finkelhor, Director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center: 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse;
Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of U.S. youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized;
Children are most vulnerable to CSA between the ages of 7 and 13.
Freud hid his own finding from himself because it was too disturbing to believe.
But Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter, completed what Freud started. As keeper of her father’s history, she was horrified by an earlier New York Times article in which Masson and others were interviewed. She promptly fired Masson, and 75,000 documents stored in the Freud archives became “prohibited” to the public and to researchers, “in some cases, into the 22nd century.”
I certainly understand how embarrassing this material is. But….
Children are being hurt every day. Shouldn’t the truth have come out of the shadows way earlier?
Remember I’ve been talking about parts and Self these last few weeks?
Some of our more disturbing emotions are carried by parts. And if we don’t want to feel them, we push them away. That is just what Freud and Anna did. They pushed away disturbing emotions.
Well, it is disturbing to think that children are injured every day by the people who are supposed to protect them. So one way to deal with that is to feel the anxiety of dealing with it and allow that anxiety to keep you up at night – but at the same time, to help the children who need it. Or help those children after they come to adulthood.
Another way to deal with that depression and anxiety is to convince yourself that the information you’re confronting can’t be true, so let’s rethink it, perhaps whitewashing it. That’s what Anna Freud and her father did.
We Do This Every Day
Anna was embarrassed at the findings, and her father was perplexed by them.
But a worse case scenario is when people who have our ear and our respect hide information from us because they are so attached to their position.
Not only do they hide information but they create a smokescreen behind which to hide it. That smokescreen is the clever use of language. If they sound like they have a moral advantage, then we don’t question them.
For example, the BDS movement sounds very noble. It wants to sound like there is a moral high ground to not doing business with Israel because Israel, so their narrative goes, mistreats the Palestinians. Many lives have been lost because of the BDS’s erroneous movement and the people who were gullible enough to accept its “moral” position.
Similarly, “Black Lives Matter” sounds wonderful but leaves out the anti-Semitic thrust in its charter.
And that, of course, is how the Nazis persuaded Germany and most of Europe to cooperate in their goal of eliminating Jews. After all, we were “swine.”
Language can be the smokescreen to hide the other side of the question.
It is for this reason that I never give a psychiatric diagnosis to clients unless they want insurance to reimburse them for laying out the payment. Then I collaborate with them to come up with a good fit to a diagnosis. The last impression I would ever want to give people working with me is that I have the power to place a diminishing label on them.
But we do this all the time in our everyday communication. And we don’t even see it.
I once had a friend, or someone whom I thought was a friend, who differed from me politically. She wanted to engage in a political conversation, and I kept dodging it. Finally, one day, she got me to disclose that I did not think employers should have to cover the cost of some of their employees’ medical needs.
For this, she told me I was “not compassionate,” and our friendship ended. Just like that. By using that language, she convinced herself that her moral position was the high one.
The language obscured all the many reasons that could pile up on the other side. No need to look there.
When my son-in-law teases me about myself, I laugh. When it’s true (and done with affection), it’s funny.
Ironically, later that week, another friend (to whom I had not brought up the above interaction) told me that I was one of the most compassionate people she knew.
So what happened? How did my former friend manage to convince herself of something false?
The answer is that we can’t ever prove that I am or am not compassionate. A million arguments could be made by a lineup of people on either side of that word.
But the word itself keeps people from having those arguments or discussions.
See, whether it’s diagnosing a client or labeling a friend, the person with the label gets the moral high ground. And by default, the person labeled is diminished. That is the reason it is divisive. And that’s no good.
This is why the Torah says in Parshas Behar, “Lo sonu ish es amito” (don’t aggrieve your countryman, meaning “don’t use words to hurt people”), and if we slip – which is really easy – then on Yom Kippur we beat our chests saying “tafalnu sheker” (we have falsely accused).
You can surely hurt people with the truth – as was the case of Freud’s daughter. She was trying to prevent her father’s name and her family memory from being stained. But you hurt even more when the accusation is false.
And the problem is that you will initially succeed when you label someone else as lower than low. You do end up convincing others – and yourself – that the person you’re labeling is unworthy of human respect.
Hashem wants shalom, not divisiveness. That’s why the achdus in Migdal Bavel led Hashem to not kill off its builders in spite of their sin.
So how do you avoid this happening?
The answer is simple: Don’t use inflammatory language. That language starts up a forest fire. And the purpose of the forest fire is exactly to hide the other side of whatever issue is on the table.
But that’s wrong. We are meant to exist with shalom, not divisiveness. Inflammatory language creates greater divisiveness and leads people to hurl their own epithets until the conflagration sweeps up everyone.
In fact, something I hadn’t mentioned in explaining Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems, is that he calls one of the parts the “firefighter.” This part is 100% kneejerk reactive. When an inflammatory word is thrown out there, the firefighter springs into action.
That is exactly what we’ve seen the last several years in politics. I bring politics up here because the positions have crept into our homes. They’ve invaded our homes just as the politics of ancient times did when Jews were divided between siding with the Romans or the Greeks or our Torah leaders. And it all begins with words that are used as smokescreens to hide the side the users don’t want others to examine.
I don’t watch the news; it’s usually
too depressing. But on January 6, I was naturally curious about the violence at the Capitol. I clicked over to MSNBC and was disturbed when the broadcaster said that President Trump “incited” the riots.
A simple word. “Incited.”
We are so used to hearing blame and accusation that we forget that newscasters have an obligation not to use inflammatory language.
Psychologically, there were people who felt called upon to riot to “protect” the President. Their firefighter parts overtook them. But by using this word by a newscaster, it sounds like it must be truth. And it is disturbing. Too disturbing to put aside so that one’s Self can examine the entire question, both sides of the question.
The riots were wrong. Five people died, and the country was thrown into fear. Eighty-two people were arrested out of a half million protesting peacefully.
Ironically, Trump himself has been guilty of using cutting words on people he didn’t like, and you see where it got him.
Just for fun, I did a search of this same newscaster from MSNBC, Chris Hayes, on the summer of riots all around our nation. Sure enough, I found only one video of his that even mentioned violence. There, he proudly stated that a Princeton University survey showed that the protests last summer were 93% non-violent! In other – unspoken – words, 7% of the people were violent.
To get a statistical comparison, let’s do the math. One source said a half million people came to the Capitol to show solidarity, so 82/500,000 = 0.000164 or 0.0164% – that’s the percent of violent people at the Capitol. Compare this to the admittedly 7% of violent people over the summer riots. Who is being blamed and accused for the summer riots?
No one.
I am not sure which is sadder: The actual damage to this country from all this violence or the damage from using inflammatory language to cause divisiveness.
But this much I will say: If you and your partner are used to living a life of arguments, there is no way out and no end when you throw inflammatory words at one another.
The best and most successful couple arguments take place when each one recognizes “points” that the other makes regardless of their own perspective.
John Gottman, eminent researcher on why marriages last, stated that couples will argue; that’s normal. But those that give five positive statements to one negative one in the middle of an argument are the couples that stick together – happily.
Why do we throw up smokescreens which hide the truth and inflame emotions? Are we afraid that a reasoned discussion with all of the data on the table will be too weak? Do we need to bolster our “side” by making the other “side” into scoundrels?
Don’t stay stuck in this sort of cycle.
Dr. Deb Hirschhorn is a Marriage and Family Therapist. If you want help with your marriage, begin by signing up to watch her Masterclass at https://drdeb. com/myw-masterclass.
