The Shared Experience We’re Supposed To Ignore
If you’re like me, you’ve been thinking about emotion lately. My daughter is 3 and as I’m sure anyone who has lived with a 3-year-old knows, their emotions know only extremes. Anything that makes them happy is a euphoric bliss and anything that isn’t how they would like it is the end of the world. Engaging with this novice emotional being is a constant test of the emotional awareness and control of my wife and myself as we try to demonstrate, acknowledge, and guide our daughter’s development.
We’re going to come back to this idea. For now, let’s talk about Bryan Cranston. Cranston is an actor known for Breaking Bad, Malcom in the Middle, and importantly, two episodes of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. (Really.) As an occasional actor, I appreciate the thoughtfulness that Cranston brings to roles. I love hearing him discuss his approach and discipline for tackling new characters. In particular, there’s one interview from December of 2018, conducted by Stephen Colbert, that I can’t stop thinking about.
The two were discussing a play that Cranston was in, and the emotion, specifically anger, it evoked. Cranston then says that one of the things that upsets him is the “social non-acceptance of the emotion of anger. To be mad.” Cranston goes on to say that we accept emotional states like intolerance and irritability and are often told to tolerate those emotions. But it is unacceptable to display anger.
Cranston’s point was that acknowledging our emotional reactions to the world, anger included is a way to be honest with ourselves about our state in society. If we accept or tolerate the things that make us angry, then nothing changes. Having a strong emotional reaction, getting angry and using that emotional fuel is how individuals can spur change in their environment. If you deny your emotion to the situation, you deny your relationship to it and therefore any motivation to change it.
In the interview, Colbert suggests that not showing emotion was a self-defense mechanism, a way of not revealing ourselves and thus displaying a vulnerability.
Cranston counters by saying that it really only applies to anger and other perceived negative emotions. There is something about the actual display of those kinds of emotions that seems to be taboo. “When people see someone crying, often you’ll hear ‘don’t cry.’” Cranston replies to his own example with “No. They should cry. They’re suffering a loss or sadness or something.” We should comfort them, cry with them, be angry with them as a fellow human being.
It is important to point out that this conversation was in the context of a theater discussion. Theater: an entire enterprise based on sharing a communal emotional experience.
What people do with their emotions is often problematic. That doesn’t mean the emotion itself is something to be locked away. If we deny our emotions, we hinder our ability to relate to the world, know our selves, and healthily express our emotions. I’m not even sure it’s accurate to say one emotion is bad and another is good. Emotions are just fuel for the person-shaped vehicles we’re all piloting.
So, back to my 3-year-old. The last thing I want to do is tell my daughter not to have an emotion, to not feel. If I tell her, “don’t cry” or “don’t be angry,” the feeling, the emotion becomes the bad thing. If we acknowledge and share the emotion, we can learn responsibility for and the causes of our emotions. To be human is to have emotions. Emotions are a universal experience. Why would we deny ourselves the full experience?
