feelings chunk 7

In relation to being stripped of our physical experiance, R.D. Laing also believes that we are not in touch with our actual feelings. To examine that theory, each day we would write down what we would be feeling at the beginning of class. I basically felt the same things everyday; tired, bored, drained, hungry, annoyed, and the urge to laugh or be happy.
When we feel our emotions, we are too consumed by them to step back and acknowledge "Oh, what I am feeling now is anger". We just know what we are feeling and express them or try to figure out why.
Andy presented his argument that virtually the whole day we're managing our feelings using tools society gives us. We hang out with our friends because that person makes us happy and makes us laugh. We go to sleep early so we feel relaxed. We wear this because it makes us feel a certain way. Tools that society supplies us with are the following: medication, music, movies, drugs/alcohol, food, sex, drama, clothes, dancing, art, friends. All of these things can often be positive to us, some we may not even think are tools for feelings, but they all help us reach a certain emotion we're trying to obtain. However, they only please us for a period of time.
I certainly agree with this but I don't necesarily believe it's a bad thing. I guess it is kind of true that with this we can sometimes alter how we feel, going to hang out with the people who make us happy when we're having a bad day.
But I also think, we as humans, all have some kind of pleasure in dwelling in our negative emotions. Take music, for example. When we are upset, angry, dissapointed, maybe we've just broken up with someone. We don't listen to our iPods and blast happy, loving, excited music. You make a playlist full of sad, missing, possibly angry songs. However, when we're feeling happy we may not just listen to happy music, we listen to a mixture.
There is also the fact that there are two different forms of pleasure" physically fullfilling and mentally fulfilling. Most pleasures make you happy but don't last. They often leave you dissatisfied and wanting more. Possibly the more common mentally fullfilling activities (i.e. books, tv, music) leave you wanting more on purpose, most likely for a corporate gain.
We were asked, if we could, would you like your feelings more of less intense? Personally, I wouldn't know. Some feelings I wish I felt more strongly, some I wish I didn't. I want pain to be less. Then again, maybe if it was all less intense I wouldn't have to deal with pain at all. You feel less happy, so once you hurt it isnt too big of a deal. But then, I'd loose the happiness of laughter or simpler things.
We did a song experiment in class. Andy played clips of different songs and we were to write what the artist was trying to convey, and what it was we were feeling.
The first song was Comfortably Numb, by Pink Floyd. I felt that the feeling trying to be conveyed was calm, almost content with feeling close to nothing. However, the feelings I felt were the feeling of emptiness, and longingg to have something/some emotion.
The next song was Going Down the Road Feeling Bad by Elizabeth Cotton. The music/soundtrack was very upbeat, however the actual lyrics were dark and depressing. These left me feeling kind of lost and a little morbid.
The third song was Cleaning out My Close by Eminem. With this song, I felt what Eminem was trying to express. I felt intense anger, the desire to be one's self while knowing that there's no way to do that because so many already hate you. It was just an entire song of admitting all of the skeletons in one's closet.
These are the song I felt the most from. However, before the experiment, Andy would be simply playing songs in the background as we wrote, songs with no words. But as they played, they reminded me of music I used to listen to, the music I listened to when I was feeling alone or upset or lost. When I heard the music, my heart felt heavy.
It seems as children we were taught to express and accept our feelings, while as we grew we were taught its preferable to hide those feelings.
We watched a childrens TV show, Carebears. All Carebears had happy names; Braveheart, Birthday Bear, all very positive happy things. All the bears/animals expressed their feelings. When they are happy they would tell eachother, when they were having fun, they would tell eachother. The enemy in the show was named Proffesor Coldheart. The entire feeling of the show was that those who felt nothing were the enemy, those that don't accept everyone for their feelings are the enemy. The show only represented a dichotemy of emotions; happy versus sad, mean versus nice.
We were presented a scenerio. If we had the option to be plugged into a machine, you can be pluged it forever, a couple years, as long as you want, and you were able to experiance any kind of pleasure, would you? You would decide the pleasure before you were connected.
I said that I would be plugged in for a short ammount of time, maybe for a massage or something that is pheasable but I am not able to get very often. I wouldn't want to stay in forever because I believe you would lose your ability to appreciate the pleasure. If you are constantly getting this one kind of gratification, it will become normal and will no longer be pleasing. Without a balance of pleasure and unhappiness, you can't experiance the pleasure a hundred percent because you do not appreciate it.
We then began discussing medication and the affect it has on our emotions. I chose to read the entry The (un)medicated Life, Part 2 from the blog callalillie. It's a girl discussing how things have been since choosing to end her perscription of anti-depresants. She describes how she believes using the drugs may have made it more difficult for her to deal with her emotions because she was unable to depict what emotions where being caused by the meds and what were feelings were genuine. Which is essentially the opposite of what the drugs claim they should do: help you better understand and manage your emotions. She also addresses a certain kind of paranoia when it comes to your emotions, "How do you really know when your emotions have crossed the border from characteristically cranky to spiralling sorrow?". When we have all these medications that are so available to us, and the number of those who are taking perscription pills constantly rising, we forget that we are human and we sometimes feel sadness and anger and that we may just need some time to deal with it rather than being told that if we are not happy all the time, we require meds.