HLife | Healthy Living Redefined

When we saw Professor Thomas J. Scheff teaching about emotions on UCTV, we knew we had to talk to him. A prolific author whose books include Microsociology, Emotions and Violence, Bloody Revenge, Emotions and the Social Bond, and Easy Rider, among others, Scheff is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an expert on emotions and social psychology. He is also a wonderful human being whose sense of humor permeates his teachings and resonates throughout this interview, where we discuss love, anger, and what he considers the master emotion: shame.

Maryl Celiz: What is the role of emotions in health?

Thomas Scheff: I think emotions are extremely important in every day life, in therapy, in politics – and much ignored, to say the least. That is, psychotherapists very seldom train to understand their own emotions and other people’s. But that’s absolutely essential. To connect with a person, you have to be in their emotional wavelength.  You have to understand what they’re feeling, because often they can’t explain it, they can’t put it in words. And, so you have to be sensitive, more sensitive than they are, oftentimes. So, it’s a big emptiness in modern societies that we’ve kind of shrugged off emotions as if they were not important and thought is everything. If you look at the major psychology departments in the world, I think there’s one that has section on emotions. I think it’s in England. Most psychology departments have large groups of cognitive psychologists, large groups of behavioral psychologists, courses on perception, on neurology – that’s very much a fad now, the neurology of the brain. But they seldom have even one person that deals with emotions. In our campus, the psychology department has one person, who deals with facial expression, or at least that’s one of his areas – but that’s the whole extent of it. In sociology, of course, I’m the only one in our department, and in social departments. So, emotions are neglected in the academy, and in medical school and so on. It’s a mess. And I’m protesting.

Silvie Celiz: Well, we’re very happy that you’re doing that. What actually prompted your own interest in the study of emotions and the role they play in all of this?

TS: I was a conventional sociologist until I was 40. I did a book, a famous one, on labeling mental illness, which takes a strictly sociological approach, no psychology (that’s what sociologists like, they don’t want anything to do with psychology). But at 40 I had some life experiences which unearthed a whole lot of emotions that I didn’t even know were there and then I got interested in studying emotions because of my own personal experience. I mean, it was a big help for me to start crying. I didn’t know how to cry – most men don’t. I learned how to cry, I cried a whole lot to catch up. And I experienced some fear that was really intense, to catch up, because men stuff fear. They pretend that they’re not afraid because they don’t want to be called ‘cowards’ – which is a total mistake because between fear and coward there is no relationship. Anyway, I learned how to deal with my anger better than I had. I was a very angry person until I was 40. And how to deal with shame, which is the hardest of all. Shame is very difficult. But I learned to laugh at myself, which is a big help, laugh at myself instead of at other people, which I’d been doing. And in laughing at myself I found that I was very laughable in a lot of ways – ha! So, I became very emotional and I felt much better and inspired to find out more about emotions in general, not just in my case – I started dealing with emotions in my classes, with my students. And they loved it – they couldn’t get enough. So, I became a student of especially shame and anger, which are very large continents and at the time that I started they were unexplored. And I’ve had a good time, and I’m still having a good time.

MC: How do we deal with negative emotions constructively?

TS: I’ve been teaching my students how to cry, for many years. The women cry but some find that it’s painful. And very few of the men cry. So, what I do is I have them make up a list of ‘best moments’, the best moments in their lives. You ever look at the Olympic winners? Here’s a man who won a mile run, and there are these men, standing up on these pedestals and they have their medals for winning – and all three are crying. What’s that about? Those men haven’t cried in years! They’re having a best moment, and they feel like nobody’s gonna call them a sissy because they just won the Olympics. It frees them up to feel their emotions and, of course, they’re crying all the losses they had to suffer to get to that point. They hadn’t been crying about them – they save them up for that moment.

SC: So crying is more about an overwhelming experience?

TS: Yes. Overwhelming grief or fear – or shame – is very painful. So, the best moments exercise teaches you how to be in the emotion without getting overwhelmed by it. Because in the best moments you’re also back in the past when you are feeling safe – and that’s the key to dealing with emotions in a healthy way. It turns out it’s not painful. A good cry when you’re in the theater and you’re watching a good film, it feels good. It’s a good cry. Sure, it may be due to a tragedy that’s happening to a person on the screen, but you’re not that person, it’s not happening to you, and that frees your up to feel your own neglected feelings because you know you’re safe. You can get up and leave the theater if you have to. I’ve done that. It’s that being able to quit if you want that allows people to feel their feelings in a pleasurable way. It’s happened to me many times.

MC: Is there ever a danger in being so in touch with emotions that you’re overly emotional and everyone sees you as an emotional wreck?

TS: (Laughs) I cry very easily. And my wife, who understands me very well, she’s still embarrassed if I cry in public. Even though she knows that it’s OK, and it’s OK with her, and it’s good for me. But she’s still embarrassed. My kids pretend that they don’t know me if I cry in public. But I want to do it, I feel I am revealing my true self: I am sad about something that’s going on and I cry. There’s a wonderful song by Iris Dement, it’s called “No Time To Cry”. That’s the story of our civilization – we don’t have time to cry. And that’s a metaphor for we don’t allow people to feel their emotions. Crying, shaking and shivering – that’s a fear response – laughing. I’m a big laugher, don’t get me laughing. My wife is worse than me, especially her own jokes, she loves her own jokes, she’ll be on the floor laughing about something that I don’t even know that it’s funny. But it doesn’t matter what you’re laughing at as long as you’re laughing at yourself or the Universe and not at other people. Laughing at other people is hostile, it’s rejection, you’re rejecting them. If you laugh at yourself, it’s OK, you’re just saying ‘silly me, what did I do, I’ve done it again’. And it’s acceptance of yourself and your feelings. And you’ll never guess what emotion laughter is tied to in my vocabulary. Maryl, you guess.

MC: Nervousness?

TS: That’s intimately connected with the emotion but emotions are states of bodily arousal. It’s a physical thing. And being recognized rather than rejected is deeply implicated in causing this reaction. Laughter is the catharsis of a very fundamental emotion, which we don’t like to mention in our society. Silvie, you get to guess.

SC: Would it be violence?

TS: No, that’s anger or fear. In my classes, I’d ask students to get up and tell about a mistake they made in public. And they would get up and start telling, and they would get convulsed in laughter, sometimes you couldn’t even understand what they were saying because the laughter was blocking out the language. So, you make a mistake and then you need to laugh about it. What emotion is connected with making a mistake?

SC: Shame!

TS: Ah-ha! (claps) Shame is my baby. I write and talk and research and on and on about shame and its connection with withdrawal, on the one hand, which is the most common reaction and to aggression, on the other hand, which is much less common but I argue that unacknowledged shame – shame that you stuff – is at the root of either withdrawal and aggression. So, anger by itself is nothing. It’s just a frustration. But when it is combined with unacknowledged shame, it goes round and round and gets you into deep water very quick. And I’ve written a lot about that. I call shame the ‘master emotion’, because it regulates the other emotions too. Why won’t people cry when they need to cry? Well, because they’re embarrassed about crying in public (except me).

SC: So what is a good technique to master an emotion?

TS: It is best to talk to someone else, because it gives you the ability to see yourself as the other person is seeing you – we do that automatically without knowing it, we get into their heads and look at ourselves. That’s how we understand conversation, because people are very unclear and unless we do that we can’t understand the simplest conversation. But it’s that split that gives you distance from an emotion. And it’s being able to be in and out of the feeling that allows you to feel it safely – if someone is listening to you, you feel even safer, you got someone on your side, someone sympathetic, and that’s very important.

MC: What if the person you’re talking to doesn’t really understand their own emotions?

TS: Well, it is a problem, but as long as the person is sympathetic and patient – that’s very important, that they don’t get impatient, that they’re willing to hear you out – it’s helpful to just have someone else hear you out when you’re struggling with some problem. I learned that from my wife. For many years, she was a mediator in a divorce court, and it’s a very messy business because she’s dealing with some very angry people all day long. So she’d come home feeling really tense and then she’d tell me about her day. And when we first got together I thought ‘how long is this gonna go on? How come she’s telling me the same story over and over again? Blah, blah, blah’. I had to be patient, patient, patient. But then I had a brilliant idea after three months: She seems to feel better after she does that! And if she doesn’t do it, she’s still tense. So then I thought about that a while, with my brilliant, fast-moving brain, and in another three months I had another idea: I can do that too! I can talk to her about MY day. And so I started to share my time with her, and I’d tell her about my day. It would take me about two minutes. And then she’d ask me questions about my day, and I got to expand it a little bit. And then she kept asking me questions, and I kept expanding. And then I’d come to an event during the day, and I felt it as I was telling her, ‘oh! I didn’t deal with that at the time, I was too busy.’ And then I’d talk about that situation and get into the feeling that I had swallowed at the time. That was a big revelation for me and I found out that some of my days were very intense. And I was hiding a lot of the feelings that came up during the day and I could only feel them when I told my wife. And so we got off on a good start that way, because we were helping each other with difficult jobs that we both had.

SC: If I do or don’t have someone, what are some basic guidelines to help ourselves out with our emotions?

TS: When you come home from your job, you need to review your day. It’s better to review it to a sympathetic listener, but if you don’t have it, review it to yourself. Looking for best moments, that’s the way to start. That’ll encourage you to be able to deal with the bad moments. I love this conversation, I never quite put it that way before, you two are inspiring me. Can I join your team?

MC/SC: We would love that.

TS: Three persons against the world.

SC: We need more of these types of conversations and insights on how to handle our emotions.

MC: These basic understandings of our own emotions and how to communicate them to someone else are crucial for relationships too, which is something that everyone wants.

TS: When my wife and I I first got together, we used to quarrel long and hard, nasty quarrels, would go on for hours. And she was in graduate school at the time and she said to me, ‘I’m gonna study marital quarrels, because you and I are both experts’ (laughs). And I said, ‘well, how are you gonna do that?’ And she said ‘I’m gonna set up a video camera in the kitchen and i’m gonna video tape our quarrels.’ And I said, ‘that’ll never work, why don’t you do something else?’ She said, ‘like what’. I told her some harebrained idea and she rejected it. So she put a camera in our kitchen and every time we would start to quarrel she would say ‘hold on’ and she would turn on the thing, and then we would argue for about an hour or two or more. And I thought I was being very wonderful, until she showed me one of the tapes. And I said ‘Oh my God! That’s not me up there – that’s my dad!’ I used to hate it when he quarreled like that, pointing his finger and so sure of himself and acting like this, and I said ‘we can’t live like this’. And so we went to a marriage counselor and he introduced us to the idea of communicating with each other. And started us on that route, and it was a good thing because if we hadn’t done it, we would’ve split up. So, it was very personal, my experiences with emotions and with relationships. I flunked the first two marriages but I’m not gonna flunk this one.

SC: You said shame is the master emotion – is that the only one?

TS: Well, it’s a little bit of an exaggeration but what I mean is that it’s shame that keeps people feeling their other emotions, and shame itself. People are ashamed of being ashamed. They’re ashamed of being angry, even the screamers are ashamed of it. They’re ashamed of being afraid, especially men. Women aren’t as ashamed of being afraid, they’re more realistic about it. And they’re ashamed of crying, of grief. So, it helps with all your emotions if you start dealing with your shame a little, and embarrassment, humiliation. The way you do that is a little different then the others. You have to talk about it a lot at first, how you were humiliated and how you felt. And if you talk about it enough – sometimes it can take a long time – you come to see it in a humorous way. And when you see it like that, you laugh about yourself. And that takes it out of the cellar, it brings it out into the light. And most laughter at ourselves is very healthy. We need to do that in order to deal with the physical parts of shame, embarrassment and humiliation. So, what I say to people is that shame, embarrassment and humiliation are bodily preparation to laugh. You had a lot of tension in your body, which can be released by laughing. Anger – you ready for this or you want to talk shame some more?

MC: I’ve been waiting for anger.

TS: Okay. Anger is bodily preparation, well, Darwin thought it was bodily preparation to fight, and it is – you get a big shot of adrenaline in your system, which prepares you for some sort of exertion. And when I was young enough, I knew that if I ran six miles fast enough, I would burn off some of that adrenaline, and it would help me sleep at night. You ever go to bed angry and you can’t go to sleep? That’s the adrenaline pulsating, it’s a very powerful upper, as my students would say. Well, how can you metabolize all that adrenaline in 30 seconds? I’ve discovered that I can get rid of that energy in less than a minute, if I play it just right: Your body has to feel the anger, you have to feel the heat, instead of hiding it. Your anger is just an internal state, so I’m not talking about acting out anger. Animals, they have to act it out. Human beings don’t. I just say ‘I’m angry at you because’. And if they don’t understand, I say it again a little differently, because human beings don’t like to be told the same thing to an adult twice – they get mad. And if they still don’t get it, I say it again. They can’t tell I’m angry because I’m won’t look like it but I am. And as I am doing that routine, sometimes my body gets hot, and after that, I feel fine – I can take a nap right there.

SC: So what about those people who raise their voice and start screaming?

TS: They’re acting out the anger. But that doesn’t work. Experimental psychologists, one of the few things they’ve demonstrated is that acting out anger doesn’t help – it makes things worse, usually. So, it’s not a good idea. It makes the other person angry and that’s not good either. So, what you want to do is keep your voice down and say courteously but relentlessly why you’re angry. And sooner or later they’ll get that you’re angry, and they’ll apologize. They’re a little surprised that you’re angry and not showing it, but you’re showing it verbally. And that gets your body into the right place to metabolize the adrenaline. You don’t have to run the six miles. But it doesn’t work every time. I’m supposed to be an expert on this and wish I could be as good as I’m telling you about but I don’t think anyone is. If my wife is yelling at me, I have a strong tendency to yell back, and then we’re in it. And she’s over it in five minutes, but I’m not. So, I wish I could be as good as I’m telling you about but I don’t think anybody is. Sometimes I manage better. One time she yelled at me and I said ‘ouch’. And she said, ‘what?’ And I said ‘ouch’. And she said ‘what does that mean?’ And I said, ‘it means what you said hurt me. It hurts. Ouch.’ And she laughed. And I laughed. And it was over. So that’s the ‘ouch’ technique – there are thousands of more out there that I don’t know about but try it out sometime: ouch.

SC: My husband does that.

TS: He does ‘ouch’?

SC: Yes.

TS: Do you laugh?

SC: Yes!

TS: Perfect. You’re probably better at it than I am, I’m good at explaining it but I’m not that great at doing it. I’m a B- student, you’re an A+ student.

MC: If acting out anger doesn’t work, then why do we keep doing it?

TS: Well, why do we keep invading Afghanistan? Our system of government is broken. And our society is very broken with respect to these crucial matters, it’s been broken for a very long time. In the 19th Century it wasn’t as bad, people could talk about shame openly. But they don’t anymore. Shame is the ‘s’ word. You have to be very careful. When I introduce this to my students, I take a very long time to get there. First we talk about embarrassment, then humiliation – and humiliation is still safe, because people see that as coming from the outside, something is being done to you, so they’re not as spooked by it as the ‘s’ word. You can’t talk about shame openly in public, not directly. You can say ‘oh, what a shame.’ But that’s different. Shame is something that people see as internal – it’s your fault: You’re ignorant, you’re stupid, etc..we have thousands of ways of putting ourselves down, which our society teaches us to do. When we are in grammar school, we get put down a lot. teachers don’t mean to put you down – they’re trying to teach you something – but they put you down anyway. You think you’re stupid, ‘cause you can’t get the right answers.  Most teachers don’t realize they’re putting students down, they think they’re giving them the right answers.

MC: Are embarrassment and shame related to low self-esteem?

TS: Low self-esteem is a hidden way of talking about shame. Instead of ‘I’m much more ashamed than I am proud of myself’, you say, ‘I’ve low self-esteem’. We have all sorts of dodges away from the truth of what we’re actually feeling. We say ‘that was an awkward moment’ – it wasn’t me that was embarrassed, it was the moment that was awkward. We have thousands of ways of saying of overlaying what’s going on.

SC: What about love?

TS: I think of love as giving just as much value to the other person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors as you do to your own. Here’s the hard part: no more, no less. You don’t value them more than yourself, and you don’t value yourself more than them. And that’s very, very tricky. You connect with them, and you honor the beloved, but you’re not engulfed with them. I have a book coming out about love and the balance of connecting. The key to understanding shame is relation. Shame is a relational phenomenon. Helen Lewis said that shame is a signal of threat to the bond. And pride, genuine pride, is a signal of a secure bond, of connectedness, that you’re connected with another person or persons. Shame, embarrassment and humiliation are signals of disconnect. Shame is a social phenomenon as well as an individual one. It’s about connect and disconnect. When we make a mistake, we feel disconnected. We’ve done something wrong, which disconnects you from people that are watching.

MC: How do men and women differ when it comes to emotions?

TS: I have an article about the machismo and Madonna system, about how men and women share in the repression of emotions. I put it this way: Men repress shame, grief and fear, and act out anger. A man is more likely to act out anger than a woman. Whereas a Madonna, which is the feminine equivalent of machismo, they repress anger and acts out fear. And that makes a fit, because a Madonna wants a strong man to protect her so she’ll be less afraid. And the man wants a woman who won’t get angry at him, so he can enjoy life. So it’s a repressive arrangement on both sides. And I think women are slightly less repressed than men, because the men repress fear completely. But the women are more repressed in modern society, especially with anger. Anger is a natural, organic reaction to frustration – of course they have it. And you need to know that and the other people need to know that. Women who smile too much and who say they don’t get angry, that’s repression. And any repression of emotions is going to do damage to your psyche and to your body and to your relationships. So I say, let’s get the men and the women together and get into the emotional relational world, into social emotion.