Meta-Cognition, Meta-Emotion
Someone cut me off while going rather fast on the road to work the other day and it made me angry.
I feel guilty about being angry, because I remember a story where a man was being driven to the hospital by a friend, but the highway was backed up so his friend drove on the shoulder, but everyone else was so upset that they blocked off the shoulder and the guy ended up dying, so maybe this person that cut me off had an emergency and regardless it didn't really affect me.
I feel frustrated by being guilty, because it was rather dangerous for someone to be speeding regardless, and they could have caused an even greater emergency if indeed they were in one.
I feel sad because I can imagine my friend dying next to me and not being able to think totally rationally and desperately doing anything to save them.
I feel resolved to prepare myself mentally for such an occasion so that I don't act recklessly, and spread awareness of such situations so other people don't act rashly out of anger or worry either.
. . .
So I had never heard of "meta-emotions" until just now. I have heard of meta-cognition and have obsessed over it to some degree, thinking about existence and the nature of thinking, logic, mathematics, and what it means for us to have the capacity for any of these. However, this now seems rather trivial in the face of "meta-emotions".
That may seem counter-intuitive, and indeed it hurts me to even say it, but I mean it. I have long avoided my emotions because I always come to a sort of dead-end paralysis where I know I should be acting but I feel too constricted by fear and sadness that I dissociate from the situation entirely. I found comfort in rational thought and logical science as I could make sense of such things, but here's the problem: those emotions never went away, they just got buried.
These unresolved emotions have caused numerous problems over the years to where I effectively feel lobotomized from how little I am able to feel about a situation or connect with friends or close family. I don't respond to messages, my finances diminish, and I flunked out of college. I just...couldn't muster enough energy to care.
But that always confused me, because there are times when I feel like I am experiencing emotions so intense that I would explode if I moved a single muscle or muttered a single word, so I knew there were emotions there. So how do I reconcile all this? If I feel, I hit a dead end. If I hit a dead end, I repress. If I repress, I stop caring. If I stop caring, I explode with painful feelings. What do I do?
Well it turned out there's an interesting little trick that my partner just taught me: "what do you feel about those feelings?" With that simple phrase, my partner prompted me over and over with each new set of feelings, until finally I found the will to act and reached out to a friend I hadn't in years!
There is more to this, I'm sure, but I needed to process this new information and document it for the future. Thank you for reading!
