On Expressing the Bad

When I was in grade 7 at Hebrew school, I chose to do a research project on the mitzvah of loving God.  Practicing Jews may recognize this commandment from the daily recitation of the Sh’ma: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”

I picked this topic because the idea of requiring an emotion fascinated me; I may have been only twelve, but I understood that feelings didn’t appear or disappear just because you wanted them to. How were you supposed to make yourself love God if you didn’t? How could anyone demand another person change the emotions in their heart?

To be honest, I wasn’t much concerned with whether I did love God at the time, and I’m not bothered about it now. But I’m glad I picked that topic, because it does resonate with something I’ve been wrestling with in my secular, adult life, as someone with privilege in a variety of spheres.

I would like not to feel things I know to be morally wrong. I think most of us feel the same. Everyone has privilege on some axis–that’s not to say that all marginalizations are comparable or even commensurable, just that no one experiences every single possible one–and so I’d like to think that everyone has a moment of anger or resentment or disdain that they know to be unjustified, in the best case, and bigoted, in the worst. These are not feelings that any of us trying to be a good person either wants to feel or thinks are reasonable, but, to reverse a right-wing rebuttal, feelings don’t always care about the facts.

When these feelings do appear, it’s certainly important not to accept them as inevitable or unchangeable. But I find, for me personally, that I push myself too far in the other direction; that the fact of feeling something I know to be wrong in the first place is a moral failing, that I ought to be able to quash it or feel the thing I know is right and want to feel instead.

Part of this is because even unspoken, unacted-upon feelings can cause harm. Would I feel hurt if, through some telepathic scrying glass, I learned that people I cared about had a surge of anti-Semitic frustration when I asked them to accommodate my religious holidays or dietary needs? Yes, probably. And I wouldn’t like the idea of making space, even outside my own space, for them to talk about those feelings.

Yet, at the same time, I understand the need for them to do so. All of us need to feel that we are humans and not monsters; bottling up “wrong” feelings lets them fester, but sunlight gives us space to examine them and address them.

If I’m serious about cultivating love for God, how can I make that effort without expressing my doubts that God exists or is good instead of trying to suppress them? How can I learn to address my frustration at what feels like the unfair things God has done? Perhaps if I’m lucky, I can talk myself out of some of the emotions I don’t want to feel. If I’m luckier, perhaps I have the solid psychological foundation to examine those emotions and teach myself perspective.

But sometimes I can’t process emotions without talking them through with someone else. Sometimes I get stuck on patterns or intuitions that I don’t have the perspective to reframe. And sometimes I get caught up in the idea that the mere fact that I have these feelings makes me alone and unredeemable, because I don’t see anybody else struggling with them.

Because feelings and expressions of feelings can hurt others, I don’t think that everyone should spout off their meanest, worst emotions willy-nilly and expect to be excused. But neither do I think that never expressing feelings one knows to be wrong–immoral, obscene, racist, sexist, homophobic, cruel–is the only ethical path.

We use the word “valid” in many different ways; sometimes, we mean that a “valid” feeling is justified, and sometimes we just mean that, even if unjustified, it’s a human thing to feel, because humans are flawed and sometimes wrong, and we believe that they, a human being, are indeed feeling it. Not everyone deserves to have their feelings validated in the former way, but I think everyone deserves to have their feelings validated in the second. Not necessarily by every single other person–I am not the right person to validate your sexist or biphobic feelings, for example, and I would never ask marginalized groups that I’m not part of to hold and tend to my own privileged feelings. But everyone trying to be better, I think, deserves to be heard by somebody who is both in a position to listen without harm to themselves and to accept the one having the feelings as a full human being.

For some, therapy can be this place. For others, a private social space might work. Either way, intentions for the space matter too: it’s important not to make them spaces of confirmation, where the group develops and cements the unethical ideas being shared. Instead, the point has to be to remind the participants that even good people can feel “bad” things; that what matters is what we do and think when we have a choice; and to allow each other to approach feelings we don’t like or wish we didn’t have in a way that gives us a chance to figure them out and put ourselves in a place where maybe, someday, we can address them.

Suppression can be a good temporary solution, especially when it’s the best way to achieve appropriate ethical behaviour. But it’s not always permanently sustainable. Constant suppression can lead to entrenchment and metastasizing; careful and private expression allows us to feel human, even if we’re not the best human we can be. Yet.