Ever been to a District Preacher’s meeting? Or to a continuing education event in your conference? Or how ’bout ever having the desire to go out to lunch after church to a restaurant across the county line — hoping you won’t be seen.?
Alot of ministers struggle with social location issues. If they are around a particular population — they feel they have to act in an appropriate way — as opposed to an authentic way. Some ministers put on game faces around the DS, the Bishop, colleagues, their church members and sometimes — their own families.
We would all agree that some control of our emotions is important. Some of our ‘raw thoughts’ may not be refined enough for public consumption. And in today’s world a knee jerk reaction can cause drastic effects (think ‘going postal’). But how much and what kind of control is healthy?
Iris Mauss discusses the various research on this topic in her article “Should you regulate your emotional reactions or let them rip?” in a recent Scientific American Mind.
She first describes the challenges discovered regarding suppression…
James J. Gross of Stanford University investigates which control strategies work best and how they affect mental well-being and physical health. Several years ago he asked subjects to watch shocking, disturbing videos — one showing an arm amputation, another an African circumcision ritual. The volunteers were told not to look away. Gross instructed half of them to prevent their facial expressions from betraying their inner turmoil while they watched — they were to devote all their energies to maintaining a poker face. This type of self-control is called suppression. The other half of the subjects got no instructions about how to react.
During the tests, Gross filmed the subjects’ faces and tracked such physiological data as heart rate, intensity of heartbeat and the electrical conductivity of their skin. All participants also filled out questionnaires asking how they had felt while watching the videos.
The poker-faced subjects, for the most part, succeeded in hiding outward signs of their feelings. The questionnaires indicated, however, that they had experienced no less disgust, horror or even fear than the subjects who had no special instructions. And yet their autonomic nervous systems reacted especially strongly — an intense stress reaction — lending credence to the notion that controlling powerful feelings may be bad for your health.
So plastering a smile on your face through out the painfully boring proceedings of Annual Conference can be bad for your health — duh.
Research done by various experts in the past five years shows that the negative effects of suppression are not limited to physical stress. As psychologists Roy F. Baumeister and Dianne M. Tice of Florida State University have demonstrated in recent studies, people who suppress their feelings are also less able to meet mental challenges. Jane Richards of the University of Texas at Austin discovered that suppressors had more difficulty remembering the details of emotionally significant experiences. Interpersonal relationships suffer, too. Emily Butler of the University of Arizona paired subjects with partners, some of whom were told not to show any sentiment during the pairs’ conversations. The subjects judged the instructed people to be less sympathetic and interesting than other partners who had been given no directions.
Reining in emotions apparently has lasting consequences. In a 2003 study by Gross and Oliver John of the University of California, Berkeley, students were asked how much they tended to control their feelings in everyday life. They were then placed into two groups: people who express their emotions fairly openly and those who do not. The suppressors, who typically swallowed their irritation, fear or sorrow, were on average more pessimistic, more prone to depression and less self-confident. In addition, these students had fewer and less meaningful friendships. Keeping a cool demeanor seemed to entail considerable disadvantages.
Work by psychologist Johan Denollet of the University Hospital of Antwerp in Belgium confirms this view. Denollet questioned people who had suffered heart attacks about their “emotional habits.” He wanted to know, for instance, how frequently they were in bad moods or had negative feelings such as dread, anger or regret. Did they share their feelings with others or keep them to themselves? When Denollet contacted the same patients 10 years later, in the early 2000s, to ask them the same questions, about 5 percent of the total had died. But of those who had originally reported greater-than-average levels of negative emotions or who had acknowledged a tendency to repress their feelings, a striking 25 percent were dead. Letting off steam, it seems, may literally save lives.
We all have known the colleague that was overly anxious about a next appointment. We have seen how he or she controls themselves in front of others, how he or she dresses at district functions. How they are so sugary sweet to the higher-ups and then explodes in a puddle of anxiety afterwards — all for a better appointment. This reserach suggests that suppression is not only physically stressful, but makes you less mentally quick and makes you appear less sympathetic. Not to mention another cause of heart disease.
So what is the answer?
Denollet’s findings leave us in a quandary. Psychology tells us that we cannot get along without containing our emotions, yet doing so leaves us socially isolated and physically ill. Fortunately, recent work has pointed to a way out of this dilemma. Emotional regulation does not have to lead to negative consequences if it is done right.
In the studies mentioned above, subjects had merely controlled their behavior, not the associated feelings themselves. If we can learn to see events in a different light, by changing our point of view, we can positively influence our feelings. Slow service in a restaurant might usually make us furious — but if we stop to realize that the poor waiter is overwhelmed by the number of customers, our resentment can dissipate.
Several researchers are now looking at how such cognitive emotional regulation operates — and if it can prevent the problems associated with suppression. People watching films of amputations could experience less trauma if encouraged to view the video with a detached, impersonal eye — say, to examine them as a doctor would.
This strategy was tested in 2002 by Kevin Ochsner of Columbia University, Silvia Bunge of the University of California, Davis, and John D. E. Gabrieli and Gross of Stanford. The neuropsychologists examined subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging. This method, by detecting the oxygen content of blood, shows the relative amounts of activity in various brain regions. Ochsner and his colleagues showed subjects disturbing images of surgery, fatally ill children and lunging rottweilers. Some of the subjects were merely asked to watch the films, and the rest were told to distance themselves from the contents as much as possible, using strategies they had been taught and then practiced independently. The leading technique was to “reappraise” the “stories behind the pictures” — for example, they were asked to imagine that a sick baby in a photo gets well again or that a snarling dog is really pretty far away, behind a high fence.
Ochsner and his colleagues found that subjects who could mentally distance themselves clearly registered more activity in the prefrontal cortex, a region responsible for so-called executive functions — everything having to do with planning, deciding and implementation. [For more on executive function, see “Brian Wilson: A Cork on the Ocean,” by Brian Levine, on page 36.] When frontal-lobe neurons were more activated, neurons were quieter in the limbic system, especially in the amygdala, which is involved in dealing with negative emotions. Cognitive strategies, it seems, can control emotional reactions. Subjects who coped well also described themselves as having experienced less nausea and disgust, and they demonstrated reduced activity in their autonomic nervous systems. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
I often wonder who is teaching young clergy how to think about the things that happen in their careers, in their ministries, in their families. Sure statistics help make you aware of how common your crisis is — but where is the mentor who will help you reframe the discussion - not sugarcoat it - but reappriase it with you?
It is a shame that the youngest, most inexperienced clergy are placed in the congregations that are the most isolated, and most desolate. Certainly there is nothing wrong with ministers learning how to do rural ministry. But rural ministry should be learned at the foot of a teacher not from a backhand of loneliness, desperation and isolation.
Seasoned clergy know very well that “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” And better than that they have developed the set of supportive relationships that help them remember that God is in control, that what doesn’t kill them will make them stronger, and that eventually a move or a funeral will come (our move - the lay person’s funeral).
The article discusses social context and cultural expectations for regulating emotions
Different cultures offer various ways to successfully regulate emotions. Anthropologist Jean L. Briggs lived for many months in the early 1960s among the Utku, an Inuit tribe in the Canadian Arctic. She was amazed by how little discord existed among them. From long interviews with her hosts and observation of their daily lives, she determined that the Utku viewed with extreme disapproval the display of any negativity. Toddlers were simply ignored if they began to scream. An adult who raised his voice in rage was treated as an idiot or a danger to the community. Briggs (now professor emeritus at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada) experienced such shunning herself once when she got mad at her host family; she immediately had to find a new place to stay.
So — as we go out to Annual Conference next week - what would it look like if we ignored the whining retiree, what if we shunned the person who knowing that 90% of the floor favors a motion, continues to hold the whole session hostage until they can rattle off their required 2 minutes argument. What if we encouraged not suppression but authentication of feelings in ministry. Ministers are one of the few groups of helpers who do not utilize formal supervision groups. Instead we think glad handing is a good way to take care of our emotions.
Every day is a new day for change and growth.
