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EMOTIONING AND THE FLOW OF CONVERSATIONS
Language Evolves Along Relational Domains
Not only do distinctions take on different meanings according to the activities they pertain to, and drift as different groups of people follow different paths of doings, but each person becomes aware of, and acts according to that awareness, of different meanings according to the emotion they themselves are living in any moment.
Others, who they are interacting with, will generally grasp the meanings as lived, and thus respond accordingly. Consequently, language also evolves along different emotional flows; that is along different relational domains.
Conversations Resolve Emotional and Rational Issues
We are frequently told that we have to control our emotions and to behave ourselves in a rational manner, especially when we are children or women, by a person who wants us to behave according to some norm of his or her choice. We live a culture which opposes emotion and reason as if they were two antagonistic dimensions in the psychic space; we talk as if the emotional denied the rational and we say that the rational defines the human. At the same time we know that when we contradict our emotions we generate suffering in ourselves or in the other, which no reasoning can dissipate. Finally, when we are in contention we also say, in the heat of anger, that we have to solve our differences conversationally, and, in fact, if we manage to talk, emotions change and the contention either disappears or transforms with or without fight into a respectable disagreement.
What happens? I think that, although rationality distinguishes us from other animals, the human constitutes itself when language appears in the hominid lineage to which we belong, in conversation as a particular way of living the interbraiding of emotion and rationality that appears expressed in our ability to solve our emotional and rational differences by talking. It is because of this that I consider to be central to the comprehension of the human, in health as well as in psychic or somatic suffering, to understand the participation of language and emotions in what in our daily lives we connote with the word conversing.
Maturana, The Ontology of Conversing
There are many useful sets of distinctions made concerning the myriad complex and flowing manners that people relate to each other in various circumstances. For example Brent Cameron developed a series of distinctions for parent/child relationships that serve well as a guide to a parent who may be having difficulty, often as they misunderstand kindness so the relation becomes child dominated, or “good upbringing” in a way that ends up being parent dominated.
Distinctions About Relationships
Conversation
Seeing Beauty
Contradictory Conversations
There are conversations that stabilize particular emotional dynamics as a result of the particular manner of interbraiding languaging and emotioning that constitutes them. Some of these conversations give origin to recurrent emotional dynamics that bring forth contradictory domains of actions in the sense that the actions that constitute them mutually deny themselves. Let us see three cases (see Méndez, Coddou and Maturana 1988):
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Conversations in which we implicitly accuse the other, whose company we desire, of not fulfilling promises that he or she never made. When this occurs, the one who is accused gets angry and begins to deny the other. If this kind of conversation is occasional and reflection and apologies are suitable, this conversation’s results are unimportant in the emotional history of the participants. If, on the contrary, this conversation repeatedly recurs in circumstances in which the accused does not want to act out anger because he or she wants the company of the other, and reflection and regrets are not suitable, or, regardless of reflection and regrets the conversation is recurrent, suffering occurs. That is, the participants here move in a continuous oscillation between domains of contradictory actions: mutual acceptance and mutual denying.
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Conversations of self-depreciation, which we make in our reflexive intimacy or in our encounters with others. These occur, for example, when in the path of a conversation we say, or say to ourselves, “I am stupid and I do everything clumsily”. In doing this we enter, necessarily, in an interbraided flow of emotioning and languaging that leads us to domains of contradictory actions that interfere with the quality of our activity, no matter what the operational domain in which we find ourselves. When this occurs, the result of our activity seems to confirm our self-depreciation. If we live this kind of conversation recurrently, we stabilize a dynamics of languaging and emotioning that continuously confirms as adequate our negative appreciation of ourselves, and we live the suffering of wanting and denying ourselves at the same time within the impossibility of changing our essential constitutive condition. Again, if this conversation is occasional, there is no suffering.
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Conversations of “must”. In the flow of these conversations with others or during reflection, we indicate to ourselves our guilt for not accomplishing or for accomplishing unsatisfactorily some cultural value or norm. The result is the emotioning in the frustration that brings forth a domain of actions in which the accomplishing of the value or norm is impossible. If we live this sort of conversation occasionally, its occurrence is unimportant, but if we live it recurrently, we experience suffering.
Maturana, The Ontology of Conversing
Drs. Brinkman and Kirschner developed a set of distinctions useful to people who are having difficulties in the workplace. They based their set on the crossing of two gradients, one concerning the emphasis people place on task v/s people, and the other on perception v/s action -- or as they put it passive v/s active. Their book is written in an amusing, easy to read style.
Brinkman talks about the problem of emotions in emails in this YouTube video. I found his recommendations useful, and the caricatures amusing if taken lightly.