Exclusive emotional states

We cannot feel both of these pairs of emotions about the same target at the same time. These emotional states are exclusive.

Hatred excludes forgiveness and forgiveness excludes hatred
Apathy excludes love and love excludes apathy.
Amusement excludes anger and anger excludes amusement.

I cannot feel love and feel nothing for you at the same time.
I cannot forgive you and hate you at the same time.
I cannot feel amused by you and angry with you at the same time.

Now we can fluctuate from on to the other over time but in one moment we cannot feel both. A moment is as long as it takes to notice and name our emotional state.

Now non-exclusive emotions can stack. I can love you, hate you and be angry with you at the same time. I can hate you and feel amused by you at the same time.

More tenuous is the idea that fear and happiness are exclusive states. I cannot be afraid and happy at the same time? Seems to work.

Can anyone else think of any other exclusive states or when the above sets are not exclusive?

Hi xanderman,

This all works reasonably well if you can accept a black and white definition of the terms, but is there really an absolutely pure 100% thing called hatred? Total, without blemish, forgiveness? I find these emotional states to exist on a sliding scale, both in myself and in my observation of others. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen or experienced an ‘exclusive’ emotional state.

I have seen an emotional state dominate a situation, such as an angry outburst, explosive laughter, etc. but I guess I’d need a very tight definition of the term exclusive before I would be comfortable applying it to anything called emotion.

JT

Hey JT,

I don’t want to suggest that a person can feel nothing but hate. Its more that hatred and forgivness, those two elements are exclusive. The presense of one excludes the presence of the other. That is how I intended the term “exclusive.” We can only feel one of them about a single subject at one time. I can only either be hating Fred or forgiving Fred. I cannot both hate and forgive Fred at the same time.

Now I might love and hate Fred at the same time. Love and hate are non-exclusive. Love and hate can mix or stack together.

But I cannot love Fred and feel apathy towards Fred. I can love Fred and be angry with him. Yet I cannot feel angered and amused by Fred at the same time. etc.

Its the specific pairs that are exclusive. All other emotional states can mix freely.

All of this is dependant on a level of awareness where you can distinquish and name your various emotional states and have the time to do so.

Well, I can see what you’re driving at, but I’m still not convinced that any one emotion excludes another. At the heart of many pathological relationships is the dissonance created when two of these ‘exclusive’ emotions compete and confuse.

Consider: I hate my mother. (for her weakness) I forgive my mother. (for her weakness). The statements are linear and sequential, but the emotions are simultaneous.

Typically, these diametrically opposed emotional states occur when we see both the positive and negative aspects of a situation. It make’s for some real “mental health” problems, or as a friend of mine has observed, “nut case”.

I mentioned RD Laing? Find a copy of his book called “Knots”. It’s a wonderful explanation and exploration of just these kind of problems.

JT

Ok, now have you actually experienced both hating and forgiving the same person at the same time?

This may be a relfection of my own emotional functioning but I cannot both forgive and hate the same person at the same time. Once I hate then then I cannot forgive, once I forgive I cannot hate.

likewise apathy vs. love
likewise anger and amusement.

Have you ever felt these pairs of emotions both at the same time?

Howdy xanderman,

Yes, I have felt these pairs of emotions at the same time. To keep from rambling let’s take them in order.

Hating - Forgiving First, I can’t really say that I have ever hated anyone. I may dislike what they do, how they see a relationship, and I may choose to have nothing to do with them. But hate? No way. I’m not about to give anyone that kind of control over my emotions. Those involved in evil and/or destructive behavior are, sadly, desparately in need of finding their humanity. Forgiveness is easy. I must be willing to forgive another’s mistakes because if I don’t/can’t, they may not forgive mine - and I am chocked full of mistakes.

Apathy - Love This one is a little tougher, but I have had relationships that have simply trailed off into apathy and at the same time felt affection toward that relationship. Sort of a didn’t go away mad, just went away.

Anger - Amusement This one is easy. A person can make me angry with bad behavior, but in a context I find amusing. Example: The first time I heard my daughter use profanity. I was angered and scolded her for her bad behavior but was laughing inside because I knew perfectly well where she learned those words.

I suspect that the issue here is how we look at the strength of the emotional state. To be EXclusive we would have to see each emotion as a monopole. To me, our emotions are not individual tightly wrapped bundles, but rather a soup. A messy concoction at times, but soup none the less.

Perhaps the problem lies in trying to abstract out a specific emotional state. We can identify ‘anger’ and associate all the various physical and mental states that comprise the word anger. It may be a useful methodology for descriptive purposes as long as we don’t forget that our word and description have very fuzzy edges. Saying ‘anger’ and the actual emotion are not the same thing.

JT

Well, if you have never felt hate than how could you have felt hate and forgiving at the same time. The question has no relevance to your experiences.

I would like to know more about the experience of love and apathy at the same time. I tend to think of love as the most intense form of caring. Caring for the other more than caring for the self. Apathy is at the opposite side of the scale, an absolute lack of caring for the other. So love vs apathy is caring or not caring. How can you care and not care in the same moment. I can see love fading away into apathy but that is transformation not unison.

I liked your anger-amusement example for a few reasons. You use the terminology of ‘laughing inside.’ An everyday term that points to an interesting phenomenon. From your description, in that moment, you split your identity into two distinct spaces. The two spaces were the public space, where you displayed anger and the private space where you felt amusement.

Now both of the different spaces were you. Your sense of identity encompassed both of them. There was no sense of losing identity or madness. Yet it was as if you became two people who were simultaneously one person. There was a splitting of attention so that one felt anger and one felt amusement.

I would suggest that your identity mapping had to create two temporary spaces for both emotions to exist at the same time.

I would agree with the model that emotions re usually like a soup. I am also interested in the bowl, as it were. How does the mind contain the emotions? What happens when they spill outside of their bowl? Is that the source of panic attacks and berserker rages when our emotions spill out of their bowl. Admittedly there are just metaphors, neurological evidence points to the amygdale as the culprit for these experiences. But we don’t usually live with neuro-anatomy as the metaphor for how the mind works. We usually tell ourselves simpler stories.

Intensity may be the key to unlocking to experience of this exclusionary pairs. Perhaps only high levels of these emotions tend to exclude each other. Then again any intense emotion tends to take center stage and push all others into the wings.

The very act of naming the emotion may influence it. Once we say, “I am angry,” our emotional state might change a bit. Yet the ability to name our emotions is part of maturity. It is one of the skills that we teach to children.

Emotions, being irrational resist any effort to organize them too much. As Jung pointed out, complete subjugation of the unconscious mind by the conscious mind is undesirable.

Forgive me my rambling.

xanderman wrote:

Yes and yes. And that’s why I have trouble setting up diametrically opposed emotional states by definition. Any intense emotional state can indeed dominate temporarily, but it does not follow that it’s opposite cannot be present at the same time. Our emotions just aren’t that black and white.

Is it possible for a person to enter into a pattern of exclusive emotional states? Yes. But it is a pathological condition of either/or.

One of the problems with abstracting out and labeling is that, no matter how fine the divisions or subtle the labels, they never quite add up to one.
Our emotion and mind interaction is just a little too complex to rely on the labels.

JT