Navigating emotions

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.” Audre Lorde

For most of my life, I was told that getting angry and expressing my anger was bad. As a result, I cultivated the habit of repressing it. I kept telling myself and others that I was slow to anger, but if someone kept making me angry I would eventually explode. Looking back, I realise that I was not slow to anger.

Instead, I allowed issues to pile up until I exploded. As you can imagine, this was not fun for anyone involved, least of all me. What freaked me out about these explosions was how disempowered I felt. I felt that expressing my anger through exploding meant I was ‘weak’. On top of this, the intense emotionality of the explosion would result in me breaking down in tears. I wanted to avoid this process of complete disempowerment at all costs. So, I knew it was time to find a healthy balance between expressing anger, exploding if necessary and coping with the feeling of vulnerability, which followed an explosion.

As I started exploring my experiences of anger, I realised that anger is a complex response. It is a normal emotion with a wide range of intensity, from mild irritation to frustration to rage. It is sparked by a perceived threat to ourselves, our loved ones, property, self-image or any part of our identity. Anger is a warning bell that tells us that something is wrong.

Like all emotions, anger has a physical component, and most people experience a rush of adrenaline, increased heart rate, blood pressure and tensing of muscles. This is often known as the “fight” response. Anger also has a cognitive component that influences how we perceive and think about what makes us angry. For example, we might believe something is wrong, unfair or undeserved. Lastly, anger has a behavioural component, we express our anger. There is a wide range of behaviour that signals anger. We may look and sound angry, turn red, raise our voices, clam up, slam doors, storm away, or say we are angry. We may also ask for a time-out, an apology, or something to change.

The reality is that everyone experiences anger, and it can be healthy. Anger energy can be a powerful motivating force that drives us to stand up against injustices whether against us or others. When managed well, anger can also catalyse positive changes in our lives and situations. Mismanaged anger, on the other hand, is counter-productive and can be unhealthy. Anger that is too intense, out of control, misdirected, and overly aggressive can lead to poor decision-making and problem-solving, create problems with personal and professional relationships and even affect your health.

The politics of emotion

I always approach internal, individual experiences through a political lens. Thus I also started examining how the systems we interact with affect how I navigate my emotions.

Sarah Ahmed notes that emotions are bound up propping up social hierarchy. Emotions become attributes of bodies in ways that are judged as ‘lower’ or ‘higher’ in the hierarchy, and expressing emotions in certain ways increases “not only the risk of becoming feminine but also of becoming ‘less white’.

In this way, hierarchies of emotion are established. While some emotions are seen as ‘elevated’ others are stigmatised and marginalised as signs of weakness, less than, and ‘other’. When developing emotional awareness and capabilities it is also important to become aware of the preferences and stigmas around certain emotions and to ask how these hold up the hierarchies of power we are working to dismantle.

“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.” —Audre Lorde.

Sara Ahmed also argues that emotions are not just physical and psychological states, but are also social and cultural practices in which emotion becomes a social currency, rather than self-expression. Moreover, emotion is seen as holding or binding the social body together.

To illustrate, emotions are often treated as tools for more effective expressions of identities, such as when anger is harnessed and channelled, or when compassion for the suffering of others motivates action, in the case of activism. Here, the ability to control emotions and experience the ‘appropriate’ feelings at the right time and place is positioned as “emotional intelligence” used to advance one’s position. Although these approaches to emotion can be useful in certain context the way that they instrumentalise emotions can take away choice, agency and self-expression.

Understanding emotional labour

Generally defined, emotional labour is managing another person’s emotions and social expectations. It’s about keeping someone else’s emotional experiences and wellness in check, which typically results in the labourer’s own emotional experience being neglected.

Activists, for example, often perform emotional labour because of a personal investment in their activist causes. This motivation combined with the emotionally charged nature of organising, means that their emotions impact their wellbeing in many different ways and thus necessitate extra attention.

Emotions that fuel activism and social change

Many activists feel anger and fear about current systemic, social and environmental conditions, but also become motivated to pursue political action through what J. M. Jasper refers to as “the excruciating contrast between the way things are now and the way things might be”. Engaging in activism with others generates emotions for activists. Taking part in collective actions can boost emotional energy and increase the joy of building social connections through a movement, and developing a sense of belonging to a group is key to sustaining engagement.

At times the strong relationships found in activist collectives assist in defining and coping with forms of emotional labour and at times maintaining relationships becomes a form of emotional labour. However, because of shared investment in the work, although the emotional labour is personal, mitigating its effects takes on a collective nature.

Mental health, emotions, activism and social change

Emotions related to activism can also have a more destructive role, inducing burnout and subsequent withdrawal from social justice movements. For example, burnout can result from external societal hostility towards the causes that activists agitate for and the emotional strain that norm transgression, sanctions and backlash bring.

We must therefore acknowledge the different identities and social positioning of activists when examining the causes and impacts of burnout. For example, racial justice activists who are themselves racially minoritised can be at considerable risk of burnout because they ‘carry the burden of structural understanding on top of the challenge of coping with the grind of racism in their own lives, often referred to as ‘racial battle fatigue’. The emotional labour of resistance takes a toll on directly impacted people, hence the importance of self-care and attention to wellbeing.

Furthermore, when people are engaged in a politics of survival there isn’t a clear distinction between ‘activism’ and living, or the privilege of choosing to ‘disengage’. Some organise because it is necessary for their survival inside fundamentally oppressive structures. Resisting under conditions of oppression and silencing within institutions can take a heavy toll.

Structures and systems in social justice organisations and movements

Despite activist critiques of wider social structures and conditions, social justice movements may also have oppressive practices and structures. For instance, activists can feel pressured to commit to unmanageable workloads because issues are so urgent or because their sense of emotional responsibility to other community members makes it hard to step back. In this vein, the ‘ideal’ activist is often perceived as an extraordinary person who sacrifices other needs and desires for the good of the movement.

Cultivating emotional reflexivity

“My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living.” —Audre Lorde

Emotional reflexivity refers to reflecting on and altering our emotions or emotional states in response to different situations and social expectations. It involves being aware of our own feelings, interpreting those of others, and adjusting our emotional responses accordingly.

In activism, emotional reflexivity allows us to navigate the emotional challenges of our participation to sustain our activism while fostering wellbeing within the movement. In terms of leadership, emotional reflexivity enables us to adapt to different social contexts and meet the expectations of our team, leading to more effective leadership. Emotional reflexivity plays a crucial role in personal and social interactions, allowing us to navigate emotions, build connections, and adapt to changing circumstances.

Simply put, strengthening our emotional intelligence often leads to improved health for ourselves and stronger bonds with others.

For instance, when we get into a disagreement, we need the ability to read our emotions to recognise if it is safe for us to engage (fear), to understand where our boundaries are not serving us (anger), to recognise our commitment to what we are standing up for (sadness) and to remember what we value about the relationship in which we are experiencing conflict in (joy).

Once we recognise where we stand within a disagreement it is also important to know how to talk about our feelings to resolve the issue appropriately. Adding to this we can learn how to recognise the emotions others are experiencing through observing their body language and facial expressions.

Learning emotional skills improves our social change work; helping us live healthier, happier, and more fulfilling lives and form strong supportive relationships inside and outside our professional settings.