From: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Speaker-to-Minerals)
Subject: Re: All mind and no heart?
Reply-To: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU
Organization: HST Wide Field/Planetary Camera
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 09:27:12 GMT

In article <1992Apr11.035847.2429@midway.uchicago.edu>, mbr2@quads.uchicago.edu (Curious Of All Natures) writes:
>My apologies, folks- many have taken this phrase of mine to mean that
>apparently I can't be emotionally affected.  This was not exactly my
>intent.  My meaning was that, in light of the motto of the Place, I
>have neither joy nor pain to share in this communication of mine.
>Into my life enters joy and wonder and occasionally pain as well, but
>usually I am feeling something well before I realize it, if I realize
>it at all, and my growing suspicion is that there is much feeling of
>mine that I DON'T realize.  Is this a bad thing?  Empathy seems to
>require a lucid conscious experience of one's own feelings.  What of a
>person whose feelings are there but usually not consciously
>expereinced?  Is this necessarily bottling-up?  Or could it be that,
>as I've surmised, they're just so well woven into my experience of
>life that I haven't learned to pick them out?  What if my heart and
>mind are the same?

StM answers, "It sounds like a bottling-up to me.  For most of my adult life,
my emotional reactions and my rational reactions to most things have been
consistent with each other.  Yet I'm generally aware of emotions as soon as they
begin to manifest.  I admit the delighted surprise of an unexpected (and
sometimes incongruous) emotion is rather pleasant, though.

>>"I realize that I'm an outsider, and that I can never hope to 
>>know the situation as well as one in the middle of it, but 
>>this is my advice.  Ponder on that question for a while.  
>>Then, when you think you know the answer, tell Judie.
>> 
>>"Who knows?  It might not help, but I don't believe it can 
>>hurt."
>
>Four months ago I did ask myself that question, CD.  I did a lot of
>brainstorming and came up with a fair bit.  Put poetically it was
>quite a romantic presentation when I finnished it.  She squeaked and
>squealed!  Ultimately I left the question only partially answered,
>because reasons didn't seem to encompass everything that caused love
>to be.  I don't think love CAN be explained fully by reasons.  But it
>was happy and healthy to find SOME, nonetheless.
>
>Thanks for the advice, though. It would be well to remind her.

It would also be well to ask yourself the question:  "If she changed the things
I'm urging her to change, what other changes would be entailed?  Would she
still be a person I'd be likely to love?"  For, you see, I suspect that one of
the reasons she's reluctant to make the changes that you think would be good
for her is that, in her opinion, to do so would require changing things that
she really DOES like about herself.  Everything's connected.  Let me give you
an example.  I used to be a manic-depressive.  Until the REAL reason for my
manic-depression (diabetes) was diagnosed, the only treatment for the problem
appeared to be drugs that, in the course of getting rid of the depressive
episodes, would also have eliminated the manic episodes.  And, from talking to
people who'd used such drugs, and reading the literature about such cases, it
was pretty obvious to me that such a course of treatment would have effectively
tken about 20 points off my IQ (dropping it to about 150).  Faced with those
two alternatives, manic-drpression looked to me like the better choice.  Yes,
it was painful, but the benefits just didn't seem worth the cost.  Please
consider that your girlfriend might see herself facing a similar dilemma.

>Back on the topic of rediscovering emotion- all of the people who have
>described to me [often similar] accounts of how emotion came back into
>their lives talk of a great pain they experienced or remembered that
>opened the gates.  Is it axiomatic that every single human being has
>experienced some really significant injuries, emotional or physical,
>by my age [20]?

No.  Though it does  appear likely to me that there's a built-in predilection
for taking life too seriously when you're that young that makes this likely.

>I mean it's probably a good guess if you know nothing
>else about a person, but what's to say that a person can't be really
>lucky?  The greatest pain I've experienced in my adult life was at a
>time when no matter what I did something TRUE of me was simply hurtful
>to someone else (this was real stuff- I was broken down to tears,
>heart wrenched, etc.).  I don't believe I've buried this pain- I can
>recall the hurt and what I learned from that time (this was
>pre-Judie).  But I'm told that this doesn't cut it in terms of
>character-building injuries.  Haven't I been hurt in a way that makes
>me feel vulnerable?  Not that I know of.

Vulnerable?  We don' need no steenking vulnerable!  Seriously, though, I don't
see any reason why a feeling of vulnerability is necessary or even desirable,
except in that it can improve one's empathy.  I don't even see any desirability
in a feeling of mortality (except for the fact that it can help you to live
longer).  A feeling of FALLIBILITY, on the other hand, strikes me as being VERY
important.  A deep-seated feeling that says "I could be wrong."  I've stated
before in this newsgroup that I don't have any truly deep-seated beliefs.  I
used to have a number of them.  Most of them were proven wrong by subsequent
experience.  Said experience led me to relegate the remaining such beliefs to
the status of working hypotheses, and to try always to bear in mind that "I
might be wrong."

>Does anyone have a tale of how they returned to the emotional life
>without experiencing or remembering an emotional wound of some kind?

After I'd once been hurt very deeply (Hey, Eddy!  If anybody asks for details,
you know what to do, right?), I pretty much suppressed most emotions for a
copule of years.  My emotions returned next time I fell in love.  Actually, now
that I think about it, I'm not so sure that "falling in love" shouldn't count
as "an emotional wound of some kind," but it didn't seem like one at the time.
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