Been brooding on the issue of externalizing emotions today.

It is clear that, for mental health as well as physical, there needs to be a healthy amount of expression of emotions. It is my feeling that for human beings, every emotion is a signal, something we developed in order to transmit information to the rest of our primate group, and as such, like all communicative urges, remains with us until expressed and received.

This is easy to define in a simple primate society like a troupe of monkeys. One monkey sees a predator and screams in fear, alerting the rest of the troupe of the danger and summoning their aid.

The monkey did not have to think “Oh, a predator. I better make the predator alert noise!”. It just did what came naturally, expressed the emotion it was feeling at the time, and that was sufficient.

Now imagine said monkey sees the predator but knows there is no other monkeys near it to hear its scream. It might well hold on to that scream as it raced back towards its troupe and only seriously start screaming when it was sure some other monkeys would hear.

Again, no need for the monkey to think this out rationally. It only needed the instinct to make sure it was heard for this system to work. The monkey will not feel right until some other monkeys hear its scream. They might well scream themselves, again their natural emotional response, but also confirming that they have received the emotional information and will act accordingly.

Soon, the predator might find itself confronted with two dozen screaming angry monkeys, and decide to look for easier prey elsewhere.

Now, of course, we human beings are far more complicated than monkeys… but we are still the naked beach ape, social primates to the core, and we have the same instincts and the same needs and desires.

We just have vastly more complex ways of pursuing them.

So I think we human beings have this same desire to express emotions to other humans. Who, exactly, we desire as recipient of our emotion is not clear. One answer would be “anybody at all”, and it is true that we will get some emotional satisfaction from having anyone at all receive the emotional message.

But I think a case could be made that most emotions that are caused by other human beings have those human beings as their intended recipient, positive or negative.

And if you are wondering whether this truly applies to human beings, you only need to observe children to see how a child will injure themselves and their eyes will fill with tears, but they won’t actually start crying until their mother can see it.

Why? Because the external expression of the emotion is meant to signal distress to the child’s mother in order to elicit a nurturing and comforting response.

This is, incidentally, the importance of a mother “kissing it better”.

And this distinction between feeling the emotion and expressing it, externalizing it, is key. But more on that in a minute.

So human beings feel and express emotions. But not always, and the reason for that is sentience.

With sentience came the ability to think about our situation, to calculate our options, to choose amongst them, and thus, frees us from the narrowness of simply doing what emotion and instinct tells us all the time. We can pause, reflect, and choose.

This is, in fact, what allows us to have free will. But it also means that we suppress some or all of our emotions in given situations. This suppression is vital to our sentience, but it means that we inevitably accumulate a backlog of these unexpressed emotional signals, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to get rid of them except by expressing them.

So these emotions are trapped awaiting expression, and the longer we live, the more we have. To a certain extent, we can remove the energy from these trapped emotions via secondary means. We can get catharsis via art, for one thing, and thus cheat the system a little by releasing the emotion because a similar emotion has been triggered in us and the repressed emotions come out at the same time.

Taking it to the next level, you can express the emotions via creating art yourself. In doing such, the artist translates the emotional message into art for others to receive, and hopefully understand the message and maybe even derive catharsis themselves.

That applies to the solitary arts alone, of course. A performer translates the emotional message as well, but for an immediate audience.

One question that intrigues me is what, exactly, is the biochemical reality of emotional release. What changes in us when we successfully express an emotion? Is some tiny electrical potential released somewhere in the synaptic jungle of our brains? Is there a coil of compounded neurotransmitters somewhere in your brain that contains your unexpressed feelings about your mother? Where, exactly, in my body would I find all I want to say to my father?

And if we could figure out how and where repressed emotions are stored, could we come up with a catharsis chemical that releases all unexpressed emotions in a might flood of emotional release?

And would that be a good thing? It might well drive a person insane. Or turn them into some sort of saint or holy person, someone who walks the Earth unburdened and seems to us mere mortals like an angel because they carry so little of the weight of the world on their shoulders.

And what if we could remove the repressed emotion entirely? My guess is, we would also have to remove the entry in our emotional index for the memory, otherwise we would be filled with a terrible feeling of something being missing, of having forgotten something terribly important.

Hmm. You know, there might be a pretty interesting science fiction story in all this.

Check ya later.