10 Feelings You've never
heard of them.
There are different psychological states such as feelings like happy or sad but there was also many other feelings which we don’t notice them but we experienced them.
There are different psychological states such as feelings like happy or sad but there was also many other feelings which we don’t notice them but we experienced them.
Everybody knows what you mean when you say you're happy or
sad. But what about all those emotional states you don't have words for? Here
are ten feelings you may have had, but never knew how to explain.
Psychological States You’ve Never Heard Of… and When You
Experienced Them
1.
Abjection
There are a few ways to define abjection, but French
philosopher Julia Kristeva (literally) wrote the book on what it means to
experience abjection. She suggests that every human goes through a period of
abjection as tiny children when we first realize that our bodies are separate
from our parents' bodies — this sense of separation causes a feeling of extreme
horror we carry with us throughout our lives. That feeling of abjection gets re-activated
when we experience events that, however briefly, cause us to question the
boundaries of our sense of self. Often, abjection is what you are feeling when
you witness or experience something so horrific that it causes you to throw up.
A classic example is seeing a corpse, but abjection can also be caused by
seeing shit or open wounds. These visions all remind us, at some level, that
our selfhood is contained in what Star Trek aliens would call "ugly bags
of mostly water." The only thing separating you from being a dead body is
. . . almost nothing. When you feel the full weight of that sentence, or are
confronted by its reality in the form of a corpse, your nausea is abjection.
2.
Dysphoria
Often used to describe depression in psychological disorders,
dysphoria is general state of sadness that includes restlessness, lack of
energy, anxiety, and vague irritation. It is the opposite of euphoria, and is
different from typical sadness because it often includes a kind of jumpiness
and some anger. You have probably experienced it when coming down from a
stimulant like chocolate, coffee, or something stronger. Or you may have felt
it in response to a distressing situation, extreme boredom, or depression.
3.
Enthrallment
Psychology professor W. Gerrod Parrott has broken down human
emotions into subcategories, which themselves have their own subcategories.
Most of the emotions he identifies, like joy and anger, are pretty
recognizable. But one subset of joy, "enthrallment," you may not have
heard of before. Unlike the perkier subcategories of joy like cheerfulness,
zest, and relief, enthrallment is a state of intense rapture. It is not the
same as love or lust. You might experience it when you see an incredible
spectacle — a concert, a movie, a rocket taking off — that captures all your
attention and elevates your mood to tremendous heights.
4.
Sublimation
If you've ever taken a class where you learned about Sigmund
Freud's theories about sex, you probably have heard of sublimation. Freud
believed that human emotions were sort of like a steam engine, and sexual
desire was the steam. If you blocked the steam from coming out of one valve,
pressure would build up and force it out of another. Sublimation is the process
of redirecting your steamy desires from having naughty sex, to doing something
socially productive like writing an article about psychology or fixing the
lawnmower or developing a software program. If you've ever gotten your
frustrations out by building something, or gotten a weirdly intense pleasure
from creating an art project, you're sublimating. Other psychiatrists have
refined the idea of sublimation, however. Following French theorist Jacques Lacan,
they say that sublimation doesn't have to mean converting sexual desire into
another activity like building a house. It could just mean transferring sexual
desire from one object to another — moving your affections from your boyfriend
to your neighbor, for example.
5.
Repetition compulsion
Ah, Freud. You gave us so many new feelings and psychological
states to explore! The repetition compulsion is a bit more complicated than
Freud's famous definition — "the desire to return to an earlier state of
things." On the surface, a repetition compulsion is something you
experience fairly often. It's the urge to do something again and again. Maybe
you feel compelled to always order the same thing at your favorite restaurant,
or always take the same route home, even though there are other yummy foods and
other easy ways to get home. Maybe your repetition compulsion is a bit more
sinister, and you always feel the urge to date people who treat you like crap,
over and over, even though you know in advance it will turn out badly (just
like the last ten times). Freud was fascinated by this sinister side of the
repetition compulsion, which is why he ultimately decided that the cause of our
urge to repeat was directly linked to what he called "the death
drive," or the urge to cease existing. After all, he reasoned, the
ultimate "earlier state of things" is a state of non-existence before
we were born. With each repetition, we act out our desire to go back to a
pre-living state. Maybe that's why so many people have the urge to repeat
actions that are destructive, or unproductive.
6.
Repressive desublimation
Political theorist Herbert Marcuse was a big fan of Freud and
lived through the social upheavals of the 1960s. He wanted to explain how
societies could go through periods of social liberation, like the
countercultures and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century, and yet still
remain under the (often strict) control of governments and corporations. How
could the U.S. have gone through all those protests in the 60s but never
actually overthrown the government? The answer, he decided, was a peculiar
emotional state known as "repressive desublimation." Remember, Freud
said sublimation is when you route your sexual energies into something
non-sexual. But Marcuse lived during a time when people were very much routing
their sexual energies into sex — it was the sexual liberation era, when free
love reigned. People were desublimating. And yet they continued to be repressed
by many other social strictures, coming from corporate life, the military, and
the government. Marcuse suggested that desublimation can actually help to
solidify repression. It acts as an escape valve for our desires so that we
don't attempt to liberate ourselves from other social restrictions. A good
example of repressive desublimation is the intense partying that takes place in
college. Often, people in college do a lot of drinking, drugging and hooking up
— while at the same time studying very hard and trying to get ready for jobs.
Instead of questioning why we have to pay tons of money to engage in rote
learning and get corporate jobs, we just obey the rules and have crazy drunken
sex every weekend. Repressive desublimation!
7. Aporia
You know that feeling of crazy emptiness you get when you
realize that something you believed isn't actually true? And then things feel
even more weird when you realize that actually, the thing you believed might be
true and might not — and you'll never really know? That's aporia. The term
comes from ancient Greek, but is also beloved of post-structuralist theorists
like Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak. The reason modern theorists love the
idea of aporia is that it helps to describe the feeling people have in a world
of information overload, where you are often bombarded with contradictory
messages that seem equally true.
8.
Compersion
We've gotten into some pretty philosophical territory, so now
it's time to return to some good, old-fashioned internet memes. The word
compersion was popularized by people in online communites devoted to polyamory
and open relationships, in order to describe the opposite of feeling jealous
when your partner dates somebody else. Though a monogamous person would feel
jealous seeing their partner kiss another person, a non-monogamous person could
feel compersion, a sense of joy in seeing their partner happy with another
person. But monogamous people can feel compersion, too, if we extend the
definition out to mean any situation where you feel the opposite of jealous. If
a friend wins an award you hoped to win, you can still feel compersion (though
you might be a little jealous too).
9. Group
feelings
Some psychologists argue that there are some feelings we can
only have as members of a group — these are called intergroup and intragroup
feelings. Often you notice them when they are in contradiction with your
personal feelings. For example, many people feel intergroup pride and guilt for
things that their countries have done, even if they weren't born when their
countries did those things. Though you did not fight in a war, and are
therefore not personally responsible for what happened, you share in an intergroup
feeling of pride or guilt. Group feelings often cause painful contradictions. A
person may have an intragroup feeling (from one group to another) that
homosexuality is morally wrong. But that person may personally have homosexual
feelings. Likewise, a person may have an intragroup feeling that certain races
or religions are inferior to those of their group. And yet they may personally
know very honorable, good people from those races and religions whom they
consider friends. A group feeling can only come about through membership in a
group, and isn't something that you would ever have on your own. But that
doesn't mean group feelings are any less powerful than personal ones.
10.
Normopathy
Psychiatric theorist Christopher Bollas invented the idea of
normopathy to describe people who are so focused on blending in and conforming
to social norms that it becomes a kind of mania. A person who is normotic is
often unhealthily fixated on having no personality at all, and only doing
exactly what is expected by society. Extreme normopathy is punctuated by breaks
from the norm, where normotic person cracks under the pressure of conforming
and becomes violent or does something very dangerous. Many people experience
mild normopathy at different times in their lives, especially when trying to
fit into a new social situation, or when trying to hide behaviors they believe
other people would condemn.
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