Emotion, courage and responding to violence

Congresswoman Gabby Gifford, April 2013

"Be passionate.  Be courageous. Be your best."  Here's an inspiring interview with one of my heroes, Congresswoman Gabby Gifford. Passion and courage spring from a healthy emotional state.  Like creativity, most of us born that way. And as with creativity, our emotional health is gradually eroded.

I worked as a nursing aide to put myself through school.  By many accounts, I was good at my job and one of the doctors would bring me on his rounds and allow me to observe surgery.  He also encouraged me to apply to medical school.  I was studying science at McGill and this ambition was shared by many of my friends.

I worked 30 hours a week during the school year and full-time in the summer on a cancer ward.  They needed people during the evening shift and this worked well with my studies but I also liked this quiet time.  I could read, I often read the medical charts, and I talked with the patients.

Many patients were on the ward for a long time and I got to know them.  Some died there surrounded by family; others had no one.  Often they would call me over just for a chat but I do remember one man asking me a serious question.  The doctor had told him that his cancer had metastasized (spread elsewhere) and he wanted to know the meaning of this word.  I sat down, held his hand and explained.  But I was young and certainly not a medical professional.  Why hadn't the doctor put it in plain English?

Another time, I was called over to hold the hands of a woman who was close to death. Her doctor wanted to drain her pleural cavity of fluid, a painful procedure.  She had had this done on a number of occasions but was refusing it this time.  At one point because of the woman's screaming, the head nurse looked in and then asked me about it afterwards. She reported the doctor to hospital authorities.

The woman died the next morning.  Later that day, her family thanked me for caring for their mother.  I didn't tell them about the incident of the previous night but I felt sad that I hadn't been able to do more for their mother.  As I was speaking with them, I chocked back the tears but afterward I went into a room, locked the door, and sobbed.

I repeatedly heard that professionals do not become emotional; do not form emotional attachments with patients.  Staff who do aren't good practitioners.  Still I was left wondering at a system that dehumanized people in order to treat them.  I did not go into medicine.

This doesn't just happen in health care.  All institutions standardize procedures to deal with large numbers of people. Hospitals assign patient numbers.  Students are given Ontario Education Numbers, OENs.  I have mixed feelings about testing and identifying students with special needs as within an institutional setting, this labelling can cause further stereotyping and the information can be used for little more than financial purposes.

Before I go any further, let me say there are many times when a standardized approach makes a lot of sense.  If I am going to have surgery, I want a surgeon who has performed the same procedure many times.  I want the best standard approach.  Similarly, I want children to be taught by teachers who are experienced and good at what they do.  There are approaches that work well in teaching just as there are better techniques in surgery.

As a school trustee, I am part of an institution that stereotypes children.  It's the only way to teach large numbers.  But there are many children who fall outside the average and when this happens, their families occasionally turn to the trustee for assistance in navigating the system.  Sometimes when I hear their stories, I can't help but get teary and this teariness was used to ridicule me when I was first elected.

Not any more.  Half in jest, a member of staff recently told me that people now practice crying in front of the mirror.  I hope not!  My aim is not to make crying fashionable.  Rather it is to make the genuine expression of emotion possible even desirable within an institutional setting.

How are emotions relevant to who we are as human beings?  How do they influence our thinking?  I had a special birthday this week and reflected on my age.  As I grow older, I have become even more emotional. With age, we all face hardship -- the loss of a job, a severe illness, the end of a marriage, the death of a parent or close friend.  It's inevitable; a part of life.  I'm better able to put myself in another person's shoes because I've suffered these myself.  I've become more empathetic.  People often enough become teary when they look into another's eyes and feel their pain.

Truly feel their pain.  I won't bore you with details about mirror neurons and the amygdala but feeling emotion is necessary in life.  People who suffer damage to the amygdala, the emotional centre of the brain, are no longer able to make decisions. Emotion also serves to lock into memory the special times of our lives.  Everyone remembers the birth of a child or death of a parent.  I remember that hospital procedure of 40 years ago because of the emotion I felt at the time.

But feeling emotion is not the same as acting on it.  A response to anger can be negative in the sense of lashing out at someone or it can be positive in galvanizing us to action. Similarly with sadness -- we can either become depressed or we can express our sadness to empathize with others.  It's not a question of dampening our emotion to be professional at what we do.  Rather it's a question of how we choose to act in response to emotion.  Sometimes it's better to express it and other times not. 

Different cultures and people have different responses to emotional situations.  There's no right way. The point is to be genuine.  That's what people see and respond to.

John Irving, still the prolific writer
(and handsome devil)

Emotion is the only way to influence people.  Poets and authors have always known this.  I recently watched an interview with the writer John Irving and this is what he had to say:

The intention of a novel by Charles Dickens was not to make you think but to make you feel.  Certainly that was what mattered most to Shakespeare.  You move the audience -- you give them a comedy; you give them a tragedy.  If they end up at the end of the day a little smarter than what they were when you began; well fine. But the principle objective is to emotionally and psychologically affect the audience. 

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the preeminent nuclear disarmament advocate, spoke and wrote about the concept of psychic numbing, a tendency to withdraw from experiences that are traumatic.  We live in a world that is constantly bombarding us with traumatic emotional cues -- from the violence of television dramas to the nightly news. Our emotion makes us human and it shouldn't be shut down.  This means we have to figure out ways to limit this type of exposure so that we can be emotionally present elsewhere.  For this reason, I limit my own television exposure and I recommend this to parents for children.

Be passionate.  My wise son says it's not a dichotomy of head or heart.  Right -- we respond with both head and heart. When people feel emotion towards others, they begin to feel empathy.  When they don't, stereotyping and dehumanization can follow with a tendency toward conflict.  And in the school setting, children's real learning needs can go unmet.  

And be courageous in life.  I am glad for an ability to express emotion but over the years, I have paid a price for my public teariness.  Still if these tears helped support the expression of genuine emotion and empathy within an educational institution, then they have been well shed.  Now if I can just learn to tone down that raucous laugh.


The views expressed in this post are personal opinions only.