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My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma
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Negative Emotions
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Pagan Parenting:

Negative Emotions

Amanda Cummings

It is the current opinion of this culture that expressions of emotion, particularly those deemed negative, are unacceptable and inappropriate. This extends to our relationships with our children. It stems from the belief that the rational is preferable to the emotional—the emotional being weak, ignorant and wrong. When we extend this philosophy to how we deal with our children, we greatly limit how we relate to our children and what we can teach them, particularly when it comes to how we deal with these emotions.

This value on the rational at the expense of the emotional is instilled first and foremost in our boy children. This is the ground for not allowing our boys to cry, to express tenderness, and it leaves them aggression as the only means of expressing emotions. That our boys grow up more destructive and aggressive is then attributed to nature, rather than the way we value their behavior and expression of emotion. By not valuing the expression of the more gentle side of their nature, we raise our boys to kill off that part of themselves. Then, when these children grow up to be men, we wonder that they are so emotionally unresponsive.

Girls, on the other hand, we encourage to be emotionally expressive, at least of the positive emotions of love, nurture, kindness, etc. However, when we continue to value the rational over the emotional, what we do is to teach our girls to behave in ways that are perceived as less valuable, and continue the misconception of weak, irrational women when they grow up.

I suggest that there are no boy behaviors or girl behaviors. There simply are behaviors, particularly when it comes to the expression of emotion. There are plenty of boys who start out compassionate and loving, just as there are plenty of girls who start out aggressive and competitive. What happens between how they behave when they start out, and how they behave by the time they are raised depends largely, in my opinion, on what they are taught to value. That directly reflects the values we as parents find acceptable. This is what our children build on when they encounter different values in society.

So, how do we do this? I maintain that our example is the best teacher, as it always has been. The current trend in parenting is to discuss our emotions. We are told to say to our children, in a calm, even voice, I am angry now, or now I am sad, or happy, or annoyed, or whatever. I suggest that this gets back to the idea of valuing the rational over the emotional. We are being told to intellectualize our emotions, putting mind over heart, and creating distance between the two.

What kind of example would best profit our children? I feel that the honest expression of emotion is more valuable to our children, both now and in the future. If we persist on making emotion something repress and control with reason and intellect, we create emotional cripples, who view self-expression as suspect at best, and wrong at the worst.

Children are not stupid, and are quite capable of spotting crap when it is served up to them. It ultimately is not honest to present emotions as sublimated and controlled by reason—and our children will know this. When we do this, we do our children a great disservice on two counts.

First, we confuse them. If we discuss our emotions with them calmly and rationally, we do not allow them to see what that emotion looks like, and they gain no concept of it. If a child of mine has deliberately done something that is personally unacceptable to me, and I am angry, is it honest to say, calmly, Now I am angry because you did? I suggest that it is more honest to behave angrily. Note, please, that I did not say destructively. When I am angry, my voice will raise, my gestures will become more agitated, and I will let the child know I am angry! There is nothing destructive about anger itself; it is just another emotion. What I do with that anger, and its expression, is my responsibility.

My behaving angrily when I am angry, lets my children know what anger looks like. When we intellectualize this emotion, along with all the others, it all looks alike to a child. Happy looks like angry, sad, worried, annoyed, because we suppress the expression in order to rationally discuss them. When I am happy, I look and behave that way, with lots of smiles, hugs and kisses. So too, I need to be able to show honestly what the more negative emotions look like. This is how our children learn what is acceptable and not. It is not acceptable to cause harm because you are angry. In my house, however, it is acceptable to yell. In this way, we give our children positive examples of how to express this emotion. Also, in my house, you are entitled to be angry with someone as long as you feel that way, with the understanding that you let them know when you are no longer angry with them. My children are not required to behave as if nothing was wrong immediately upon the offering of an apology. You and I as adults know that an apology does not always fix things right away. My children are however required to let the person know when they are over it. That goes for me, as well. I can get mad at them, but I have to tell them when I'm not anymore.

The other thing we do to our children by rationalizing emotion, is to leave them clueless when they experience these emotions themselves. If we all calmly discuss our emotions, and that is the only context we offer our children of acceptable expression of those emotions, how will a child handle frustration when they encounter it? By not letting our children see us express emotion, especially the negative ones, how will they know what to do with it when it is part of their own experience? If a parent gets angry, but doesn't hit someone, then our children see that anger is OK, but hitting because of being angry is not acceptable. Then we are in the position to remind them, if they do hit someone, that it is not acceptable. We can then say: You know when I get angry with you, right? When I am angry with you, do I hit? And we have provided them a way to manage that anger. Or: You've seen me get frustrated, haven't you? When I get frustrated, is that how I behave? What do I do?

By building up a frame of reference of what behavior is acceptable and unacceptable, we then provide our children safe boundaries for expressing emotions. Emotions can never be unacceptable, but the behavior associated with an emotion may be. We teach them how to deal with other people’s emotional expression, too, because they have to deal with our emotions. But when we tie moral judgments to emotions, we hobble and cripple our children and force them to disassociate themselves from their feelings.

Why do I think this is a Pagan issue? Because, when we value all life, as most Pagans do (at least idealistically) then there are no wrong emotions. When we devalue emotions, we contribute to the splitting apart of our children's souls (for want of a better word), often by gender, but always to their detriment. If we are trying to teach our children to value the female as well as the male (an idea that appeals to a great many Wiccans, in particular), then we cannot instill values that perpetuate this division. The female can no longer continue to be stereotyped as weak, receptive, nurturing and irrational, and the male can no longer be valued more highly for being aggressive, active and rational. If we disregard these stereotypes, we are then more able to allow our children to grow up into whole people, capable of all their potential, with no value judgments made about their emotional or rational abilities. The children we offer to our society, particularly if they grow up to be Pagan, will be whole. They will understand balance and responsibility, and will value the emotional as well as the rational.