February 12, 2016. Dichotomous (Opposite) Emotions
After seeing the movie Inside Out recently it struck me that many of our emotions are dichotomous, having two polar extremes, like our personalities. If we lean too far toward pursuing one of these emotions while suppressing the opposite feelings we become unbalanced, suffering mental distress and hurting people who love us.
I’ve been thinking about which emotions lie on opposing scales and have come up with a pretty long list. In most of these dichotomies the healthy balance point is not the midpoint, but actually somewhere close to what people would consider the positive, or better of the two emotions. Still, the negative emotion has a purpose and appropriate time of expression. It’s not healthy to completely evade any of the emotions God gave us.
Consider love and hate. As a rule for life we should strive for love and resist hate, but there are times when hate is appropriate. (Ecc 3:8) We should hate sin, injustice, oppression, etc., even as we strive to love our families, friends, neighbors and enemies. Strictly speaking we should look at love and hate as more that just emotions. They are attitudes, actions—ways of life, but they come with associated feelings. We need balance and appropriate expression of those feelings. I’ve listed some emotion dichotomies below with the more positive feeling first.
We could reduce this list if we eliminated some of the similar emotion dichotomies. For example, Joy – Sorrow is a lot like Happy – Sad, but they aren’t quite the same. The list could be much longer if I added every emotional adjective I could think of. I’ve just included a few synonym pairs here that seemed important to me
This list makes a good checklist to evaluate myself for emotional balance. I can consider each pair of emotions and think about where the best balance should be and compare that to where I am. Am I allowing negative emotions too much expression in my life? Am I suppressing some negative emotions and not giving them appropriate expression? Am I missing out on good feelings that could make life better for me and other people in my life?