The Carnival of Negative Emotions

Life would be much better if intellectual debates were conducted with more rigor.

Thanks to Prof. Martha Nussbaum we now confuse disgust over certain (but not all) sexual practices with homophobia. Worse yet, we have been convinced that disgust and phobia are the same as hatred.

One might expect that a serious philosopher who studies the question of negative emotions would distinguish between them.

Disgust is fundamentally an alimentary emotion; it involves feelings akin to nausea and causes people to avoid or to expel any ingestible or ingested object that would damage their health.

It may be true that many people feel disgust at the image of genital-anal contact; some feel disgust at the image of genital-oral contact. Others overcome such feelings in order to pursue sexual gratification.

Such feelings do not make them phobic and do not make them haters. By and large the people who feel the most disgust at the pictorial representation of sexual acts are women. We do not want to say that women are bigoted against male homosexuals for as much.

And we do not want people to overcome disgust altogether. No one would suggest that people stop washing their hands after going to the bathroom, for example.

By definition, a phobia is an excessive fear of something you have every right to be afraid of. People are phobic about spiders, heights, crowds, enclosed spaces, snakes, and rats.

A person who is phobic about snakes or rats is not, therefore, a bigot. If you are afraid of snakes and rats, that does not mean you hate them or even that you want to destroy them. It means that you are going to make a very strong effort to avoid them. If you are phobic about heights, you do not hate tall buildings. You will simply make every effort to keep your feet on the ground.

Both disgust at contaminants and fear of dangers to one’s physical existence involve biological survival.

Disgust is therefore not a social emotion; it involves your biological organism.

When individuals or even groups of people are persecuted or scapegoated disgust is rarely the issue.

It is possible to conduct a human sacrifice and not hate the person you are sacrificing. What would the sacrifice be worth if you were not sacrificing someone or something of value.

To understand human sacrifice or a human holocaust we need to understand the workings of guilt.

Some people are scapegoated to placate an angry god. When a group feels that it is being punished for a crime, it will choose someone, or even a group of people, to accept the punishment, and to pay the price of the crime.

When people are punished for being unclean, this also means that they are guilty of having transgressed a law. I recognize that the rhetoric involves a promise of social catharsis, but I do not believe that the reaction concerns disgust, as much as it involves other negative emotions, like envy and resentment.

Along with shame, guilt is an emotion that involves socialization.

You feel guilt for transgressing a law and you feel shame for failing to uphold your responsibilities as a member of society.

Guilt and shame do not involve your survival. They ensure your social being. Being a member of a group requires you to obey the group’s laws and that to fulfill your responsibilities toward others.

If you fail on either of these accounts, you will experience shame or guilt, depending on the nature of the violation.

Among the negative emotions, anxiety belongs to the complex involving guilt. It should be distinguished from fear

You feel fear when in the presence of a real danger-- be it a bear in the woods or a mugger in the alley. You can choose to fight or flee or even freeze before a threatening object or situation.

Anxiety differs from fear because when you are anxious you are aware of having done something wrong, of having broken a rule, and you anticipate punishment. When you are afraid of being punished, you will feel guilt and will anxiously anticipate punishment.

Anxiety does have one thing in common with fear. It involves fear of physical punishment. Crimes are punished either by physical incarceration or the infliction of physical pain.

But guilt, as opposed to fear, has a moral dimension and a social dimension.

Shame involves an immediate recognition that you have failed to uphold your responsibilities as a member of the community. Whether that involves keeping your pants on, showing up at appointments, or fulfilling your responsibilities as a corporate officer, the feeling of shame alerts you to your failure. Shame shows that you have let down the group.

In a culture that emphasizes shame, punishment involves ostracism and shunning rather than physical punishment. A culture that cuts off the hands of thieves is not a shame culture.

These are hardly the only forms of negative emotions. If shame and guilt involve your social being, your membership in a group, another set of negative emotions defines your status within the group.

Within this category we find: envy, resentment, contempt.

Politicians who try to provoke class warfare often attempt to cultivate these negative emotions. They want you to be resentful or envious of those who are more successful than you.

While we tend to direct our envy and resentment toward those we perceive to be our betters, however, we reserve our contempt for those we consider our inferiors.

Class warriors do not limit themselves to envy and resentment. They try to turn these into contempt, by convincing the lower classes to look down on the upper classes. Where the lower classes, for example, earn their way, the upper classes cheat and steal. Where the lower classes contain a vital human energy, the upper classes are dead inside.

As I suggested the Holocaust of European Jews involved envy, resentment, and contempt more than disgust.

Another category of negative emotions involves self-regard. When you have an exaggerated sense of your own self-worth you are either arrogant or vain. When you undervalue your own abilities, you become demoralized or desperate or helpless. Evidently, much of what we call depression falls within the category of unreasonably diminished sense of self-worth.

We feel anger toward people who threaten our self-regard, whether they are threatening our face or our illusion of face. We express anger because we seek to defend our reputation and because we want to affect a reconciliation.

When anger fails and when the offense is egregious it can turn into hatred.

Hatred is not about defending our honor but about destroying the other person… for a crime real or imagined. It is more about rough justice than about asserting your dignity. It is more about righting a wrong you believe was committed against your person.

When you hate someone you want to destroy him, to punish him for a crime real or imagined, a crime that can only be expiated by his being punished.

This gives us three sets of negative emotions. Some negative emotions sanction the kinds of bad behavior that would threaten your membership in a social group.

Others tend to undermine cooperative enterprise by making you feel that when others are more successful than you they have stolen from you. Essentially, these pervert the desire to succeed.

Finally, another class of negative emotions involves misunderstanding your value, your ability, your station, and your status.

Winning or Losing: What Makes the Difference?

If this blog had a daily theme, today's would have been the perils of self-esteem.

For those who believe that I was being too alarmist in suggesting that a generation of young people has been adversely influenced by a self-esteem movement that has wrung the competitive fight out of them, and that, by shielding them from the shame of failure, has deprived them of the joy of success, I would offer some anecdotal evidence to support my contention.

I did not gather the evidence from a scientific study. I read it in Brett Steenberger's blog. Link here.

Steenberger is a renowned trading coach. He works with people who trade financial instruments for a living. His goal is always to guide them to better performance.

As he tells the story, a year or so ago he was addressing a room full of traders-- over a hundred-- and ended his talk with an offer that, you might think, no one could refuse. Anyone in the room could ask him for advice and counsel and he would give it to them for free. All they had to do was ask.

After the talk one man walked up to Steenbarger to express his concern. Wasn't the coach worried that he was going to be swamped with demands for free consultations.

Steenbarger was not so sure. Two weeks later, he sat down to count up the number of requests his offer had elicited, and came up with... One.

How did he explain this strange response? He did it by noting that only a small fraction of those who consider themselves traders, who trade for a living, are willing to put in the work necessary for success. And he added that those who are not willing to do the work are also unwilling to take any advice.

Such would be the expected fallout from rampant self-esteemism.

Here is Steenbarger's conclusion: "Traders can repeat positive affirmations and invoke positive images, but nothing replaces the hard work associated with preparation, practice, and focused work on one's craft."

As for the sole trader who called Steenbarger after the lecture and asked for help, last year he made well over a million dollars trading.

Has the Self-Esteem Movement Damaged a Generation?

The thought feels just a tad alarmist, but I don't see how you could not be alarmed by the findings reported by Don Peck in his great Atlantic Monthly article, "How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America." Link here.

The article is long, comprehensive, and well worth the most serious attention. But I am going to follow Dr. Helen Smith's lead and focus on the effects self-esteem programs have had on a generation of young people. Link to Dr. Helen's post here.

After all, the only way we are going to get ourselves out of the Great Recession is through hard work. And the young generation, its mind filled full of self-esteem, doesn't seem to know that there is even a job to be done.

As Peck put it, young people: "seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves."

Peck follows the research of Prof. Jean Twenge and points out that young people have an exalted view of their own merit and ability, that this view has never really been put to any meaningful test, and that therefore it has no real correlation with reality.

They have been told they are great, over and over, by teachers, parents, and the media. So much so that they believe it. They have not really had to do anything to receive these accolades, so they do not see the point in doing anything to maintain them... beyond an occasional exercise in self-congratulation.

They think that they are every bit as good as they think they are, because, didn't you know, thinking makes it so, ?As Peck reports, when these young people receive perfectly good job offers, they turn them down because they know they deserve better.

If the marketplace has not yet recognized how great they are, they need merely wait for the end of the recession and the advent of a New Age where their greatness will be recognized and rewarded.

For the moment they are unemployed and living with their parents.

If you detect the stale odor of idiotic ideas, you would be right. As Dr. Helen points out, this young generation has been exposed to a steady stream of: "PC feel good ideas as opposed to useful practical ones."

But given their enhanced self-esteem, I would also think that, more often than not, they have become immunized against the influence of useful, practical ideas. If they ran into a good idea, they would recognize it and would not know what to do with it.

And the worst part of it is, as Dr. Helen adds, with a full measure of irony: "People suffer from some of these idiotic ideas but at least they feel good about themselves while they do."

This is, effectively, what self-esteemism has wrought in a generation of American youth. It is the direct consequence of a therapy culture whose pernicious influence I have often been at pains to point out.

If you ban as many forms of childhood competition as you can because you do not want any child to feel the sting of failure, you are also ensuring that these children never experience the joy of success.

And if, as Dr. Helen remarks, these unemployed young people, a generation of slackers, still feel good about themselves, then they have also lost touch with their emotions.

Numbed to the judgment of reality this generation can no longer access its own pain and suffering. It remains stubbornly optimistic, soaking up the hopey-changey rhetoric, imagining that the world is going to come around.

Too many of them do not have to get up off the parental couch and they are not going to take an initiative to do so. If shame is the great motivating emotion, and if they have been deprived of their ability to feel it, then they will remain unmotivated.

As Peck points out, and as I have occasionally railed about, the young generation has lost any sense of a work ethic. It does not know that you have to work to succeed. You cannot just lie back on the parental couch and await the Messiah.

Still and all, casting such a harsh judgment on an entire generation feels slightly over the top. And, in fact, it is. But that does not make it inapposite.

Surely, we all know of children who are attending schools that have not succumbed to the idiocy of the self-esteem movement. These children have engaged in competition, have learned how to work hard, and have known both failure and success.

No one wants to belittle their achievement or the achievement of their teachers and parents.

Yet, if an increasingly larger part of our young people feels that their greatness does not need confirmation in the real world, the small number who go out and work, who get the job done, will eventually form an oligarchy of the wealthy and successful.

To me this does not feel like good news.

Coaching Lessons: How to Turn Failure into Success

Failure brings with it powerful, sometimes overpowering, emotions. As Art Petty described it on his blog yesterday: "the moment of failure feels much like being transported to an alien landscape where suddenly everything is not as it should be." Link here.

When you are being assailed by powerful emotions, you might well believe that they are demanding to be heard, if not heeded. If you believe that emotions must be understood, worked over, worked through, until you gain insight and awareness into why you failed... then you are ready for psychotherapy.

You are not ready to succeed. If psychotherapy works as I just described, it will not lead you to success. It will lead you away from success, away from the future toward the past. It will make failure a meaningful experience, an integral part of who you are.

Coaching takes a different tack. Any coach will tell you that when you have fallen, you must immediately pick yourself, dust yourself off, and get back in the game.

In Petty's words: "The faster you can move everyone from 'what just happened?' to 'what next?' the faster you pass through the cold alien landscape of failure. Linger too long on an extended self-pity party and you might as well set up camp and become a permanent resident. Your goal must be to move through this phase or process in a hurry."

If speed is of the essence, and if you want to use success to diminish the hold of failure, you should avoid exploring your emotions and working them through. You should not go looking for that certain something in the past that is making you feel so badly. And you should certainly not imagine that failure is trying to tell you something about who you really are.

When your emotions overwhelm you, when they demand attention, your job is, as Petty suggests, to rechannel the energy toward future success. Surely, your emotions are telling you that you failed, but they are not, therapy withstanding, telling you that you are a failure.

Now one ever moved forward by obsessing about the past.

Think of your emotions as transients. Your job is to ensure that they do not take up permanent residence. Be wary then of any form of psychotherapy that tries to build them a new house.

We all feel ashamed when we fail. Shame is probably the most powerful of negative human emotions. There is only one cure for the shame of failure: success.

Yet, psychotherapy will try to transform the shame into guilt. Once you have learned to see it as guilt you will need to discover who you should blame. Once you have punished the guilty party, the siren-song of therapy goes, you will be released from the negative emotion of guilt.

Therapy wants you to embrace failure, then to find someone to blame.

First, you will try blaming the world. As Hamlet put it: "How all occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge."

When you cannot act, whether because you do not know what to do or because your therapist has convinced you that it is more important to get in touch with your feelings, you will likely see reality as a conspiracy to inhibit you.

If your back is up against the wall, if the entirety of the world is arrayed against you, then inaction becomes the proper and rational response. What else can you do?

Eventually, you are going to start blaming yourself. You might discover, with a certain type of therapist, that you, like Oedipus, are the criminal you are looking for.

If you are suffering because a crime has been committed, and if God is just, then you yourself must be the criminal. Then you will feel empowered. You will be able to punish yourself, even martyr yourself, in order to release your negative actions and feel good about yourself.

None of this will show you how to act in the world, or how to snatch success from the jaws of failure, but now, thanks to therapy, you will no longer care.

If, after you have failed, you turn around and look back, you are going to be facing failure. After a time you are going confuse the matter and believe that failure is your future, not your past.

Welcome, demoralization and depression!

The Road To Success Is Paved With Failure

Yesterday I posted a link to Paul Tudor Jones' speech to the graduating class of ninth graders at New York's Buckley School.

To the relief of some, I did not offer very much commentary.

Today is a new day, so I will post some of my thoughts on the speech.

Jones wanted the teenagers to know that the road to success is paved with failure. And that your success will depend on how deeply you experience the shame of failure and how well you learn to overcome it.

He wanted these adolescents to know that behind great success there lies a series of extremely painful failures.

Take these points as benchmarks against which you can measure the rules that our culture is imparting.

Ask yourself this: do we still allow children to fail? Are children allowed to do poorly in tests, are they allowed to get things wrong, and are they allowed to be called on the carpet for having made egregious errors?

I suspect that this is not always the case. We have all heard about the empathic school administrators and teachers who are terrified at the possibility that a child might fail at something.

These officials have banned dodgeball and spelling bees because some of the children will feel badly for not coming in first. Worse yet, they have introduced fuzzy math, where there are no right and wrong answers, because one person's wrong answer is another's expression of creativity.

Where these policies are practiced, children are not allowed to fail. They do not know what it feels like to fail. They do not know what it feels like to let themselves down. They do not hate the shame of failure with every sinew of their being.

The consequence: they are not being prepared to succeed. And they will lack the motivation to succeed.

Jones told his audience about his own failures. He did not sugarcoat them; he did not say that they were good experiences. He did not try to show people how to palliate the pain of failure.

Instead, he offered something of real value. He told them how to use failure to gain success. He showed them how he picked himself off the floor, how he went back to the drawing board, how he attacked problems anew, and how he kept on doing it until he succeeded.

This is not the way therapy has traditionally taught people to deal with failure. Therapy and its culture has tried to make failure a meaningful experience, one that you should understand, one that you should integrate into your life narrative, one from which you should use to learn more about your miserable upbringing and your childhood traumas.

Therapists feel your pain. And they do not want you to feel too much of it because then you might not like them as much. They want you to feel that today's shame is not really about today's failure. It hurts because it reminds you of a forgotten childhood trauma. One for which you were decidedly not responsible.

Paul Tudor Jones is saying that your failure is your alone. Don't go out and blame others for your mistakes. The experience is not a meaningful reflection on your character; it need not be integrated into your life story.

To make failure into a stepping stone to success get out of your mind and back in the game; keep trying until you get it right.

If you do not own your failures, you will not own your successes. If you blame others for your failures, you will have to grant others the credit for your successes.

Then you will never really enjoy your successes because you will never really feel that they are yours.

Learning to Win, Part 2

What motivates successful people? Why do some people seem driven to succeed while others content themselves with suboptimal performance?

The conventional wisdom answers that success comes to those who really want it, who want it more than others, who want it really, really badly.

This implies that the path to success must involve strengthening your desire... almost to the point of becoming obsessed.

This theory says that if the man does not stop drinking it is because he does not really want to. And it declares that if the child is doing poorly it is because her parents did not really want her. Finally, it tells us that the player lost the match because he did not really want to win.

The other part of this theory tells us that if you cannot succeed as a florist then that means that your heart's desire has nothing to do with flowers. This implies that once you discover your true desire to throw pots success will arrive on angel wings.

This conventional wisdom infests our therapy culture. It was effectively countered by Brett Steenbarger in a post yesterday on turning goals into consistent habits. Link here.

Steenberger's point, if I may paraphrase, is that success does not come to people who want to win; it comes to people who hate to lose.

Winners do not lust after the emoluments of success. What really motivates them is the taste of failure. Having found failure intolerable they have vowed to do whatever it takes not to experience it again.

The emotional matrix of this motivation is shame. Shame accompanies defeat and success comes to those who will do what it takes to avoid shame.

The most significant problem with the emotional reaction to failure is that people do not feel badly enough. They shrug off failure as something that happens in life. They do not denounce it as something that they should never again have to feel.

As Steenbarger suggests, desiring the benefits of success is a poor motivator. When you are working hard because you want to own a yacht , your motivation to work will subside the moment you acquire one.

If, however, you are motivated by a fear of failure, that prospect is always lurking. Worse yet, the more you have the more you stand to lose.

This is not just about learning to win. It also concerns what causes people to make important changes in their lives. I suggested in my book "Saving Face' that shame is a primary motivator of significant and substantial change.

Steenbarger argues the same point. In his terms, we change when we have to, not when we want to. For those who have made a career out of saying that no one can change without really wanting to, this is a sobering corrective.

Alcoholics stop drinking when they find themselves in the real or psychological gutter. Only when the pain becomes too great and the alcohol fails to palliate it are they motivated to do what it takes to avoid going back.

Steenbarger reminds us that alcoholics go to AA meetings for two reasons. First, for the social connections with their fellows; and second, because listening to the bad experiences of others provides a constant reminder of how far they might fall.

It is not about what you want to do; it's about what you have to do. It's not about aesthetics, but about ethics. The strongest positive motivation does not come from appetite, but from duty.

[Note: My first post on "Learning to Win" is dated August 30.]

Learning to Win

Recently Brett Steenbarger wrote on his blog that the inability to deal with trauma is often a trader's enemy. Not sexual trauma, not childhood traumas, but the trauma of losing money.

Ever since Freud psychotherapy has labored under the notion that the best way to deal with trauma is to talk it out. It has recommended telling the story of your trauma, gathering up a few insights, and then pretending that you understand the meaning of what happened to you. This enhanced consciousness is supposed to constitute cure.

Need I mention that it never works. In some recent posts Steenbarger offers a good explanation of why. Losing money in a bad trade or in a series of bad trades sets up a conditioned response, one that bypasses thought and reflection. Negative experiences-- like losing money-- are more powerful and influential because they cause people to vow "never again." If you have been hurt badly at some activity the chances are good that you will avoid, not only that activity, but anything that remotely suggests it.

Steenbarger adds that since traumas bypass thought to create automatic responses they cannot be influenced by more and better thinking.

Let us say that a trader was traumatized by a loss? How will he conduct himself to avoid it every happening again?

He may be too quick to take small profits because he panics about the possibility that they will disappear. He might allow his bad positions to decline too long because he refuses to take a small loss.

In the end he might become accustomed to losing money because he has gained extensive experience at it. And he will accept it because he will feel that trauma has defined him as a loser.

No one is going to get over this by talking it out or talking it over or talking it through. No one is going to learn to win by discovering why he likes to lose or why he wanted to lose.

Once traumatized a person might well need a trading coach to guide him back into the markets. A coach will teach him how to get out of his Self and back into reading the markets. He will not do as many therapists do and puff up his self-esteem. As Steenbarger said: "It's not about thinking more positively about yourself; it's about removing the self from pure performance skill."

Still and all, someone who has gotten too used to losing must figure out some way to learn how to win. And as Steenbarger suggests, he must do it through experience, through the experience of winning.

How do you do that? East... you take up golf... or tennis or bridge. You go outside of trading to find an activity where you can learn to win with humility and lose with grace.

Golf is like meditation, only with a competitive kicker. You do not have to introspect to discover how good your concentration is... the trajectory of the ball provides an instant reality check.

Golf will teach you how not to get too full of yourself when you sink a long putt or make a great chip shot. It will teach you how to get your concentration back when your drive lands in the lake.

Similarly, with bridge. If you are not in the bridge world you may not know but a great many of the finest bridge players are also traders, generally options traders.

I would add here that children need to learn how to win and how to lose, that is, how to complete, when they are growing up. This ought not to need emphasis, but there are enough mentally-deficient educators in our country who want to ban dodge ball and spelling bees, to say nothing of grades, because they are afraid someone's feelings will be hurt. What they are really doing is creating children who are incapable of dealing with failure. It is a sorry legacy of the self-esteem movement, and one can only hope it has not infected too many school systems.