Non-reactivity is a quality that people in the world today hold in very high esteem. People tend to hold a positive opinion of and a very high degree of respect for people who do not canvass their emotions and who do not take actions that are triggered by emotions. And like anything that is esteemed within society, people strive to be what is esteemed. People aspire to not only have complete control over their emotional state, but to be non-emotional. Currently, people see non-emotionality, especially non-reactivity as an indication that a person is mentally healthy, mature, safe, in control of themselves, wise, self-actualized and even enlightened. Today, I’m going to show you why un-emotionality and non-reactivity is not necessarily an indication of any of these things. As well as explain why this obsession we have with non-reactivity is causing people harm.

In today’s world, people have a very, very poor relationship with emotions. We are essentially living in an emotional dark age. Because of this lack of understanding about emotions, people don’t have an accurate perspective about them and so, they don’t do the right thing with emotions when they occur. So, let’s start at the beginning. Emotions are reactions in and of themselves. They occur within you in response to many different stimuli, such as people, places, things, situations, circumstances, and energies that you are encountering in the external world as well as your own thoughts, especially your own thoughts about those external stimuli. When we encounter a stimulus, we experience a reaction to it in the form of a felt based, highly physiological response. Within this felt based response, is information. Emotions carry a lot of information about our environment and about ourselves, most especially about our subjective experience of our environment and about our personal truths. For example, a baby may be having a strong emotional reaction and contained within this emotional reaction might be the information “that scared me, I need comfort”. This is why emotions can serve as a kind of internal guidance system. Sometimes it is helpful to think of emotion as a different language in which information is received and transmitted. When we have an emotional reaction, most of the time, this information within the emotion is totally subconscious. And we do not take the time to make it conscious. We don’t tune into this language that is occurring within us so as to consciously ascertain the information it contains. And because of this, we simply have a behavioral response to the emotion. This is what people are most familiar with… the actual expression of an emotion.

The truth is, we should not be focusing on trying to regulate our emotions at all. If anything, we should be concerned with consciously regulating our behavior. After all, what we are really concerned with when we talk about needing to be non-reactive is the behavioral response that we have to experiencing an emotion.  

One of the biggest false assumptions people make is that all people experience emotions the same way and with the same level of intensity. They don’t. Anger does not always feel the same in one person’s body as it does in another’s. Some people also feel emotions much, much more intensely and for longer. Emotions (you could say the way we feel) is a very important part of us. It is a key component of being alive. And as such, this language should be mastered and the way we feel should be consciously tended to. 

The problem is, all of us have experienced negative emotional reactions being caused within us in response to the behavioral responses someone else is having due to their emotions. And we don’t want to feel bad, so we don’t want other people to have them. The behavioral responses to emotion we are feeling can have a negative effect on us and can have a negative effect on others. But they can also have a positive effect. The problem is not behavioral responses in and of themselves, the problem is we are not consciously involved in the process. These behavioral responses are so subconscious, it seems like they are simply happening to us. I find it amusing that so much of our relationship to emotions (as well as our glorification of non-reactivity) stems from our own desire to not have a negative emotional reaction to someone else’s negative emotional reaction. As well from our desire to be held in esteem by other people, which many of us feel is not possible unless we have no negative emotional reactions that could make them have a negative emotional reaction. In other words, we are very, very resistant to feeling. The obsession we have today with non-reactivity and emotional regulation is causing people to go into resistance to their emotions and to try to achieve a state of non-emotionality in detrimental ways. Ways that can prove even more detrimental than the automatic behavioral reactions people have to emotions. 

In today’s world, people see emotional regulation, non-emotionality as a sign that someone is mentally healthy, mature, safe, in control of themselves, wise, self-actualized and even enlightened, regardless of how that state of being is achieved. And this is really really ignorant. There are a great many mentally healthy, mature, safe, wise, self-actualized and even enlightened beings that are highly emotional beings and who choose to canvass their emotions very intentionally. But the most important thing to understand is that when it comes to what people are calling emotional regulation, the WHY and the HOW matters a great deal. It matters why someone is wanting to regulate their emotions. It matters why someone is not being emotionally reactive and it matters how emotional non-reactivity is achieved. 

So that this idea that nonreactivity is a perfect indication of someone being mentally healthy, mature, safe, in control of themselves, wise, self-actualized and enlightened is destroyed for good, let me explain some super out of alignment ways that people can achieve this state and thus, you can be fooled. 

1. Denial can easily make it so that someone does not have an emotional reaction. When this happens, they are telling themselves a story in their own head and are therefore not reacting to what is occurring in reality. For example, you could use the story that a child who was born into an abusive environment is an eternal soul who wanted to be in that very experience in this life for the sake of their own expansion. By doing this, it is easy to deny the negative reality of that experience and to not have a strong negative reaction to a child being abused. You can also deny and ignore your emotions themselves because you’ve decided that they shouldn’t be there.  

2. People can have no emotional reaction by disconnecting from their own emotion. This is often called emotional blunting. This is a coping mechanism whereby people detach from and disengage with their own emotions and the emotions of others. People can disconnect from their own body so they no longer perceive the physiological responses associated with emotions in their own body. People can also disconnect from other people, so other people have no real effect on them. Disconnection is one of the most out of alignment states there is. Unfortunately, it is easily mistaken as someone being evolved.  

3. Disidentification without self-ownership. This is an especially prevalent issue in the spiritual community. This is when people identify only with their non-physical self and disidentify from everything else, especially their human self. They call this dis-identifying from their ego or from their physical form. But, they do not caretake their temporal self or take it as a part of themselves. Rather they radically disown it. As a result, any emotion that they have, they don’t see as ‘their’ emotion. They minimize it and see as totally invalid to them, refusing to engage with the language of felt perception. They are disconnected from the temporal self and have effectively abandoned the temporal self. Unfortunately, to the untrained eye, these people are often seen as the most enlightened of all.     

4. The creation of (and over-identification with) a spiritual persona that does not have emotional reactions. When something is as highly esteemed as emotional non-reactivity, we can easily create a persona that mimics this quality. We can then get stuck in this 24-7 game of pretend. We pretend to be that person, only that one created part of ourselves. Like an act, we craft our thoughts and behavior to match how we believe that person would and should be, rather than working with what is real about us and real about how we feel. This creation of a spiritual persona like this can often be a means of achieving power over others in the form of a covert superiority complex. And it is quite possibly one of the most obnoxious things you will encounter in the spiritual communities. It is a walking, breathing gaslight.    

5. We can live in the coping mechanism of toxic positivity. People sometimes use positivity to cope. Rather than seeing reality, they simply only focus on the positive aspect of anything they encounter, reframe everything to be positive and tell themselves a positive story about everything. When they feel a negative emotional response, they immediately counteract it. They are actually at war with their negative emotions. But because on an emotional level, they are essentially injecting themselves with pain killers constantly, you will not see any strong emotional reactions from this person. People who live from this coping mechanism refuse to hold the cognitive dissonance state of two opposing things being true at the same time… “And Consciousness”.  

6. Suppression. It is possible for some people (not those who feel very, very strongly) to suppress emotions. Emotional suppression is so, so common amongst people. You can also suppress emotions with certain drugs and medications. As a result, they will seem very in control of themselves emotionally. Though they will feel very numb in life in general and will have lost touch with direction in life because they are not listening to the information about themselves contained within their emotions. 

7. Lack of empathy. When we are deeply connected to all that is, we have a high degree of empathy. This means we have strong negative emotional reactions to what is occurring out there in the world. When we are not deeply connected to the world, when we don’t take others as a part of ourselves, we lack empathy. But this makes a person seem much less emotionally reactive. 

8. Withdrawal. Some people accomplish non-reactivity by withdrawing. They simply remove themselves from whatever is causing an emotional reaction in them. They accomplish emotional control by removing the stimulus that is casing that reaction. This is a state of avoidance, unfortunately withdrawing is often seen as an evolved behavior, certainly much healthier than exhibiting an emotional reaction.                   

As a society, we need to resolve this resistance that we have to emotions. We need to love them instead. Only then can we be in a working relationship with them. We need to stop seeing non-emotionality as a virtue. And we need to stop seeing non-reactivity as an automatic indication of someone being mentally healthy, mature, safe, in control of themselves, wise, self-actualized or awakened.