are never simple. Indeed, with all the understanding there may be in academic, scientific, and practice circles, the complete nature of human emotion remains mostly a mystery. Anything at all can trigger one. They are the joy, spice, and passion of life, and the source of its greatest suffering. They are wholly contained within the person and his boundaries, they are no one else's responsibility but that of the one bearing them, and they account for both the source and much of the fallout for what we call "mental illness."It is common to include the factor of human spirituality. Among those who believe in a single God in the Judeo-Christian traditions, most, if not all, believe that even He has emotions
.Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive article about such a broad subject, but reading it simply offers a look at the many facets of it. Doing so offers no real, palpable answer to the question with which we began.
In psychotherapy
, we often attempt to help people simplify how they think and speak of emotion in order to provide "handles" that can be grasped for conceptualization and conversation. It has been said that there are only five feelings: mad, sad, glad, scared, and hurt. All the words that we use to describe emotions can be conceptually squeezed into one or more of these five words. It is not an academic concept, but merely a therapeutic tool to attempt such a thing. At least, this simplification process can help us be as precise and descriptive as possible when thinking or speaking of our emotional experiences.In my humble opinion, human emotion transcends everything about human existence, save for spirituality, which is a much more nebulous concept, and will have to remain so within this discussion. But few people would characterize spirituality as being unrelated to emotion, or even emotion to spirituality. What about this idea of transcendence
, though? It is this transcendent nature of human emotion that best answers our question. To fully understand the complexities of emotion would be to fully understand what we are.The arts have provided perhaps the most comprehensive attempts in human history to approach the human experience, and usually from an emotional standpoint. Surely when we see Michaelangelo, hear Bach, or read Tolstoy, our human experience is enriched, almost as much as our experience of real life itself. Ancient cultures seem to have usually supported artistic expression in its finest forms, from the ranks of royalty to the most humble of people. Perhaps when (if) our culture becomes more aged, it will have the collective human wisdom to do the same. As the most purely capitalistic culture
in history that I know of, I have my doubts. So far, in our brief, newborn-cry as a culture, what have we done about the arts? Perhaps more importantly, what have we done about the arts enriching the lives of our own human race? Perhaps more telling, what resources have we committed to more base pursuits as opposed to the more valuable? The broad subject of education
in this country comes to mind easily, in light of recent events.To me, the final question is the most disturbing: what will happen -- indeed what has already happened in our culture -- to human. social, and cultural emotion and experience as a result of what we have or have not yet done about the arts in America
?
~
kicking in, but this has me thinking. People often do not understand one of the basics of healthy relationships: 
. In mental health circles, this has been discussed and hashed over and taught for decades. But such things as developing healthy boundaries are learned from parent to child, in relatively 
" has to do with boundaries. Perfect assertiveness would be behavior that always protects one's own interests while completely allowing all others to protect theirs, and never being the source or the chooser of conflict. The result of his model-assertive behavior was frequent conflict with others, usually coming from their side of his healthy boundary. Generally speaking, people in our culture expect us to maintain an unhealthy, too-loose boundary of our own so that they can "get in" to us to whatever extent they want at the moment. The same people often have a rigid, un-crossable boundary over which none may pass.
, and was regarded in a large metropolitan area as the local expert. This patient had learned well, and had come a long way. After his treatment, the man's wife became very angry, in part because she could no longer cross his healthier boundary when she wanted to. She became so enraged that she was out in the yard, violently destroying some of his favorite and most irreplaceable possessions. She was making a lot of noise, and several neighbors had gathered to watch her. For his own reasons, some of which should be obvious, he chose not to retaliate in kind. Instead, he stood with the neighbors and watched, talking calmly with them about what she was doing. He had no appropriate way to 
-- indeed, none of us ever does, since each person is responsible for his own behavior -- so he had to accept what she was doing, for the moment, and maintain his own healthy boundary, assertively protecting his own interests -- to the extent that he could. Funny thing (?) is, the less he did to respond to her inappropriately, the more enraged she became. Perhaps she wound up behind bars that evening.
. He was writing about healthy boundaries, but he was far more honest and wise about them than the publishers of the poster. They left out the last line:
is really a grief experience, natural to people when they experience a loss of any kind.
, still required reading for anyone studying the human experience. During my education and career in human services (including 
, or at least listen to somehow, both to get the impact -- and to have such a fine song in your collection. It's called 
That means, "Well it might be the Devil, or it might be the Lord."