MIND MOVES Tony Bates "He bowed his head upon his hands, bidding his heart to be meek and humble that he might be like those who knelt beside him and his prayers acceptable as theirs.
His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom
He could still leave the chapel. He could escape from the shame. The slide was shot to suddenly. The penitent came out. He was next.
He stood up in terror and walked blindly into the box. The slide clicked back and his heart pounded in his breast. The face of the old priest was at the grating, averted from him, leaning upon a hand"
In this excerpt from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce describes Stephen Dedalus caught up in a charged emotional scene. We feel his shame, guilt, fear and terror as he is drawn into the reluctant role of penitent. Our emotional reaction to his plight draws us into his world, and may activate fragments of our personal history that have equipped us with a unique empathy for his predicament.
Our emotions reveal to us an aspect of our personality that is intensely relational. They enable us to enter a world of communication with others where meanings are signalled, grasped and understood. Our emotions also talk to us and tell us what we care about, what holds significance for us, and what leaves us cold. The texture of our emotional reaction tells us more precisely the specific meanings that an event holds for us.
Sadness suggests an awareness of loss; fear, the imminence of some danger; anger, an injustice or violation of a value we hold dear. Our feelings are a rich source of information about our relationship with the world at any given moment - they represent the body's wisdom in speedily assessing what matters and how it matters.
Literature, art and good conversation can provide us with spaces where we are reconnected with personal feelings and have time to process them. Given our frightening capacity to become lost to ourselves and confused about where we are in our lives, we need these spaces to catch up with ourselves emotionally. Some would argue that this process of catching up is a little harder for men than women, and research in key areas like bereavement and depression often seems to bear this out.
Without becoming too medical, I can report from personal observation that my male friends seem to need time to reach inward and find a language for how they are feeling. It's always important whenever we meet that we build in time for warming up to anything that might be described as an emotional exchange of life experiences. Safe topics have to be covered, achievements shared, and the progress of children updated, before the conversation can stray into more risky territory.
As the summer light slowly fades around a barbecue, or closing time is announced, or as we loiter with intent in the parking lot, there is suddenly a shift in the conversation and we find ourselves in an exchange about the more hazardous business of our personal lives. This epilogue can be extended or brief, but going that extra mile and allowing this part of the evening to happen, seems to round things off and leave us with a sense of completion.
Maybe it's a guy thing, but I suspect it's not simply that. There's a paradox in being emotional, in that our bodies react very quickly and hold the echo of our experience, but our minds need time to make sense of it all. Whether you're with your spiritual confessor, your counsellor, or among friends, you need time to connect and become attuned to the bass notes of your emotional life.
Summer time can be about taking time to allow your mind and heart to get re-acquainted. It can be a time for making space for whatever conversations work for you to bring you back home to yourself. Maybe when you're lying on a beach, telling yourself you should leave it all behind, and you notice some tension you are holding in your body. Or maybe it's when you're reading a book and some passage suddenly resonates with some unspoken feeling about your own life.
It might be Joyce, but it could just as easily be Marian Keyes or Michael Connelly. Something at whose sight you find the truth that gives you back an image of your mind. These are precious moments in our lives where we touch base with our humanity and have time to meet ourselves in a healing conversation. Don't let them pass you by.
Dr Tony Bates is principal psychologist at St James's Hospital, Dublin, and author of Depression: a common sense approach (Newleaf)