Navigating difficult emotions in interpersonal contexts

Eindhoven

This is a report of a symposium at the OZSW Philosophy Conference in Eindhoven in August 2024. The symposium was entitled: "Navigating difficult emotions in interpersonal contexts", and featured three presentations.

The Affective Injustice of Therapy-Speak by Carme Isern-Mas and Manuel Almagro (University of Balearic Islands)

Carme Isern-Mas's presentation

When we break up with people we tend to use therapy-speak: this was highlighted in a viral tiktok video on how to to best tell a friend that we no longer want to hang out with them. Therapy-speak is weaponised to promote and perpetuate epistemic and affective forms of injustice.

What is therapy-speak? Therapy-speak is use of therapeutic language and concepts into everyday communication: "He's such a narcissistic!", "I need to set some boundaries." 

It can have advantages: it enables us to share some experiences that we might not have acknowledge before we had terms for them (think about the important notion of "post-partum depression"). 

But therapy-speak is also problematic because it exploits the epistemic power of medical evidence and causes us to conflate descriptive and normative terms. Moreover, when the speaker is challenged, the fact that they used therapy-speak enables them to say that their view is not just one view on the matter, which can be disputed, but the correct account of the situation. If someone does not share that account, then it must be because they do not understand the situation.

According to Carme, the use of therapy-speak illustrates three forms of affective injustice: affect-related testimonial injustice, affective injustice or emotion policing, and emotional imperialism. Carme reviewed each form of injustice, using examples.

Epistemic Justice as Care in Trauma-Sharing by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (University of Birmingham)

Kathleen Murphy-Hollies's presentation

There are situations where we do not believe what people tell us and yet we feel bad about dismissing their reports. For instance, when people recall traumatic experiences and they have disorganised memories; or when a friend tells us about a painful break up and does get all the details of the failed relationship right; what can we do?

In those cases when a person makes a statement we do not believe, two credibility assessments are needed:

1. one concerns the propositional content conveyed by the statement; and

2. the other concerns the perspective of the person making that statement.

In agential accounts of self-knowledge, the agential capacity to make up our own mind is central. This is what makes self-knowledge special, the capacity to regulate our behaviour, not necessarily the capacity to introspect accurately. If our claims about ourselves do not get uptake, then we are robbed of an exchange with other people about those claims, and of the possibility to gain self-knowledge in this regulatory sense.

Even false claims about the self can embed know-how and dismissing them can be a case of epistemic injustice. Engagement with those claims is the best policy: so even if the propositional content of the person's statement is something we do not believe, we may still engage with the person's perspective and see where they are coming from when they make that statement.

Hermeneutical Crowding and Moving on from Non-Bereavement Loss by Pilar Lopez Cantero (Tilburg University)

Pilar Lopez Cantero in Q&A

What happens when we refuse to move on when love ends or we suffer from unrequited love? Couldn't we educate ourselves out of this sort of self-victimisation? Are we just irrational? Building on work on narrative identity theory, Pilar Lopez Cantero argues that we experience a lack of narrative competence. 

We have story making capacities that we use to interpret the world and in particular the events that happen to us, and we can be better or worse at exercising those capacities. Such capacities include:

1. multiperspectivalism 
2. diachronic projection 
3. unification 

In a break up, those capacities do not work so well. We fail at multiperspectivalism because we can only take the perspective of the sufferer. We fail at diachronic projection because we can't look to the future. We fail at unification because we can't see the good things that happen to us, only the bad ones.

So the solution seems to be that we need to foster our narrative competence. But once the break up happens, we still see it the end of love as being a tragedy. This situation can be better understood via the notion of hermeneutical crowding. 

There are a number of cultural narratives that crowd out an alternative narrative: "there is only one love", "the end of love is a failure", "divorce is a disaster"... these prevent us from telling ourselves a different story about the break up.

For Pilar, we have a duty to foster narrative competence before break ups occur, and learn to recognise our narrative incompetence in everyday life to prevent feeling like a victim when a crisis occurs.