Expanding the Emotional Container
Here, on the brink of chaos
Here, on the brink of chaos, we need to reclaim and remember other types of relationships, other layers of the psyche, which are usually numb and eroded. Because of this numbness and amnesia, we easily and constantly dissociate, running away from grief and the pain of the world. We close ourselves off instead of venturing out to feel as if the whole world matters.
The expression Expanding the Emotional Container refers to the growth and co-regulation of emotional and sensory capacities, expanding affective resources to welcome Life in all its beauty, paradoxes, complexity, and violence. To welcome the end of the world.
The Expansion of the Emotional Container, individually and collectively, helps to broaden the possibilities of acceptance in the tension and confrontation with disorientating dilemmas in the encounter with dissonances that call into question how we think the world works. It’s positioned as an ecological substratum, just as in mourning and decomposing superficial beliefs.
Regenerative Inquiry
As Vanessa Andreotti from the GTDF collective says: "We will have to expand our neurobiological capacities before we can even begin to imagine, desire and hope for something different."
According to the articulation of Regenerative Inquiry, "a teaching/learning design methodology that aims to expand cognitive frames of reference, raise affective/emotional thresholds and broaden the scope of relationship possibilities, relationship building and accountability", it is essential to improve our collective capacity for emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment and intergenerational responsibility. This is a non-prescriptive practice that, among other things, cultivates humility and emotional and relational intelligence, and creates resistance and resilience to the challenges of the polycrisis/metacrisis that we have to face together.
As referred above, Regenerative Inquiry is about expanding intellectual options beyond universalistic, Cartesian, anthropocentric patterns of reasoning (...); that, in terms of affection, it has to do with expanding our collective capacity to face, feel and process the difficult and painful aspects of reality, without feeling overwhelmed, immobilised or demanding quick fixes to be saved from discomfort. It relates to expanding the capacity to build relationships based on trust, reciprocity, consent and responsibility, embracing ambiguity, uncertainty, paradoxes and contradictions.
What if we had living space to feel and relate beyond our limited identity box?
Ecological Thinking
Here, I want to link Lorraine Code's seminal work on Ecological Thinking, as she says on page 20 of her book Ecological Thinking — The Politics of Epistemic Location: "(...) ecological thinking questions and strives to destabilise the self-assurances of Western capitalism and the epistemologies of domination that it sustains. However, ecological thinking is not unilinear (...), as it emerges from and addresses intertwined and sometimes contradictory issues (...)." Ecological Thinking is fundamental precisely because, like a vibrant ecology, it co-creates intricate networks of trust and is openly cooperative —it's not about us or exclusively for our benefit like individualistic thinking. Ecological Thinking is also not limited to thinking about projections or superficial ideations of ecology or the "environment".
In line with Code’s Ecological Thinking, we commit ourselves to participating in the co-creation, regeneration, and sustenance of viable habitats, "prepared to take on the burdens and blessings of place, identity, materiality and history, and to work with the local possibilities and limitations, found and created, of human cognitive-bodily lives (and beyond)."
According to Code, Ecological Thinking distances itself from the search for causal or transcendent principles and truths; here, we engage and move with the territory, in its vibrant networks of complex interdependence and circularity, in its shadows and paradoxes. This practice of "thinking with", sensorial and viscerally, politically and historically, assumes that "ecosystems —both metaphorical and literal— are as cruel as they are kind, as unpredictable and overwhelming as they are orderly and nurturing, as destructive (...) as they are co-operative and mutually sustaining." Ecological Thinking is not replacing one unified and unifying discourse with another. Ecological discourse is inherently and systemically paradoxical and unstable, and its strength is navigating complexity.
If we talk about co-regulation, we talk about Ecological Thinking, because the embodied being-in-the-world differs radically from the perfect form of autonomous man, whose assumption of mastery suppresses diversity in the name of instrumental simplicity.
Expanding the Emotional Container is an ecological, situated, incorporated and interdependent process. It requires a diverse, rooted, mature and responsible imagination. It takes a long and careful time before concluding, resisting premature and categorical closures.
But how do we deal with "expanding" in a culture of violent and synthetic expansion?
If words are spells, we must care for their living and multiple territories, cherishing their shadows, mists, and depths. In a normative culture that celebrates homogeneity, the expression Expand the Emotional Container can easily be misinterpreted, erasing its innate openness to diversity and co-participation. The expansion movement is shrouded in the cultural memory as conquest and domination, or with linear, infinite, transcendent growth and progress. The etymology of the verb expand comes from the Old French espandre "to spread out, extend, be poured out", and from the Latin expandere "to spread out, unfold, expand".
I confess that, in my imagination, which is limited by this cultural legacy, the image of the word expand appears to me as a tight blanket of Spandex, Lycra or elastane, a synthetic fibre known for its exceptional elasticity —a polyether-polyurea copolymer invented in 1958 by chemist Joseph Shivers. A kind of cocoon that grows, expands and widens.
However, this is not an image of biological elasticity, an essential property of connective tissues such as blood vessels, lungs, and skin, which gives bodies elasticity and resistance to stretching. Biological elasticity doesn't expand infinitely and artificially; it has its own limit.
What appears to me is an imagined cloak woven from plastic fibres, those popular synthetic materials that are cheap, easy to produce, durable, and wrinkle-resistant. Made from petroleum-based polymers, they are a form of plastic, a product of the technology of domination and progress. Non-biodegradable synthetic fabrics generate microplastic pollution, which ends up in rivers, lakes and oceans, posing a serious threat to marine organisms (and beyond), damaging soils and poisoning groundwater. The promise of these fibres is their powerful, synthetic elasticity, which expands but also squeezes and tightens as it tries to return to its original shape.
Clearly this is not an appropriate image for the sustained practices of Emotional Container Expansion.
The point is that these practices are not linear and are cyclically heavy, sinking and carrying. They are also practices of mourning and decomposition. So, the container can't expand indefinitely without sustenance, only to return to its original shape deformed. Nor can it have the impertinence not to decompose —a departure from the ecological principles of cyclicity, and therefore incapable of sustaining challenging, complex and multi-layered processes. On the other hand, we also have rigid plastic containers which, despite their enormous resistance (and in addition to creating the same ecological problems described above), do not expand and have a breaking point.
May we assume that the comfort of such synthetically durable materials gives us an illusion of control and stability that has never existed in a living world. A territory of the psyche, aseptic and sterile, which postpones and avoids ruptures at all costs, fleeing the pain of inevitable transformation. Leaving and breaking up are inevitably and viscerally part of the process.
Contrary to expectations of linear, pure and evolutionary processes (in a mistaken idea of the biological evolutionary process, which is much more dendritic, web-like and chaotic), the Expansion of the Emotional Container, woven with the threads of Regenerative Inquiry on the loom of Ecological Thinking, also opens up and expands through breakages and ruptures, just as a seed cracks its shell in order to take root and become a tree. Just as a moth tears the cocoon with its new wings.
As Tyson Yunkaporta says in his book, Right Story, Wrong Story: "we have to release the expectation of soft landings."
The Emotional Container Expansion is not about keeping ourselves numb and dormant, trapped in (exclusively) individual and exceptional development processes, without ever allowing the world to pour into us. It's not a place to remain privileged and innocently ignorant, asleep in our ideations of conquest and purity. It's an affective, visceral and collective welcome, full of cracks and flaws, decomposition and putrefaction, wrinkles and twists, which allows us to rescue ways of feeling and processing the difficulties and pains of the world, despite feeling overwhelmed, paralysed or demanding and imposing quick solutions to be saved from discomfort.
Collectively and responsibly, we sustain, weave and implicate ourselves in the diverse ecological complexity. May we bravely allow the necessary ruptures, as they are the emotional container to be matured and expanded. May we assume our valuable place in the ecology that we are, surrounds and crosses us, stepping out of our individualistic and anthropocentric box, maturing in responsibility and reciprocity.
What materials do you imagine as this affective container that expands but also breaks down cyclically?
Originally written in Portuguese: https://serpentedalua.com/expandir-o-contentor-emocional/