I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
Last Friday, I held a party at my house after my daughter’s master’s degree graduation ceremony. My daughter’s father (my ex-husband) attended. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, does it? Many divorced parents join together for celebrations involving their children. My parents, divorced for almost three decades, have long attended holiday celebrations involving their joint kids and grandkids together. But this was the first time in the almost fourteen years since our divorce that my ex attended a family event I had at my house.
My emotional reactions to this were surprising to me, and new. I felt happy for my children, but also happy for myself. I was happy for my three children, especially the graduate, that their dad showed up. And for myself: it has been hard to feel shunned for so long.
It made me think about all the emotional tumult I’ve been through in the aftermath of the divorce.
Two kinds of emotional reactions
In her most recent newsletter article, Going from one form to another, Jessica Dore shared a link to Kym Maclaren’s academic article Emotional clichés and authentic passions: A phenomenological revision of a cognitive theory of emotion.
Maclaren distinguishes between emotional clichés — reactions that are well-practiced and not newly created for a particular situation — vs authentic passions — reactions that represent creation of new meaning.
Maclaren bases this distinction between two types of emotional reaction in a conceptual framework from Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961), a French phenomenological philosopher working under the influence of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heideggger.
Maclaren writes:
In his analysis of language and expression, Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between first- and second-order speech, or in other words authentic speech and already constituted, sedimented speech. Second-order speech is speech that relies upon the familiar, already established meanings of words; it expresses thoughts previously constituted by ourselves and others and makes sense of the world in familiar, well-worn ways. This is the realm of clichés or what Heidegger calls “they-speak.” First-order or authentic speech, on the other hand, seeks to articulate a thought not yet constituted, and draws upon the sedimented meanings of words in such a way as to break them, transform them, find new meaning in them and thereby “inaugurate” as Merleau-Ponty says a new dimension of experience, a new way of seeing. This is poetic language, language that gives us “new organs” and reveals within the world dimensions previously unknown.
She continues, applying this idea to emotions:
A similar distinction can be drawn, I contend, between first and second order emotions—between authentic passions and emotional clichés. Emotional clichés are, I propose, emotional responses that draw upon already familiar, established routes for making sense of things, and that reinstitute familiar ways of being. Authentic passions, on the other hand, involve the realization of unforeseen meanings within the world and new ways of becoming oneself.
Maclaren cites grief over the loss of a person central to one’s world as an occasion for the development of new meaning rather than a replaying of already-learned emotional pathways:
In this kind of grief, we can find not reiterations and recapitulations of old, sedimented meanings and ways of seeing, but rather a genuine openness and vulnerability. The bereaved is not simply asking an isolated question; his very life has become a question.
For this question to be answered, for grief to be genuinely transformed and overcome, something creative must occur. The bereaved must become someone new, and live in a transformed world. He must cultivate a new form of life in which he might live meaningfully without either pretending that his beloved is still here, or leaving her entirely behind.
expression drives transformation
The process of developing authentic emotional meaning requires expression, proposes Maclaren. “The experience that exists prior to expression is, then, one in which we are not yet in possession of its meaning,” Maclaren writes. It is expression that brings about transformation:
Expression is liberating because it transforms the very structure of this experience: it involves a circumscribing of what it is we are experiencing, and thereby a gradual distinction of ourselves from the object of our experience. It turns our experience from something that moved and overwhelmed us, that opppressed us by putting us into question, into something that is “for us” or owned.
Grief, like I felt over my divorce, can drive new ways of being, but involves first a breakdown of understanding who one is and what one should do:
Such a passion is not merely a “judgment,” a construal, an endorsement of habitual meanings offered up by a situation. It consists rather in a breakdown of our habitual negotiation of the world. The bereaved experienced a crumbling of his world; and as his world fell apart, so too did his sense of how to live, and who he is. Where there was once breakfast time, for instance, there is now only confusion, indeterminacy, a gaping openness. In grief like this, things within one’s perceptual field no longer clearly call to one to do this or to say that; and as a result, it is no longer clear who one is to be. This is what it means, I propose, to be put fundamentally into question, to live as a question, and thus to experience an existential passion. It is to be a subjectivity or an experiencing in which subject and object are not yet fully realized, in which how things mean and who one is are still in flux; it is to be an experiencing which calls not for a mere endorsement of familiar meanings, but for self-overcoming, for some creative form of expression in which a new grasp on the world is realized—however provisionally—and one newly “becomes oneself” (at least until the next breakdown of meaning).
This describes very well what I experienced after my divorce. While I felt sometimes compelled to accept the meanings and expected emotional reactions that my society offered to me — the meaning that I was flawed and I had failed, the prescribed reaction that I should feel shame (and I did, and still do) — I also felt like there was room for meaning making and for deciding myself what meanings and reactions I would express.
On Friday, my children felt that the attendance of their father was only about them, and in many senses it was. My ex would never attend a social event at my house except for it’s being about one or more of his children. But it was also about me, because the reason he hadn’t attended past such events was because of my presence and the presence of my parents. His willingness to attend might have said something about his moving beyond his own past reactions and meanings. And in that way, it felt like some sort of release. For me.
forced to make new meaning
There is a level of passivity to my creation of new meaning in response to my divorce, which I in some sense chose, but was also thrust onto me.
Maclaren writes:
Once we acknowledge authentic existential passions, I have proposed that we are also called upon to revise our understanding of subjectivity. The subject can no longer be understood as a purely self-determining agent who constitutes the meaningful world; the subject must rather be understood as achieved from out of a dispossession by the world, and in part by being moved by meaningful directions already at work within the world. Though the subject realizes itself, becomes itself, through assuming and further determining these meaningful inclinations operative within the sened world, the subject cannot be understood as wholly active. We must allow a fundamental dimension of passivity within subjectivity. We must allow that we are meaningfully moved by the world that we inhabit.
I must acknowledge also that my ex-husband experienced the grief of the divorce as thrust upon him, and acting upon him, and creating a setting in which he as well had to reconstruct meaning, transforming himself in the process.
Most recently, I have myself begun to take an affirming position relative to the divorce: it happened and I am glad of it — I choose it — because I am glad of the good, bad, and terrible I’ve experienced in this human life. I choose it and would choose it again and again.