“"Surprise, surprise!”

Brian Lynch

                     

 

Surprise, is an ignored emotion or feeling or more accurately an obscured emotion due to its nature, and what is that? It is that surprise is not so discrete as some emotions as it is followed immediately by some other emotion such as joy or terror. For many of us, we are particularly conditioned for one or the other, and most unfortunate for those people who have been conditioned to always or near always associate it with fear or terror. I will often hear people say “Oh I hate surprises.” This is probably due to having a history of what amounts to childhood abuse: a sibling or parent who would scare the hell out of them, as opposed to your father surprising you with a gift when he came home from work for no particular reason.

 
 
 
 One sense of painful surprise that has stuck with me since I have begun my study of basic emotion is the all too oft occurrence of the mother or today, the stay a home parent who will say, “Just wait until X comes home then you will see.” Well X does not come home until late when the kids are asleep and X prances into the bedroom and gets the kids out of bed for their punishment. The kids suffer “surprise” and terror. And at this point have no idea what is going on.
 
 For one thing, one attribute of surprise is that it “clears the circuits.” It wipes out everything that goes before it. Here the kids are in a deep sleep and are awakened, their memory banks are cleared and their Adrenalin starts pumping and they now can try and escape the intruder that came into the camp. There is no reason at all for them to be remembering that they were jumping on the sofa 10 hours previously and did not heed the pleas to stop.
 
 Surprise has much to do with trauma. But first, let me say that I want you to appreciate that pure surprise, I believe, is never pleasant. That is the initial jolt is a painful shock, it is only made worse or ameliorated by interest and or joy that might flow so the odds are weighted against coming out with a lifetime average of good experiences with surprises.
 
 But back to trauma; so logically when bad things happen surprise is likely to be involved and whether we are a “good” guy or a “bad” guy the emotion is almost impossible to control. Again, when it happens, and especially when we are a “good” guy when we are blindsided our memory banks are wiped clean, at least for the moment. This means that memory can and tends to be fragmented. Not repressed but fragmented and associated with fear-terror and shame. When we are small do we have power? Not likely, we therefore feel helpless. If we are subjugated to this trauma repeatedly we might turn to anything at hand to soothe ourselves sleep, food alcohol, incest, cutting. Each of these will bring on new experiences of surprise and new experiences of secondary feelings and some relief of interest and joy but of course, interest and joy will come at a very high price later on of shame and guilt.
 
 Much of sleep problems are due to childhood traumas such as those just described. A famous case is that of Michael Jackson. Michael was not shy about talking about his father terrifying him and his brothers at least once. One night in a dormitory arrangement when his father came in an open window dressed in a frightening costume. Michael seemed to be tracing his sleep problems to that incident. His father, of course, was, “teaching them a lesson.” A lesson that ended in his son’s death some fifty years later and a murder charge for Dr. Murray.
 
 How do we fix things? As always not easily done and too much to do justice here but it is but certainly not by ignoring things. It is essentially by reconstructing and bringing into consciousness the sequence of events, i.e. learning and then deconstructing what has been reconstructed so that we can have control over those feelings, and affects that are controlling us.
 
 So surprise at its core is a painful experience and its evolutionary role is essential to our survival. It is meant to clear the circuits so that we might forget entirely what was going on just before the event that is now taking place so that we can put our full attention to it. We are out gathering mushrooms in the jungle and a Bengali tiger catches our eye. No matter how good the treasure trove of mushrooms we want to clear our minds of dinner and focus on the tiger.
 
 As culture has become more sophisticated, unfortunately, so have the various ways feelings can become complicated. Surprise is primary for survival that then leads to joy.
 
 I want to thank Jim Duffy, psychologist, and Melvin Hill, therapist for much of my understanding of the above.