Should we keep a stiff upper lip?

The Shrink

The last thing one would expect is for a therapist to recommend a stiff upper lip. The label has become accusatory, suggesting that someone is rigid and buttoned-up. But it didn’t always have such a derogatory meaning. Nowadays we place a much higher value on emotional expression than on the ability to control our feelings.

One reason for this is a Freudian assumption that has seeped into our thinking. In Freud’s “hydraulic” model, emotions have to be expressed. If you bottle them up, untold ills will follow. So we’ve come to equate control with repression – and we all know that repression is not healthy. But we go wrong when we assume that any kind of control is therefore harmful.

In fact, we need to avoid two extremes. If we demand too much emotional control, we may miss out on precious life experiences for fear of being overwhelmed by strong feelings. But too little control means being unable to handle the times when acting on our fear or anger or desire would not be conducive to a good life.

Fortunately we don’t have to choose between turning ourselves into Spock-like creatures and being pushed around by our emotions all the time. It is possible to feel deeply and manage our feelings when necessary. In order to do this we need to reclaim the virtue of appropriate self-control.

The key is in the word “appropriate”. If we want to live a rich life, it is important to be able to feel. But we also have to be aware that our emotions may be inappropriate or excessive. We should not deny their existence, but learn to work out when they are pointing us to the truth and when they are telling us lies.

This matters, because these issues show up all the time in life. We often find ourselves grappling with troubling emotions such as fear, anger, jealousy, even the intoxication of love. Sometimes we should trust these feelings, sometimes it’s better to question them, and sometimes we need to control them. Our challenge is to tell the difference and act accordingly.

The Sage

Seventeen years ago, Graham Miles suffered a brain-stem stroke which left all but his eyes completely paralysed. “I was determined to get some feeling back in my body,” he recalls. “I concentrated on my big toe. I closed my eyes and willed it to move. One day, after about three or four months, it flickered.” This Herculean effort did not allow for any dwelling on his misfortune.

“I had a major problem and I knew I had to deal with it and that was my main focus.”

Miles’s story shows that the now-derided stiff upper lip still has its uses. But ethics, not pragmatism, is the main reason to admire it. It is not incidental that none of the world’s great moral philosophies has much to say about expressing how you feel. Rather, they ask us to focus on how other people feel, on what our duties are, and on what actions would bring about the best situation for as many people as possible. It is hard to consider these questions clearly when you’re a bawling heap in the corner. To dismiss the stiff upper lip is therefore to prioritise how we should feel over what we should do. This is the victory of narcissism over morality.

You only need to think about when a stiff upper lip is most admired to recognise that it can be a moral virtue, not an emotional failure. We admire people who control their feelings in order to minimise the extent to which others are forced to share their suffering. Such self-sacrifice is based on the truth that a problem shared is often just a problem doubled.

We also admire people who plough on in difficult circumstances doing good work, rather than allowing their own psychic pain to stop them in their tracks.

Emotion is important to morality, of course. Without compassion and empathy, it is hard to imagine anyone being motivated to help others.

But there is a difference between recognising the proper place of emotions and simply becoming slaves to them. The moral life is warm-blooded, but it is not emotionally incontinent.

The Shrink & The Sage live together in south-west England. Stephen Grosz returns in two weeks