Emotional Health

I recently spent several days with my daughter, driving from Provo, Utah to Boston. Somewhere in Wyoming we began discussing what it means to be emotionally healthy. This discussion continued for several hours over the next 2 days. We explored questions of what are human emotions, what does it mean to be emotionally healthy, is there a difference between emotions and responses to emotions, and so forth. At one point in the discussion we even tried to list all of the human emotions we could think of. We considered whether we could group them by categories. We discussed what might be the opposite of charity. We tried to come to a conclusion as to what it means to be emotionally healthy.

Somewhere in Iowa or Wisconsin I finally came to the conclusion that emotional health consists of three things:

1. The ability to feel the full range of human emotions
2. The ability to acknowledge/express those emotions
3. The ability to act appropriately in response to those emotions.

The important word in #3 is "appropriately".

Perhaps my definition is elementary. So far, I have found it to be a useful working definition.

In passing (and unrelated), I have begun to wonder if charity isn't the most important and fundamental emotion. If the spectrum of emotional health were a sphere, then charity would be at one pole, and whatever is the opposite of charity would be at the other. Every other emotion would be found somewhere on a longitudinal line between charity and its opposite. Thus, the emotional spectrum would not be a line -- charity at one end and its opposite at the other -- but a sphere, with all human emotions somehow being tied into or being opposite charity. Certainly gratitude would likely be the emotion closest to charity in every direction.