Emotions are adaptive

     “Many doctors have difficulty handling their own emotions — sorrow, guilt, identification, and feeling a failure are just part of the range of emotions reported. There is little evidence that these difficulties get easier as doctors become more experienced.
     Doctors are unaware that a failure to disclose information honestly to patients might be an attempt to protect their own emotional survival as much as to help protect the patient.”
     Fallowfield L, Jenkins V. Communicating sad, bad, and difficult news in medicine. Lancet 2004; 363(9405): 312-9.

     Research shows that “some emotions … will be painful and unpleasant but will promote healing. This makes it impossible to separate positive and negative emotions as if they were healthy and unhealthy, respectively. Assuming that unpleasant or negative emotion is unhealthy overlooks the primary function of emotions as being adaptive. … none of the affective-meaning states are inherently pathogenic. ... getting stuck or persistently ‘repeating’ any one of these components will cause emotional disorder … (Whereas) a healthy self-organizing trajectory reaches its completion as a meaningful, emotionally differentiated, and integrative experience. … it may begin as a sense of intense, poorly regulated, and ill-defined global malaise.”
     Pascual-Leone A, Greenberg LS. Emotional processing in experiential therapy: Why 'the only way out is through.' Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 2007; 75(6): 875-887.

     Suffering begins with a perceived threat of destruction and ends either when the threat has passed, or a sense of integrity is otherwise restored.
     Cassell EJ. The nature of suffering and the goals of medicine. N Engl J Med 1982; 306(11): 639-45.

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