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We move into the Ostrich Effect by averting our gaze from what we know is there but would rather not see. Consider Andy, who feels let down by his business partner, Mike, amidst an engagement with an important client. There is a moment in which Andy is flooded with anger, frustration and sadness about the partnership. He is immediately anxious, not wanting to disturb his life by pursuing his realization. He averts his gaze. He tells himself that he is just tired, upset about something else, and that no partnership is perfect. Andy decides to forget about it. He surfs the internet. Soon enough, absorbed in something else, he feels better. The moment passes.
But, indeed, the moment has not truly passed. It has simply been looked away from. Yes, time has passed, and the immediate situation is no longer as it was. Andy works on other cases, lunches with clients, enjoys a baseball game. But the moment lives on within him. It does so because of a crucial dynamic: Human emotions do not go away of their own accord.
Sigmund Freud has been criticized for much but he was right about this: suppressed experiences, emotions and anxieties do not simply disappear. Emotions triggered in difficult moments demand expression. When people talk directly with others about what they feel in the moment, emotions dissipate. They may wreak havoc like a particularly unruly visitor, but they leave. People are then able to look and deal with their situations dispassionately. When people avert their gazes, though, emotions remain even as they are pushed down and away from conscious awareness. The emotions take up residence; the demanding guests move in indefinitely. At that point, deeply seated emotions grip us; they have us, rather than the other way around. Loosening their grip requires us to give voice to what we truly feel and think, to others who listen to and validate our experiences.
This is easier said than done. We avert our gazes and silence ourselves because, simply, we are too anxious about what might happen if we do otherwise. Expressing our emotions will put us at risks we seek to avoid. This is a tricky place in which to be, torn between competing dictates to speak and not speak. We get caught between the proverbial rock and the hard place. So what do we do? We unconsciously create compelling distractions that let us safely express emotions that demand expression. This solution leads us deeper into the Ostrich Effect.
Consider Andy. A few days after the moment in which he feels betrayed by Mike, he attends a partnership meeting. Mike is joking around with the other partners, delaying the agenda. Andy snaps, telling him to grow up and act responsibly. Now, we all know that relationships involve periods of disagreement and hurt. But something else is going on here. There is simply too much emotion. Andy moves quickly from annoyance to fury, and then to sadness. Not coincidentally, these are precisely the emotions that he had felt days earlier, which had been insisting upon expression ever since that moment. Andy is too anxious to do so in a way that would help Mike understand what he is really angry and sad about. So he unconsciously finds another arena that makes him less anxious. He attacks Mike about how seriously he takes the role of partner in the firm. Andy gets to feel and show what he had felt earlier without risking real conversations about the nature of his relationship with Mike, his own identity, and other anxiety-provoking issues.
Compelling distractions let people express emotions triggered in painful situations. Ironically, the emotions themselves do not actually dissipate. They are vented, like steam from roiling water that relieves building pressure but does not empty out the water itself. The venting is crucial: a tea kettle at full boil without a release valve would ultimately explode. Vented emotions function similarly. They are spent in the moment, abating their pressure. But the roiling emotions beneath do not go away. This can only fully occur when people re-connect their emotions to the moments in which they were triggered, and in exploring those moments, express the emotions usefully. Absent this the emotions remain, somewhere between simmering and full boil. They continue to be imported into other situations, which get distorted and enlarged.
The Ostrich Effect thus involves people trying to get rid of emotions but not so directly that they have to get near what made them anxious enough to avert their gazes earlier. So they bootleg the emotions into other situations. Their reactions are misshapen, not really fitting the dimensions of the situations taken in their own terms. The emotions that they express are real; they are just divorced from the situations that released them. They might feel good momentarily, the pressure relieved. But the emotions remain lodged within them, building pressure and seeking release. They drive the ongoing action of the Ostrich Effect.
