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This post is a review of Hard Feelings: Finding the Wisdom in Our Darkest Emotions. By Daniel Smith. Simon & Schuster. 227 pp.$28.

When he has been beset by “unruly and offensive emotions,” Daniel Smith acknowledges, he has looked for only one thing: “a way out,” a “vacuum to clear away the debris, and some help.” But he now realizes that “no emotion is inherently bad.”

In Hard Feelings, Smith (a psychotherapist and author of Monkey Mind and Muses, Madmen and Prophets) draws on works of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, literature, art, and, most of all, his personal experiences, to examine six dark emotions: annoyance, shame, envy, boredom, regret, and despair. To vilify or reject these emotions, he argues, is not only futile, but “a kind of psychological abuse.”

Especially when “emotional regimes (ethnic, national or denominational cultures) and “emotional communities” (families, college friends) have codes governing how emotions should – or should not – be expressed. Moreover, emotions contain essential information we can’t get elsewhere “about our vulnerability, furtive desires, hidden assumptions, and half-remembered experiences.”

Smith makes good use of social science research. In Thinking Fast and Slow, he notes, Daniel Kahneman found that people regret an action they took much more than their decision not to act. But as time passes, roads not taken generate a deeper ache. The more people use social media, we also learn, the more envious and sad they become.

Nonetheless, Hard Feelings is most compelling – and moving – when Smith describes his emotions, candidly, and with self-deprecating humor. Although audiences tend not to sympathize with Mr. Wilson, “the patron saint of annoyance,” who just wants Dennis the Menace to leave him alone so he can read his morning newspaper, Smith asks, “Really, while we’re at it, why don’t Dennis’ parents keep the little shit on a tighter leash?” The prevalence of annoyance in families, he adds, “is almost a physical law,” as husbands neglect to turn down thermostats at night, and wives never remove their hair from the shower drain.

The care and feeding of a four-year-old is boring, Smith confesses: “Question after question after question.” Are penguins cold? Is tea hot? After Smith fills and refills sippy cups and toasts toast, he lies: “Daddy has to poop,” heads to the bathroom, reads half a paragraph in the newspaper, plays a word game he no longer likes, “flushes the toilet and runs the faucet, for verisimilitude.” In an imagined study of boredom measuring when people will self-administer electric shocks, he predicts that dads of four-year-olds will press the button in only 15 minutes.

Smith’s elucidation of the power and tenacity of dark emotions, it seems to me, is more persuasive than his claims about the “essential information” about assumptions, desires and vulnerabilities they can produce. Or than his assertion that “no emotion is inherently bad.”

Annoyance, Smith writes, “has a permanent seat at the table.” Smith vows to let it “do its compulsive thing,” admit it has a point, be bothered but “not bothered by being bothered.” Similarly, shame “is an inheritance not so easily shed. It is not shameful. It is just where we start.” Amid “the malignant innovations of consumer capitalism,” envy leaves us, “alas, alack,” armed only with eternal verities about “gratitude, contentment, and the dogged indefinite cultivation of the peaceful self…” As he wrote Hard Feelings, Smith felt his regrets “proliferate, clash, pile up, clamor, and overlap.” And Smith understands that at times, beneath the torment of despair is “a distant chance of return,” felt but seemingly out of reach, to which “a person might consign himself to Hell… to confirm, once and for all, the darkness, the certainty of it.” Smith did emerge from despair, it’s worth noting, but the emotion returns periodically.

What Is Emotion Regulation?

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Although in deference to the unique circumstances every human being faces, Hard Feelings ends without a one-size-fits-all template for dealing with dark emotions, Smith endorses a rather traditional approach, with a caveat that “it is impossible to follow it with any fidelity or confidence.” He warns against confidence in any prescription. After asking with humility, where is my “splinter of light?” he advises going wherever it leads, while expecting nothing and seeing “what you receive,” devising a plan of practical guidance and listening for an inner voice to whisper, “Nice try. Keep trying. Keep trying.”

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