Author's Replies

Replies to Gasdaglis, Tarver, Conway, and Fullarton

Mariana Alessandri 

University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA

Alessandri, Mariana. 2026. “Replies to Gasdaglis, Tarver, Conway, and Fullarton.”

 Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 8, no. 2: 48-56. https://doi.org/10.33497/2026.latesummer.6.

Abstract: I am grateful to the four commentators for taking time to read Night Vision with care, and for providing their insights in the form of thoughts, questions, and challenges. Themes in this response include shame, emotional work, compassion, scarcity, sharing pain as gift vs. burden, our nonideal world, ableism, love, and justification. There are countless other topics that merited a thorough response, such as distinguishing between types of light, eros, verticality vs. horizontality, the lessons of suffering, teaching and humility, and a deeper analysis of the cost of compassion. 

Keywords: mood, mental illness, light, dark, self-help, existentialism, toxic positivity 

Thank you for all of your thoughts and provocations and premonitions about where I am headed. Whatever I have miswritten I have recognized only in hindsight. I don’t think I have changed my views so much as focused on the important ones. This response represents what I was trying to say in the book and represents my “for now” thoughts. 

Night Vision is not trying to rehabilitate the dark moods so much as the people who live with them. I am in some danger of romanticizing dark moods—some people worry about this—but when we’ve gotten to talking, it becomes clear that I am not trying to go down the familiar path of self-help. In preparing for and writing this book, I have heard from people, mostly students, who would trash themselves on account of living with anxiety or depression. I had the feeling they were getting those disparaging thoughts from an ableist society that

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pressures us into being healthy. My editor and I went back and forth a lot on the book’s subtitle, because the common ones, given our zeitgeist, tended toward: “seeing our dark moods in a better light.” But it kept nagging at me: I wasn’t talking about appreciating our dark moods but about appreciating ourselves, not trashing ourselves on account of “doing it wrong” or “being weak,” or “succumbing” to dark moods. I was trying to see people who, like me, feel pressure to be happier and end up feeling worse. I—and I have heard from others too, who—feel better when they hear “It’s not you, it’s them” than when they hear “Have you tried… broccoli…yoga…green tea?” I don’t think hurting people want to be cheered up so much as to feel seen.

I was heartened that many of you picked up on the incessant theme of shame throughout the book. While I was writing Night Vision, a different book specifically on shame constantly threatened to crawl in, which resulted in a lot of cutting and pasting into a new document that I called “The Second Arrow,” which was going to be the title of my second book. Now that the dust has settled on Night Vision I have been able to write this second book, on shame, which will hopefully be published in 2027. When it is published, I will know better how to talk about this topic that has had me clenched in its jaws for some time.

Yes, Catherine, I am saying that if we could feel those feelings without shame, we might be better off. In Night Vision I saw shame simply, as “feeling bad about feeling bad.” At this point I would describe the emotion more specifically as “mood shame” or “dark mood shame.” Some might say that this emotion would be better termed “guilt,” but there is too much disagreement about the difference between guilt and shame to address the matter here.  

I don’t have any illusions about being able to take away a person’s dark mood—anger, dolor, grief, depression, anxiety—and I don’t know much about how to lessen the intensity of those feelings except the ones we all know: therapy, medication, talking, creating, etc. But Night Vision didn’t set out to be a self-help book. It’s neither The 5 Steps to Overcome Your Anxiety nor The Gifts of Your Depression. I do think I can make a little headway on trying to get the monkey off the back of dark moods. Together, we can lessen the shame associated with them, not primarily by way of de-stigmatizing campaigns—telling people it’s normal to feel down—but by uncovering how society hurts us. We make things worse for each other when we say no instead of yes to a person’s dark mood. “Don’t say that!” “You’re beautiful!”   

As far as I understand it right now, shame may be an intensifier to dark moods (feeling bad about feeling bad) but it is an emotion in its own right when it comes to other categories: race, gender, body, sexuality, language. Fat shame, for example, I think of as feeling seen in a lousy way and wanting to hide. The person being fat-shamed may not have felt bad before, but is made to feel shame when someone moos at them.

So, is it shame that makes the mood debilitating, or is the mood debilitating already? I think that depends on the sufferer and the mood. Depression is most famous for being debilitating, but so can anxiety be, or grief, or even anger and sadness. So, I don’t think it’s shame’s fault that a given mood is debilitating, but it certainly makes the experience worse. Students have told me that their depression deepens when their parents ask what they have to be depressed about. Emotional illiteracy does damage. Take grief: I think there are experiences of grief that could be called valuable and difficult by a certain person in a certain situation at a certain time, but it becomes debilitating when their loved ones ghost them or tell them to get over it or insist that they spend more time

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crying. There are many ways to make dark moods worse, including Erin’s experience of being told how “strong” she is from the Edward Scissorhands’ in her life.

The premise of my book is that, if our society practiced night vision, that is, if we could become more emotionally literate, or agile (to use Susan David’s term), or more emotionally comfortable, less anemic, etc. then I think we would also see less depression, anxiety, etc. So, while I don’t think of shame as the anti-king Midas, turning all gold into trash, I do think that shame adds insult to injury. And if we can adjust the shame, in the best of cases it will also adjust the mood. But I am not primarily trying to relieve the mood, just the shame. A line that I repeat from time to time in promoting the book is: “I don’t pretend that I can make you feel better but I do think I can show you what’s making you feel worse.” 

On Katherine’s question of emotional work: No doubt that emotional work is work, and no doubt that historically this work has been left to women. It seems to me to be the case that we get to say no to whomever we choose, whether it’s to a second cousin we met once but who wants us to move into their cave, or a child or spouse or parent. Sometimes we don’t have the ability or desire to do this work. Another issue I do not understand is why the reoriented efforts I am suggesting would fall more to women than to men, since I am not suggesting that anyone do more work. In Night Vision I am talking to the reader who already has decided to put in emotional work, but who finds that their efforts are not working. Take Jody’s husband: he is attempting to provide emotional support to Jody based on the old idea that our job is to cheer one another up. His way is neither making Jody feel better nor helping her feel seen, so I suggest that he just switch tactics. I’ve heard from readers who feel like Jody’s husband, and it’s occurred to them upon reading this chapter that they are going about their compassion in an unproductive and mutually unsatisfying way.

On the other hand, I think the emotional work I am proposing is sometimes easier than what people think of as love’s obligations. A lot of the “work” in emotional work comes down to feeling like it’s our job to make the person we love feel better. I am suggesting that we let down the burden of having to cheer each other up, and replace it with accompaniment, sans wisdom and advice but maybe filled with pizza and music. In some ways, the job of “consolation” or accompaniment becomes easier. You can always choose not to sit with someone, but we’re talking about a person who already feels compelled, for reasons outside of my book, to care for their suffering soul. In truth I don’t know how to account for a fair distribution of emotional  work, nor how to support it economically. Since I am not prescribing more work, just different work, the problems that exist in the distribution of emotion work are still there. I haven’t attempted to resolve them in this book, nor would I know how to. 

Many of us have been raised on the belief that sharing our pain is a burden. We feel bad telling people we are not doing well. We don’t want to make them feel bad. But it’s based on the belief that we are giving them a job: to cheer us up. But love ought not be so transactional. Whoever shares their pain is opening a door, they are giving us a chance to practice night vision. We can choose to enter or turn around, and we have all probably done both. The request implicit in the sharing of pain is not “please fix me” but “please see me.”

Back to the original question about emotional work: I don’t think I am “calling for us all to do more of this work” but rather to try changing the way we do this work. Jody’s husband would have benefited from night vision and so would Jody. What’s the alternative? To walk away. Yes, he could have. If we frame what he

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originally did as rejecting Jody’s offer for closeness, he may have a right to do so but won’t likely feel satisfied with that choice.

Erin’s friends in Boston could have chosen not to open their homes and Zoom rooms to her. That’s an option. But if you want love, sharing pain just seems to be part of the deal. Aristotle’s “pleasure friendships” are built solely on pleasure and dissolve when the going gets tough, but virtuous friendships are built also on pain. I can’t understand what it would look like, in a virtuous relationship, to “call for the fair distribution and compensation of doing emotional work” unless that just means reciprocity. If I listen to a friend who never fills me up or asks about my pain, etc. then I will not maintain that friendship. I agree that boundaries are in order, and that asymmetrical friendships should be reconsidered.

Katherine—your point about people of color and “feeling rules” (as Arlie Hochschild calls them)—I agree. It’s this nonideal society we’re living in. We are trying to figure out the best way to live in it. You are right that “people of color must suppress expressions of negative emotions in the public domain” and also that the costs of sharing pain with others are sometimes too high. But what’s the alternative: to go on with emotional illiteracy? To go on ghosting one another because we can’t think of the right words? I’m going for gold: I want to change society. Those asymmetrical risks are at our dinner table too. Emotional intelligence is aptly named—it’s learned and learnable. We can start small instead of suggesting that the scaled version of it won’t work or has too many problems.

I wasn’t really prescribing more night vision in workplaces, though it might be helpful there too. I once was asked to speak to customer service providers! I suggested that they might get a better response from angry customers if they cut the platitudes out. They brought up the good point that listening takes more time than ignoring people. But I think a lot of what I am saying actually makes less work, along the lines of “work smarter, not harder.” Some of those people wouldn’t rant half as much if we spoke to them as real human beings. If we can accept as a starting point that suffering people want to be seen, not fixed, then I think we can change our society little by little.

Katherine, I want to question the basic statement that “the ways we take up, assess, and respond to the pain of someone like Elliot Rodger should be quite different from the ways we take up the pain expressed by those grieving the loss of loved ones who were his victims.” I pause here to trepidatiously ask “why?” I don’t think that acknowledging someone’s anger means condoning it. I think I’m with Mister Rogers here, who said (after his mentor Dr. Margaret McFarland) “What’s mentionable is manageable.”[1] I might go as far as to say that rejecting certain angers (not hatred—I think Audre Lorde’s distinction is great) is a recipe for escalation. Take Jody’s husband as a misogynist: I still think we get further by saying “yes” instead of “no” – trying to listen to someone who is trying to communicate verbally.  “You shouldn’t feel that way” doesn’t go down well; the person just feels more misunderstood. If Jody wants to stay married to a misogynist, then listening to his anger would be one good way to go—probably more effective than not listening (again I wonder, “what are the options?”). As you said, we are living in a non-ideal world, so neither option is ideal. Ideally people would not get mad about things we don’t think merit anger. But I am sure they think we get angry about things that don’t merit anger. In both cases, we are trying to deal with what we actually have. To write the husband off—if we love him and are interested in keeping the relationship alive—is to say that he is irredeemable and unworthy of compassion. “You

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shouldn’t be angry” sounds to my ears now as pointless as “you shouldn’t be sad.” Feelings aren’t what cause destruction, but negation of feelings can lead to terrible consequences.

Here is an odd example that might work: the other night my 12-year-old son was very sad that he never gets what he wants. He admitted that sometimes he gets what he does not want, but he couldn’t think of the last thing he asked for and got. Now, as my blood boiled I thought of all of the things he has received in the past few months alone. I know for a fact that his story is flawed. I also know that a normal reaction to a spoiled brat, mistaken kid would be to “correct the score.” “Change your narrative” I might say if I were less critical of the cultural zeitgeist. I considered trying with him the work of Byron Katie by asking: “Is it true?” But instead, I just sat there, knowing that those rational responses would alienate him further. So instead I said: it sounds like this is deeper. The more I sat with him, the more I realized he was expressing to me a kind of need to feel special, loved, singled out and appreciated. It wasn’t about facts but about feeling. I hugged him and didn’t piss him off and eventually said goodnight. If I had gotten into whether his feeling was justified or not, I wouldn’t have seen him. In general, I am not interested in talking about feelings as having to be justified. This logic leads my sister to ask: “How can I complain about my life when the Los Angeles fires are happening?” That kind of thinking only exists when compassion is seen as scarce. When there is enough to go around, we loosen up on “justified.” We don’t need to prove that we have good cause to weep or wail. We are worthy of compassion even if we never get it.  

Katherine writes: “Being ill is not a reason to blame, devalue, or treat a person as broken.” I like this. This is why I don’t want to call “mentally ill” people “broken,” and if a person doesn’t want to identify as mentally ill, I don’t think they need to. What is the best metaphor here? My reaction is similar to when I hear people talk about “imperfect,” which Daniel touched on. If something is broken, then we should ask “a broken version of what?” But what’s a broken or imperfect version of human? We can be wounded, but wounded seems more in line with what the range of possibilities a human being can be. A person without a foot is neither imperfect nor broken. They are a way of being a human. My deaf friend is another way of being a human. It’s only in the world of comparison to a non-existent ideal (“normal”? “healthy”? “whole”?) that we start using the word “broken.” I believe people can be ill, but it’s extremely difficult to talk about illness without sliding into brokenness.

Catherine: I worried about using too much vision language, a la ableism, but I thought I had covered it by writing something about “feeling” or “knowing” etc. “Seeing” is meant to be a metaphor for understanding, connecting, touching, knowing, intuiting, reading, etc. If it still leans too heavily on the metaphor, it’s my fault.  

I’ll leave the redemptive suffering question for someone else. I don’t feel comfortable talking about suffering in those terms, and I don’t need to because so many authors already do. I think the “lessons learned” gets under people’s skin, so whether grief can have redemptive qualities just depends entirely on the person, their network, their experience, their stage in life, etc. Mostly I want to know why it’s important to talk about it in those terms. What’s at stake here?

I am grateful for Daniel’s writing. Some terms of phrase—“gleeful shame throwers”,  “aggressively vertical articulation” and the Grand Inquisitor’s “undersized hands” made me close my eyes. I also thank Daniel for bringing up eros. I hadn’t thought about night vision allowing us to reclaim and activate eros. I had long worried about the question: How is this philosophy? And now I have a good answer: a philosopher’s job is to “[Turn]

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their souls, [tweak] their beliefs, and [activate] their eros.” The moon is not a gleeful shame thrower. The moon has a “steady, welcoming gaze,” and it’s a “silent, judgment-free witness.” I also appreciated the reminder that Eeyore was not shamed in the Hundred-Acre wood; his friends accepted each little animal as they were.

Here's what I would like to focus on from Daniel’s remarks. He writes: “I hesitate to blame those victims whom I have already acknowledged as burdened by the surplus suffering of shame, but what other options are available to us?” In other words, why do we let it happen to us? Why do we let the Light Brigade push us down with the surplus suffering of shame? I don’t think the question is out of line, like “Why did you let yourself be molested?”, but it shares the trait of pointing us in the wrong direction. I once saw a billboard advising people on how to not get their car broken into (hide your laptop, lock the doors, etc.) This orientation assumes a fixed world. It also subtly suggests that the outcome could have been otherwise. This leads me to think that society is teaching us that we can be invincible if we work hard enough at it, that we can keep what Erving Goffman calls “the fingertips of society” out of our psyches.[2] We could just not let society shame us. But by focusing on what the victims of the Light Brigade could have protected themselves, we are in danger of letting the Light Brigade function as usual. I guess I think the answer is that the Stoics were wrong about our ability to withstand the storm of life. We aren’t Jesus, calmly sleeping upon turbulent waters. And when those waters turn out to be gleeful shame throwers, even less do we individually have the power to resist it. It’s like asking “why do you let yourself be influenced by social media?” which is different from “why don’t you just look away?” That second question is easier to answer: because we belong to society. But if Epictetus’ question was a rendition of “why do you let yourself be insulted?” my answer has to be something like: because I want to remain a tenderhearted human being.[3] Our goal is not impermeability, and to the extent that we fortify ourselves against each other, we fortify ourselves against ourselves. Some amount of armor is necessary, clearly, but good luck, because there is no way around sociality. We all have our callouses. But to aim to become a fully calloused human is to lose something of what makes life worth living. Why do we let ourselves get shamed? Because that road, where you encounter others, is the same road you take to get to human connection. I am with Sartre on this: humans are risky and they have power to hurt us. Not because we are weak, but because we are tender.

Erin: Thank you for this exposition of human tenderness. It encompasses all the parts: the risk, the reward, the insult. Yours is not a “lessons learned from grief” story. It simply highlights the parts that occur in this dark mood: the agony and the tenderness. Both can be found, but I am not trying to provide a theodicy, meaning, the tenderness is not meant to justify the presence of agony. I could never provide a theodicy because I don’t need to know why we suffer. My starting point is simply that we suffer. We don’t need to chase it or bring it on. We trembling kittens just want to know what to do when it comes. Erin did the dishes and joined a support group. She read about grief and loss and radical acceptance. I’m guessing that she stopped asking why, but that’s not even a requirement.

Erin, I do think that philosophy can save us, by seeing us and telling our story. I think philosophy saves us by saying “this too, is human” compared to self-help’s “have you tried hot yoga?” Philosophy is like the Little Prince who “never let go of a question,” even when the answers shift. This is why, Daniel, I don’t think my stories are the best or the only ones. But they have given me life and create hope in me—not for a sunnier disposition but to bring more people into the lunar orbit, or maybe to recognize that so many of us are already here.

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I want to end with the central question of the film Shadowlands, about the life of C.S. Lewis: “Why love if losing hurts so much?” I guess I don’t think we have much of a choice in this. We snuggle up to each other for warmth. We philosophers roughhouse and sometimes spit. We take to our corners and start again another day. Overall, we are social beings who are told we are rugged individuals, capable of walling ourselves off from pain and rewarded if we “do it by all myself.” But I just don’t think we have much choice in the matter. I guess I don’t think it’s a conscious decision made by the “weak” to care about one another. I would, however, like the world to give us some tools, in the form of language and such, to take our own side when the walls fall down. 

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Notes

[1] Rogers, Fred. 1994. You are Special. New York: Viking Adult, p. 115.

[2] Goffman, Erving. 1963 Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.  New York: Simon and Schuster, p. 53.

[3] Epictetus said “Remember that the person who taunts or hits you does not insult you, but your opinion about these things as being insulting does,” which amounts to the same as asking the question “why do you let yourself be insulted?”  Epictetus. 1983. The Handbook (The Encheiridion). Translated by Nicolas White. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Ch. 20.

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References

1. Alessandri, Mariana. 2023. Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv31nzm7c 

2. Attenborough, Richard et al. 1993. Shadowlands. United Kingdom: Mill Creek Entertainment.

3. Burton, Tim. 1990. Edward Scissorhands. United States: Twentieth Century Fox.

4. David, Susan. 2016. Emotional Agility. Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. New York, NY: Avery.

5. Hochschild, Arlie. 2012. Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

6. Lorde, Audre. 2020. "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism." In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Edited by Patricia Hill Collins, pp. 127-138. 3rd ed. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

7. Katie, Byron, 2021. Loving What Is, Revised Edition: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life; The Revolutionary Process Called "The Work". New York, NY: Harmony. 

8. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.  New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

9. Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1943) 2003. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Estella Barnes. 2nd ed. Routledge Classics. London, England: Routledge.

10. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. (1943) 2018. The Little Prince. Translated by Irene Testot-Ferry. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth.

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Mariana Alessandri © 2026

Author email: mariana[dot]alessandri[at]utrgv[dot]edu