Total or no control: Two popular yet contradictory theories about whether we can change how we feel.

Summary: He just insulted you and you feel your blood pressure rise. For a minute, as your body floods with resentment, your chance of staying calm is slim. You take a deep breath. Turning away expressionless, you muster all the spiritual benevolence you can, and for once you don't counter-attack. You say something impressively forgiving and dignified. Do you mean it? Maybe not, but it works. He, braced for a fight, is thrown off balance, and suddenly you feel less threatened, safer in who you are and where you stand. Now, staying calm and forgiving in the encounter gets easier. Resisting that initial pull toward retaliation was hard. At first you were wobbly, but then it becomes effortless. From wobbly to stable--it's the ten-minute equivalent of learning to ride a bicycle. Scenarios like these are important to Cognitive Therapy. They demonstrate that your emotions aren't fixed facts; they're flexible. It's all in how you interpret your situation. Tell a different story and you'll automatically generate a different emotional response. Positive Psychology likewise advocates ways to limber up emotional response. It agrees with Cognitive Therapy; you can change your story to change your emotions. But you can also change your behavior to change your emotions. You can jump start emotions, fake it ‘til you make it, behave differently, and people will respond differently. If you play the calm one in a conflict, an opponent's response often makes it increasingly easy to continue to play the calm one. About this fluidity of interpretation and emotion, there has accumulated a bit of oversimplifying conventional wisdom: In any situation you have complete control and flexibility in how you respond. No matter what's going on, you can choose whether to be angry or calm, resentful or forgiving-it's all up to you. I'll call this the Total Control Theory of emotions. This theory usually comes bundled with an incriminating assumption that there's an obvious right way to be. If you have complete control over whether you're resentful or forgiving, and if forgiveness is the obvious right thing to feel, then, if you're resentful instead of forgiving, you've failed. I don't believe there is an obvious right way to feel. Sure, by word choice, one can give the false impression that there is, but there isn't. Should you be resentful (a negative sounding thing) or forgiving (a positive sounding thing) makes it sound obvious how you should feel. But if you reframe the same situation as a choice between upholding high standards (a positive sounding thing) and failing to respond to substandard behavior (a negative sounding thing) suddenly, it's not so obvious what is the right way to feel. Unlike the Positive Psychologists, I don't believe positivity is always the answer. If you want a thorough exploration of positivity's downside, try Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Still, we most often hear the "total control" theory of emotions accompanied by advocacy of a particular position: "Stop feeling X, and you can. It is within your power to do so." The Secret is another example. It argues for a supposedly appropriate positive attitude but it also assumes that you have a lot of choice about what you feel. Total Control Theory could also be called the jukebox theory of emotion. You get to pick the tune. And clearly, to some extent you do, or else in the scenario above you couldn't turn a low probability of calm into a high probability of calm. Competing with the Total Control Theory there is another bit of conventional wisdom about emotional control that is also quite prevalent. We could call this the No Control Theory: You feel what you feel and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it. No Control Theory doesn't seem to have proponents who advocate it explicitly. R