This blog post is written in response to comments and discussion generated at the February 2018 White Noise Collective dialogue, which examined the themes of “Emotional Labor and Difficult Conversations about Race and Gender”.  I am grateful to the participants for their frank, vulnerable, and honest conversation. See our website for the guiding questions and suggested readings for the dialogue.

I recently had a friend (a late 20s straight cis-man) divulge to me a dating encounter that he was frustrated about.  To his credit, he asked my permission first before telling me the story (which quickly turned in to him seeking my validation of his position); and to my chagrin I was too overextended and disconnected from my own needs to check internally and see if I was truly willing to offer my consultation before agreeing to do so.  The redux of the story goes like this: my friend went on a few dates with a woman who he wasn’t very excited about. Instead of acknowledging directly that he wasn’t interested, he spent a few weeks making and then canceling plans, which is a step familiar to many of us who do the modern dating dance. Finally, without other more interesting plans, he ended up seeing her one evening for a few drinks, which turned into casual sex.  Before having intercourse — but after initiating intimate contact — he paused to tell her that he wasn’t interested in a long-term connection and that this would just be one-time and casual. She acknowledged, and they continued. A few days after the evening together, she began reaching out to him, saying she wanted to see him again. When he reaffirmed that he wasn’t interested in continuing to see each other, she requested that they meet to process some trauma that had been re-stimulated during their interaction.  He refused to make himself available for this, saying that he didn’t feel obligated to perform emotional labor for someone that he wasn’t emotionally invested in.
Hearing this story initially made me feel envious that he was capable of holding such a firm boundary about what kind of emotional labor he was and was not willing to do, without any sense of guilt or obligation.  But after only brief reflection, I started to feel rage. Why did he feel entitled to refuse to provide emotional labor to someone to whom he had inadvertently caused harm? He was convinced the harm wasn’t a result of his actions or inactions (he had communicated clearly his expectations around their interaction), but instead arose from past, unrelated experiences this woman was still carrying with her; and according to him this absolved him of responsibility to attend to the harm.
I stewed on this conversation for weeks, and began to reflect on parallel experiences in my life in which I found myself in his position, resenting the expectation that I would perform emotional labor for someone who’s hurt stemmed from situations that didn’t feel relevant to me.  However, because of gendered socialization and patriarchy, more often than not I performed this emotional labor against my own desires, rather than asserting a boundary. And in the rare instances in which I did assert a boundary, I was wracked with guilt and doubt about if my boundary was justifiable.
All of this stewing brought me to an even more fundamental question: what actually is emotional labor.  Of course, reading the condensed Metafilter thread on emotional labor brings the concept to life in vivid and clear detail, and this emotional labor assessment makes it concrete and tangible.  But even more helpful was Haley Swenson’s article Please Stop Calling Everything that Frustrates You Emotional Labor.  I started to explore the distinction between emotional labor and labor that causes me to feel emotions.  Not every encounter that makes me feel feelings, consensual or not, can be categorized as emotional labor; and certain emotions, even if they are very hard to feel, need to be felt.
Many emotions that arise interpersonally are a result of activation from past trauma, both of unique personal experiences and of systemic shared experiences that logics of oppression impose harmfully onto targeted groups.  For those of us who identify as survivors of past trauma, a powerful part of the healing process is learning to recognize that, despite signals arising from our nervous system, whatever is happening in the present moment (whatever activated the trauma response) is not the same as the trauma itself, and that this moment is fundamentally different from the past trauma.  This emotional processing is not easy. It is hard work, it is laborious. But it is not the same as emotional labor. And only we can do it for ourselves. At the same time, the healing process that results from this neurological rewiring is often more profound and effective if it is done in the presence of an attuned and caring companion. (This is what good therapy can be.)
One of the most insidious logics of the oppressive structures of capitalism is that anyone can be outcast, disposed of, or rejected for making a mistake.  Because capitalism needs to grow perpetually in order to sustain itself, disposability is to its advantage — disposable napkins, disposable fashion, disposable technology, disposable humans.  This fear of disposability is so real that very often, when one person’s trauma response is activated by someone’s words or actions in interpersonal conflict, the offending person also experiences a threat to their ego, sense of belonging, and security when they are confronted about the disconnection their harm has created.  While not to necessarily equate these two responses (that of a trauma survivor being re-stimulated, and that of an offender facing a threat to their ego), they are related to each other along a spectrum of degrees. Also on this spectrum is a more dissociative response — a sense the offender maintains, whether embodied or intellectual, that the harm they have caused is not a priority of theirs to address, or that it isn’t worth their time or effort to acknowledge or repair (like in my opening example). Wherever someone lands along this spectrum of responses — activation, dissociation, ego-threat, or anything in between — the embodied experience of feeling, processing, and recovering from each response requires challenging emotional work.
So the question arises — if something I say or do activates someone’s trauma response, is it their work to recognize and transform their own trauma response, or is it my work to be present to the emotional processing that this necessitates?  And how does this get complicated when we add a politicized lens that recognizes that being targeted by racism, cis-hetero-sexism, transmisogyny, colonialism, ableism, and other forms of oppression is inherently traumatizing?
Let’s take some concrete examples from my life:
As a politicized queer cis white woman working with mostly straight cis men of color returning home from prison, I believe it is my work to educate myself about the traumas of mass incarceration and systemic racism so that I can be mindful of potential situations that may re-stimulate historic trauma in my interactions with my colleagues.  Knowing that perfection in this work is unattainable, I also believe it is my work to be present with my colleagues and their trauma when it does arise. Furthermore, I believe that there is no way to exist outside of the dominant messages of racism and disposability that maintain the prison industrial complex (although we can do our best to recognize those messages and counteract them when we witness them).   Given this, I believe that even when an encounter that causes harm might not be overtly about race or other dimensions of power, it cannot be distinguished or separated from these structures, and they are at play in some form or another. Add to these layers of beliefs a lifetime of femme socialization in which I’ve been taught it is my work to take care of others, and it’s an easy intellectual leap to arrive at an expectation of myself to do whatever emotional processing that arises in whatever challenging interaction, whenever it arises, despite what is happening for me in the moment.
Where this position often gets me is truly exhausted.  Take this example: At my work, we, as a team, determine standards of accountability that we all agree to commit to, as well as consequences for the instances in which we cannot maintain these standards.  Then I, because of my role in the organization, am in the position of enforcing these agreed upon consequences. And even though my role as enforcer-of-agreements was agreed upon collectively, it is my role rather than another team member’s role because of my skill set, which includes computer literacy, English as a first language, and many other skills that are, of course, entirely related to legacies of white supremacy, anti-Black racism, and colonialism.  Despite this collective agreement to hold ourselves to standards or face consequences, the lived experience of facing those consequences is deeply frightening for my colleagues, who are reminded of past experiences of arbitrary displays of life-threatening power and who fear losing their jobs (which, to be clear, is very explicitly not a consequence of failure to meet these accountability agreements).  This trauma response then results in my enduring hurtful and aggressive verbal harassment, which because of my own personal history and experience as a woman within patriarchy, is activating in itself.
This pattern, as it repeats itself, is that when I have emotionally activating interactions with colleagues, I find ways to conceptualize them as being tied to white supremacy and structural power (even when they aren’t explicitly so, because let’s be real, they are), which puts me in a position in which I feel that I’m unable to create an emotional boundary to protect myself from activating content.  As a benefactor of white supremacy, I feel an obligation to do the laborious efforting of being activated (being verbally harrassed by my colleagues for enforcing our shared agreements about accountability), centering my own nervous system and recognizing I’m safe despite the alarm bells in my adrenal system, and then making myself as present as possible to support my colleagues in their emotional overwhelm and rage (at their trauma response that arises when being held accountable to our shared agreements).  This results in a very exhausting existence, in which I’m constantly allowing myself to be activated, maintaining no boundaries, doing huge amounts of challenging and painful emotional processing, and feeling no reciprocation. As you can imagine, this quickly leads to resentment, and the envy of my friend in his situation that started this rumination.
He felt entitled to refuse to perform emotional labor, or labor that evokes emotions, because he didn’t believe his date’s activated emotions were about his actions.  But can we expect to perform emotional labor only when we consent to it? Can we expect this even when an incident is related to structural harm, and we (because of our positionality within capitalism) are implicated in that structural harm?  And if we can’t have this expectation, and structural power is always present in interpersonal dynamics, are we allowed to have boundaries around what types of labor, particularly labor that is emotional, that we are to participate in? And as politicized femmes who claim boundary-setting as a form of political resistance, how do we hold our commitment to resisting patriarchy by holding interpersonal boundaries over our exploitation simultaneously with a commitment to be present in the naming and addressing of structural harms to which we are implicated?
These questions don’t have clear answers, but the questioning itself reveals the fundamental challenges of being human in an overwhelmingly harmful structure.  Oppression mediates relationships. Relationships cause harm. Harm requires processing. Processing is laborious. The burden of labor (of all kinds, emotional or not) is disproportionately borne by those most marginalized.  In the case of emotional labor, or labor that evokes emotions, those better resourced to perform it (e.g. femmes, people of color, queer and trans folks, and other marginalized groups) are exploited for this resource, which in many cases has become developed (or relatively over-developed) as a coping and survival strategy within patriarchy.  Femmes pay thrice: first by doing the emotional labor (or the labor that is emotional) itself, second by not being evenly reciprocated with emotional labor for our own difficult emotions (except often by other femmes), and third by being expected to teach about emotional labor to those who don’t know or understand (hat tip to Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha who articles this profoundly in A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy).
While just as naming reproductive labor as a concept transformed the way we understand capitalism, naming emotional labor helped further visibilize the exploitation of femmes in powerful ways.  However, I wonder if at some point the framework encourages thinking that is too transactional. Perhaps a distinction between emotional labor, which is exploited for the sake of another’s material and emotional gain, and emotional work, which is the simple yet hard stuff of being alive, is illuminating. It can be a source of joy and connection to be present to someone’s deepest emotional needs, even when this work brings out difficult emotions and deep needs of our own.  If we do the emotional work of recovering from our individual, historic and ancestral traumas first and foremost for ourselves, as we become more separate from these histories, we become better resourced for others who are on their own healing path, wherever they are. Discerning between situations that demand emotional labor, and those that require emotional work, is not always easy, especially when complex positionalities intersect in interpersonal conflicts. For marganized and exploited folks, setting and maintaining boundaries is its own form of resistance.  However, boundaries can be constantly shifting. When it comes to individual and collective healing, perhaps we can conceptualize these boundaries as growing edges — the dialectical places to simultaneously establish and push through.