Smiling when I'm not happy? I thought this was such an interesting topic, and something I truly hadn’t put that much thought into. I guess I just always thought it was a sort of maladaptive response to stress. But as it turns out, this odd response actually has a name. Inappropriate affect. Now affect itself is the way that we express externally how we are feeling internally. So by definition inappropriate affect is displaying emotion, behavior, and/or demeanor that is not appropriate for the event, situation, or thought that is occurring or being expressed. Meaning we may smile or even laugh when we talk about terrible or traumatizing things.
Now there are many reasons we could struggle with inappropriate affect. First, many mental health conditions cause it: such as schizophrenia, schizoid personality disorder, autism spectrum disorder, depression, or even bipolar disorder. There are other reasons this could be occurring, like brain damage, pseudobulbar affect, and many other neurological disorders, so make sure if you feel your expressed emotions have a complete life of their own, make an appt to see a neurologist as soon as possible.
However, based on the question I received I am guessing they are only experiencing inappropriate affect in therapy or whenever they are asked to talk about things that are upsetting. And research this specific issue actually states that it usually happens for 2 reasons:
We are not comfortable or well versed in our own emotional state. This means that whenever we feel a “bad” emotion, we struggle to accept it. Often stuffing it down, and taking the whole “grin and bear it” motto to heart. Not only can this lead us to crying or getting upset and not really knowing why but we can also begin to truly feel that our emotions are out of control. Because we aren’t feeling them when they happen, but instead waiting for our emotional pot of water to boil over.
We have internal cognitive dissonance: Let’s say we were always told as a child that we shouldn’t cry in public, or being angry wasn’t okay. We can slowly be conditioned to literally “grin and bear it” even though we know that humans cannot improve their mood by simply faking it. Obviously we can even do this to ourselves as we get older, if we don’t like expressing any emotion, and just prefer to pretend we are happy even when we aren’t. By forcing a smile when we are actually upset, we end up teaching our brain to associate smiling with being in distress. Which can actually make our depression or disappointment even worse.
My video on Cognitive Dissonance: https://youtu.be/xVR4n8NbSBs
While it’s not always safe to allow ourselves to feel how we feel in that very moment, it is best to allow ourselves to feel how we feel. Since inappropriate affect isn’t something we create in one day, give yourself the time to develop new and more healthy habits. Here are some tips to get you started:
1. Feelings charts! Start out trying to identify 2-3 feelings a day and move up to 3-5, and even try taking stock of your emotions in the morning and at night!
2. Describe each feeling without using the feeling word.
3. Feeling collages! Take a large white piece of paper, writing down the feeling word in the middle of it and then adding in other phrases, pictures, captions etc that fit in with that feeling word for you.
4. Relearning: we can relearn when to smile and not smile, just like we learned to do it at inappropriate times before. So noticing when you are smiling when you shouldn’t be and work to stop yourself, and when you are happy and should be smiling.. Force it a bit! Slowly but surely your brain will relearn when it wants to smile or laugh and when it doesn’t.
https://teespring.com/empathic-badass#pid=369&cid=6513&sid=front

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