Emotional privilege is the greatest power on Earth.
It means being able to freely indulge your feelings in the moment – getting to fully react and emote to what’s shown, when it’s shown, without having to worry (or at least worry less) about how your reaction affects others.
In many relationships, especially the romantic and professional, someone has emotional privilege – a pre-existing right to be more reactive and less controlled than others. In romance it’s the more-pursued, and in business it’s the boss or investor.
This privilege is ultimate. It’s the difference between true freedom and self-restriction. It means not having to exert emotional discipline… which is arguably the hardest thing in human being. Having to control or suppress feelings you’re feeling in the moment, especially the really strong ones (like arousal, anger or loss), is brutal. It forces you to internalize uncertainty, frustration, stress and pain, rather than healthily venting them as they’re felt. It’s like swallowing acid.
And internalized feelings don’t just disappear once suppressed – they graft themselves onto psyches and become part of people. They directly and deeply shape emotional well-being and character (and, I think, even physical health). The more someone’s on the wrong end of emotional privilege, the more emotional acid they swallow and the more psychic poison they’re forced to carry.
With emotional privilege also (usually) comes privilege of reactivity. Instead of having to lead the interaction, the privileged get to simply react to what’s presented them. It means getting to make less effort while also being a kind of social judge, evaluating how they treat the presenter as they take in what’s said and what’s demonstrated. Having to lead an interaction is much harder and more demanding than simply reacting in one.
Emotional privilege and privilege of reactivity are the observable, ground-level revealers of real power – and the real definers of social inequality in action.