How to Defuse Offensive Speech

f you Google “It’s been emotional,” even without quotes, you’ll find that a clip from Guy Ritchie’s 1998 British crime comedy, , . Vinnie Jones delivers the line as the leather jacket-wearing Big Chris, a no-nonsense debt enforcer and devoted single-father from East London. You can buy a or T-shirts glorifying his parting words. But perhaps the most prominent use of the line came, a few years ago, from Jones himself—he used it as the title of his , . It fit. Much of what Jones disclosed, he aired to his psychotherapist. “I’ve been going to see him once a week for eight months at the time of writing this, and we’ve got the dog at the back of the kennel,” he writes—the “dog” being his emotions. Ritchie introduced Jones to this Kabbalistic manner of recategorizing his unruly feelings, which his character, Big Chris, at times . “In Kabbalah, the Jewish novelist Judy Brown in . A “person’s evil impulses must be controlled like a vicious dog on a leash.” Jones says since childhood his dog has been a “big, angry bastard…one I should have spent more time understanding how to keep under control.”