What if the same emotions keep coming over and over? Read on…
Kathleen writes:
I can at times react impulsively to my emotions. I’d like to change that. I’d like to know what to do with the same emotions that continue to arise over the same situation.
Dear Kathleen:
I’d like to suggest that it’s not your emotions that are causing your reactions.
I know it feels that way! But the way I see it, the situation you are in is triggering a complex combination of emotions and impulses to action.
The other day my partner said something that I felt belittled me. My face got hot, my heart beat faster, and I wanted to snap back quickly with an angry response.
But it wasn’t the emotion of anger that triggered my response. It was the whole situation.
That day, I was able to pause instead of reacting. I asked for a time out. I went out of the room and listened to myself for a while.
What did listening to myself involve? I started by saying:
“I am sensing something in me got triggered. It was when he said… (whatever he said)… and something in me felt belittled. I’m saying Hello to that.”
Already I could feel my breath slowing down and my curiosity rising up. It was at least possible that he didn’t mean to insult me. I began to wonder what had been going on in him… though I could start to guess.
When I got back to him, I was calm, and the outcome was very different from what it would have been.
When we react impulsively, quickly, that’s almost always from a part of ourselves, rather than from our whole Self-in-Presence.
And if those in-the-heat-of-the-moment occurrences are too easy to get swept away by, we can always do the Focusing later, when things are calm. But in that case — just saying — an apology may be the result!
