Stepping into Anger
A couple of days ago while at the park with my daughter, she banged her head and left quite an impressive bump on her forehead. He response was to get angry about the accident. I think it was more anger with herself and the embarrassment of the tears that followed.
My instant reaction was to comfort her, downplay it and tell her it was just a bump and that she will be ok, but does this then invalidate her feelings? Should I just let her cry it out while just comforting her? Such a difficult thing to do when all you want to do is to make the pain go away.
The question is what pattern does this set for the future? That we cannot hurt, get angry at things, uncomfortable emotions should be dismissed?
Last week I was involved in an email exchange that I was not aware of. The blame shifted to me though someone could have dealt with the situation.
My instant response was to get angry. I even typed an email response that in the end, I did not send. I had to calm myself down before I got involved in correcting the situation. The incident with my daughter reminded me of my own actions. By stepping back and calming myself, did I invalidate my own feelings? The uncomfortable emotions that we believe through growing up, that we should not have.
What makes us mature is learning to deal with that anger, those emotions. Yet we still try to block them. EQ asks us to allow them. To explore and validate them.
What we need to do is learn how to use those emotions, learn to productively use them to not allow patterns to form and develop for example. Yes, calm down and think objectively but not forgot how that person made us feel. I am not talking about revenge and that is driven by hate but to set those boundaries. Tell them how they made us feel. Explain what they could have done to help.
To learn and grow we must step into those emotions. The uncomfortable and negative ones because all emotions are valid. We must learn to accept them and to process them in a way that they are valid and useful. Emotions are what drives our passion, that makes us feel alive. It is the indifference that kills us from the inside.
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4 年Greg Ward, I enjoyed your article. We are taught from an early age to suppress our emotions. Through a lot of hard work, I am much more comfortable with emotions. I still have some work to do on processing the negative ones.
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4 年Good article, I believe emotions are valid and to be experienced. Take a step back and process the emotion, set boundaries and forgive whether it be self or someone else, do not have to forget what made you feel that way but why hold onto the refuse of those emotions! Thank you for posting!
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4 年Great article Greg Ward! I prefer to be feeling positive emotions. However, I do not deny negative emotions, they have a place and you should indeed process them and do something constructive as a result. Indeed you should tell the other person how you feel and also in the same breathe tell them what you think could be a more helpful way to communicate. Here's the thing sure we can do what I advocate, here's the ugly truth, you can't control other people! Only yourself! So they may not respond well to your desire to construct a better way of communicating. This does not mean that we should not do it!