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Did you ever see a wall chart that has a bunch of kids’ faces and underneath each is written the name of an emotion? When working with dads of tantrumming children, I often encourage them to name their kid’s feelings—preferably before the tantrum. One of the reasons temper tantrums occur is that a child is experiencing a huge, strong rush of a feeling and they don’t know what’s come over them. It’s scary. Labeling what the child is feeling as “fear” “sadness” or “anger” helps them to contain it. After a while they don’t have to have a conniption, they just need to know that this feeling is an emotion called ‘sad’ (and, yes, does it suck!)
Emotions are in all of us, even if you’re a person who’s thought of as “unemotional”. What that really means is that you don’t express your emotions in a way that is easy to interpret by others. As a matter of fact, you might not realize you’re having the emotion: it can take some savviness to become aware of the emotion you are feeling and an even greater level of savviness to be able to name that feeling.
It’s often interesting how sometimes parents are better able to know their kids’ feelings than their own.
Many of us didn’t have someone “teaching” us the feelings when we were younger. While we may have picked up a general sense it doesn’t mean that we’re aware of our feelings all the time. In fact, half of my job is slowing guys down to connect their thoughts, or even their physical pain, to an actual feeling. I don’t do this to be an annoying, stereotypical therapist, but to move toward some relief. Once we connect with the feeling (and then, hopefully, take the next step to allow ourselves to have the feeling) we don’t have to put so much effort into avoiding the feeling. That’s the face many of us show to the world.
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How do you know when you’re angry?
I ask this starting out with the guys who come to me telling me they have some “anger issues.”
How do you know when what you are feeling is an emotion if you have not yet identified it?
If they jump to the explosion that happens or to when their fist goes through a wall, I ask them to back up. Back up and up until we get to when the first germ of how that anger began. Maybe it was a remark from their boss earlier that day that was “cooking” until they got home. Maybe something struck them while on the subway. Maybe someone made a passive aggressive comment and they tried to brush it off.
If we can get to the trigger I then want to know what initially happened inside them. This could be involuntary and often it’s physical.
- Stomach cramped up
- Headache came on
- Fists began balling up
- Face got hot and red
One signal that we’re having an emotion is how our body reacts. We need to know ourselves well enough to be familiar with the signals.
We need to do this for ourselves, especially if our emotional expression (or lack of emotional expression), is getting us into trouble.
Experience the Emotion, Not the Tantrum
Much of the suffering in our lives is the avoidance of an emotion. Often we’re not even aware that we’re pushing the emotion away because we’re not aware we’re having an emotion! If we haven’t had practice in connecting with our feelings we may not even realize when they’re coming up. In retrospect, we’ll justify an action stating that it’s because we lost control. If we can be aware of the emotion before it reaches a breaking point we won’t have the tantrum; we’ll have the emotion instead.
But that takes knowing yourself. And it takes a willingness to be vulnerable.