I know I said in my last post that I was going to talk this time about undoing the past, but that post isn’t ready in my head yet. (I really need to stop predicting the future, even the bits that I have some control over. It so seldom works out.)
Instead, I’m going to talk about why you get upset, why that’s completely understandable, and what you might do about it if it distresses you. It’s a direct follow-on from How to Hold Your Outcomes Lightly.
Over on my other blog, How to Be Amazing, I wrote recently about what to do when you offend someone. It wasn’t just a random choice of topic. I’d offended some people – not deliberately – with a guest post I wrote on another blog. One of the people I’d offended later came to my “what to do when you offend” post and left a lovely comment, and that got me thinking about why people get upset, as she had originally done.
Why you get upset
You get upset – angry, sad and/or afraid – when you feel threatened. That’s probably not a big revelation, but let’s think about it for a minute and unpack some of the implications.
Any time I’m feeling these strong emotions, it’s because I believe something has threatened my wellbeing. I talked about this last time in The Real Secret.
I have some belief that things “should” or “must” be otherwise than they in fact are, and that because they are not that way my identity, my existence, my wellbeing or the things I value are under threat of destruction.
And the reason that I believe this is that the situation reminds me, in some way, of a situation in which I felt that way before.
Often, what’s going on is what the Transactional Analysis folks call “hooking the not-OK child”. All of a sudden I’m a helpless little kid again, one who’s in a bad situation that he doesn’t know how to deal with. I feel intensely unresourceful in that moment, and so instead of using my many years of experience of solving problems rationally and effectively, I strike out, run away, or turtle up and stop interacting.
When I wrote a post that used stuttering as an analogy for procrastination, I hooked a number of not-OK children who had been teased and bullied for stuttering. I don’t stutter, but I’ve been teased and bullied, and it’s painful. Naturally, in many cases, their first reaction was to strike out. (The non-striking-out ones didn’t leave comments, but I’m sure there were some people in that category too.)
Getting upset is perfectly understandable
Getting upset when you feel threatened is understandable. It’s natural. It’s usual. It’s human nature. Everybody does it.
It’s not necessarily desirable.
Crapping in your pants is also natural, also part of human nature, but we teach our children not to do it.
As children, we also get taught not to express our upset, or at least not to express it in particular ways that are unacceptable to our particular parents or their culture. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we don’t get upset, just that we get better at hiding it, and/or express it in ways that were rewarded (or at least ways that escaped the degree of punishment that would have caused us to change our behaviour).
What we seldom get taught is how not to get upset in the first place. The parallel with defecation only goes so far. We have to relieve ourselves regularly, but we don’t have a biological need to regularly get upset.
If we know how not to get triggered, or how to deal with the feelings if they do get triggered, there’s no reason we can’t deal maturely with all of our challenges, without falling into the unresourceful not-OK child mode at all.
Anger, fear and sadness are often distressing, not only to you but to people around you. They don’t usually help to resolve the situation. They are completely understandable, and no blame attaches to you for feeling them (you feel what you feel, and nobody can tell you not to). But it’s often more adaptive and more helpful to give those feelings less control of the situation rather than more.
What happens when you don’t act out of upset
I’m not going to claim any kind of flawless victory in the Incident of the Ill-chosen Metaphor. When I first started to see the comments piling up on my guest post, I was, yes, upset. I had several reactions:
- Anger at being misinterpreted
- Defensiveness at being criticized
- Sadness because I’d hurt other people
- Fear for my reputation
All of those were natural and understandable.
The thing that I did right, though, was that I didn’t respond immediately and primarily out of those upset feelings. Instead, I:
- recognised that the upset feelings of the people leaving comments were natural and understandable – I adopted some of their viewpoint.
- realised that some of their upset came not from what I had said but from what it reminded them of.
- accepted responsibility for my own role in the situation.
- apologised.
This had two good outcomes, from my perspective, in that two of the strongest critics calmed down and became much more positive. To use the language of transactional analysis again, by speaking from my Adult I had engaged their Adults and brought them out of the not-OK child. One of them has actually become a subscriber, which is a result well beyond what I expected.
So there are the benefits of not reacting out of upset - but how do you get to do that?
How not to get upset
If you’ve read the Emotional Hamster Wheel ebook that’s part of my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course, you’ll know the answer already.
The key is to start paying attention to your upset reaction so that you can start to slowly, slowly insert wedges between the stimulus (the event that reminds you, rightly or wrongly, of a threat) and the response, and widen the gap.
You can work backwards from the reaction to the irrational beliefs that trigger it off. You can work forwards from it, and put longer and longer pauses in before you react, to give your brain chemistry a chance to normalise and your rational brain to come back online.
And you can use self-calming techniques (such as the ones in the other ebook in Simple Stress Management Techniques) to reduce the intensity of your feelings in the moment and let you see above the emotional alligators.
With time and practice, you’ll be able to do it without as much concentration.
It’ll become natural and usual. Like second nature.
