You probably noticed, that communication is a challenge and that the more feelings are involved, the more there are risks of confrontation.Each experience you live is tainted with colour, depending on the way that you have been living it: it’s a good or a bad experience. So many times in a day, something is happening and you will feel it in a very unique and personal way. It will depend first on whom you are, what has been your life, what happened to you just before and your mood at this precise moment. In other words, you can never predict exactly the way someone will react to your statement or attitude. In the same way, you may react very badly to something that would have been insignificant the day before. The most delicate situations are with people really close to you, where there are strong emotional implications. Most of the time, we don’t share our feelings with others. Especially when something happens and it hurts: it can be a statement, a comment, a joke, or a criticism…We will very often react to hide the real result and the pain that has been caused. Socially, we react as if we can’t show true feelings. We’re supposed to be strong and insensitive.At work, it’s very obvious. A comment from your boss can be absolutely devastating for you, but you will not show anything. Instead, you’ll react as if nothing happened.Your relation to your boss is your relation to authority, which is very close to your relation to your parents as a kid. Unconsciously, for a lot of people, there is a neurotic relationship with the boss.There are unconscious expectations toward the boss to be the one telling you how good you are. If he’s making a comment on the quality of your work, you’ll take it very easily at the wrong level.Instead of taking it as a comment, it will be taken personally, at a personal level.

Everything that happens to you, day after day, is generating emotions and feelings. If you don’t clean it up, in a way or another, you keep emotional rubbish, exactly as you could do in your kitchen. Imagine keeping your rubbish in your kitchen for weeks and weeks…

There’s different ways to clean up. It can be just to think about it and let it go, to go to the gym regularly or any other personal way. The other option is to express your feeling to the person concerned if possible immediately after the event.

When you choose to express yourself, you usually tell the person how bad he has been with you, you judge, you accuse and the person in front of you will feel attacked immediately. You share in fact the result of your initial feeling instead of sharing what really happened for you and the way you have been feeling.

Did you notice how many people are aggressive driving their car?They’re expressing the results of what hasn’t been expressed to the boss, to the partner, or who ever else: it’s the expression of emotional rubbish none recycled.We usually express the result of bad emotions rather than the original emotion. We get back everything but what we really need. If I’m grumpy and aggressive, people in front of me will rarely be kind to me, even if behind the grumpiness I’m sad and need a big hug: we call that parasites emotion. Expressing an emotion instead of anotheris generally a very good way to feel worse.

Express your feeling without expecting anything back. Give choice to the person, and allow him/her to listen instead of defending him/herself.On the top of this, the quickest you express yourself, the less frustration you carry.

Most of the time, it’s our ego that stops us from acting healthily, expressing our feelings.

“What would he think if I admit that I was hurt?”

“I will appear as a weak person”

So, the only way is to accept our feelings and not to carry rubbish for the wrong reasons.

In a relationship, a good way to move on is to talk, to put things on the table, when it is not yet old enough to smell like rubbish.

It’s the degradation of feelings, after turning it over and over again in your head or stomach that make it smell bad, that makes you overreact or punish on an unfair way.

If you can change the way you’re dealing with feelings, when you’re hurt, you can change very quickly the cause-effects in your relationship and avoid a lot of conflicts.

Express your emotions and not the result of your emotions.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 10:35 am and is filed under thought for the day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.