Learn to Respond

There have been two main things on my mind this week. The first is choosing to respond instead of react. The second is that when we have been piling up emotions inside of us for a long time there comes a point when we can't respond rationally because we don't have clear space in our mind to see what is really going on. All we can see is the hurt from yesterday, last week, last month, last year, five years ago, a decade even. All of these emotions, if never gotten rid of in a healthy way just stays deep down inside us waiting to explode and as it waits to explode it begins coloring our vision, we no longer see reality we see hurt, that turns to anger, that turns to resentment.

  As I started writing I was going to say that first comes responding instead of reacting, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that until we learn how to work through emotions in a healthy way we will continue struggling choosing to respond instead of reacting. Now you might be wondering what the difference is, the prefix of 're' on both words would seem to indicate they are the same, but upon closer inspection we see (or at least this is how my brain quantifies it) that react means an action came our way and we are acting back in return to the initial reaction. Or something acted on us and so we act back to that action. It implies a lack of thought, we are simply acting back to what happened to us. Respond comes from the Latin word respondere which means answer to, to promise in return, to pledge. To my mind these words seem more thought out, more deliberate and seem to say that I am thoughtfully making an answer, instead of quickly acting in defense of myself.


  Our lives are full of experiences that were painful and built up emotions that can cause us to react disproportionately to future experiences. I have seen the good it has done in my life to choose to respond instead of to react. To take a moment and see what is causing my rather strong reaction and determine if the emotions I'm feeling fit with the circumstance or if I need to take a step back and dissect my emotions from reality. As I do I realize that I am defending myself from a life time of what I feel is being misunderstood, when the person saying something or doing something is coming from a life time of their experience. Only by stepping back and taking the time to respond calmly and desiring to know why they are doing what they are doing do we actually come to a helpful solution. I'm not saying this is easy, but responding instead of reacting saves a lot of heartache and wasted breath.

  Some of you might be wondering at this point well what do I do with my emotions so I can have the brain space to respond instead of react. The first thing is to be conscious of what emotions you are really dealing with. Generally what we think is anger is really just an outgrowth of fear and hurt. When we choose to consciously check in with our emotions we begin to see that what we think is a reaction to a single circumstance is actually a reaction to a life time of protecting ourselves. I struggle a lot with being called out when I have done something wrong. I want to be perfect and tend to forget that to achieve perfection correction is required. Well I received an email this week calling some things out that I had done incorrectly. It was an email so I couldn't hear the tone it was written in, but automatically my brain reached for hurt, because I had had some interactions with this person in the past, I reached for the bad. Yet I also knew that I wanted the process we were working on together to improve in the long run. So I re-read the emails and took some time thinking about what I really wanted, once I knew that I realized I needed to apologize for not doing it correctly, then set up a system to do better in the future. I am hopefully waiting to see how this new system works.

   Realize that what you experience in the moment, is not from the moment, but from a past full of experiences. Then find what works for you, maybe taking a walk and talking to yourself (make sure that no one is around) and talk things through, then as you walk back focus on what you are grateful for. Or maybe do a write and burn, choose an emotion and write it out for a page, then tear it into little pieces and burn it. You can write everything out because no one else will see it, get out all the mean, the nasty, the hurt and the painful, let it go on paper so that it doesn't burn away your insides instead. As you say good by to those emotions and work through the experiences that caused them, you don't have to be haunted by them anymore, you can be grateful for what you have learned and find peace in moving forward

   I'm not saying this from a place of having perfected it, but I know I have a lot more peace even in just the last few days, choosing to be an agent unto myself, choosing to respond instead of being reactive and taking ownership of my emotions instead of letting them own me.