What are you responding to?

A man sees his wife's socks on the floor and promptly feels a wave of anger that elicits him to start an argument. A mother sees her daughter making a mess of her toys and immediately feels upset and stomps out of the room. In both cases, an outsider might think the person is "being dramatic" or "overreacting" - perhaps the person is thinking that themselves! But what might really be going on here?

What if I told you that yesterday the wife had agreed to her husband's request to stop leaving socks on the floor, as she'd been doing so for their last 5 years of marriage? What if the mother had just lost her job and learned her best friend was in a fatal car accident? Both waves of emotion make more sense in this context. Of course these are specific examples, but my point is that there is usually more going on with an emotional response than meets the eye.

Emotional reactions make more sense when we consider the larger context of our experience. Whether we're responding to similar experiences of the past, our current emotional state, or our own thought-processes, our emotional responses are often natural reactions to our larger experience.

When we don't fully recognize what is impacting our emotional responses, it's awfully hard to manage them. Our actions tend to be more reactionary as well, leading to behaviour that conflicts with our values and usually worsening the situation in the process.

This is where self-reflection comes in. By regularly recognizing within ourselves what we're responding to, we have better insight into our emotional reactions when they occur and thus greater control in how we respond to them.

If we know we're in an off mood, or that we're really responding to the hundred times the same frustration has occurred in the past, or we know we're not paying attention to all the information, or we recognize an emotional button has been pushed within us, it's far easier to catch ourselves before we respond.

When we do, we can take a step back, self-soothe and "talk ourselves down" during the specific situation, respond in a values-guided way to the situation at hand, then address the larger issue more effectively. This could look like setting boundaries, acknowledging patterns in ourselves or others, looking after ourselves, problem-solving other stressors, working with our own thought processes, attending therapy, or communicating assertively about the situation.

Take a moment now to reflect on a past situation where you (or others) feel you overreacted. What else was going on besides the direct situation that you might have been responding to? How might that knowledge have impacted how you dealt with the situation?

Next time you feel your emotions aren't proportionate to the situation at hand, see if you can take a step back and consider what are you really responding to?