Give a F*ck, Actually by Alex Wills

Author:Alex Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510772984
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Emotions Are Our Teachers

“Look, this moment feels overwhelming because it is. The future is unknown. Your immunodeficient son is vulnerable. And there’s so much outrage going around. There’ll be a replacement hero, or villian, trending by six o’clock. But here’s the hopeful part: your emotions are telling you your deep truth. And your truth is what puts you back in the driver’s seat. And by ‘emotions’ I’m not only talking about the shield emotions that made you take a swing at the guy, but the deep-down stuff,” I added.

“You mean the fear.” Gabriel looked up at me with tired eyes. “The fear under the hood.”

“Yes!” I said. “Fear. You felt a shit-ton of fear! There is nothing wrong with that. Your emotional data made you aware of a threat. Your emotions were helping you. They were trying to protect you from a real threat. Well, they were helping you until you blew your own fuse.”

Mask Man stopped to contemplate what I’d just said. “The guy was probably picking up on my fear, right? His coping mechanism was humor, but he had a tough audience in me. And the customer who taped it all? Probably fearful, too. Fear is as contagious as any virus, isn’t it?” He paused, glancing up at the ceiling. “Oh my god!” His face flushed with remorse. “I was the super-spreader!”

“What if I told you your fear serves a purpose?”

“Even if it made me explode with anger?”

“Was it the fear that made you explode or was there something more to it?”

Gabriel glanced out the window. “I guess I felt like I had no options,” he sighed. “I mean, I can think of a couple now, but not that night”—he shook his head—“Jesus, I really do go into full-on roid rage when I feel threatened! If I’d just been able to take a step back and practice that REA thing in the moment—none of this had to happen.”

“It had to happen because it did. Your emotions are teaching you something. You’re learning that your fear and vulnerability manifest as rage. This is valuable emotional data. Data you can use immediately to make better life decisions. Now you have options, now you have agency. You can choose to radically accept the temporary but intense emotions of feeling overwhelmed.”

“Accept feeling overwhelmed?” Gabriel asked, incredulous. I’d noticed his energy shift the moment I said the word.

“How do you think your evening might have gone if you’d accepted that you were feeling overwhelmed? That you were on a short fuse and needed to de-escalate your interactions with others?”

“I guess I could have used one of those grocery delivery apps, or made another meal of pantry-pasta and put off going until tomorrow. At the very least, I could have avoided the guy,” Gabriel hung his head. “Or tried to have a real conversation with him.”

I nodded. “But could you have listened? You were too caught up in anger—in your most effective shield emotion—to even hear yourself.”

“I’ve been fuck-blocking myself for a long time,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.