Prizeworthy by Mitch Abblett

Author:Mitch Abblett [Abblett, Mitch]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

How to Become a “Tamer” of Reactive Emotions

It was a particularly difficult day. My friend’s nine-month-old son had had a terrible night and left his parents with only a handful of hours’ sleep. “Needless to say, we were slow getting up and out the door that morning,” my friend told me over coffee. “Before we left, my wife and I had a ‘discussion’ about who should’ve gotten up during the night. We barely spoke in the car the rest of the way to work, after dropping the little dude off at day care.”

And then my friend had been hit by one issue after another after entering his office. There had been an important meeting he needed to chair, but he had forgotten to put it in his calendar. “And worst of all, I must have used a ladle to scoop sugar into my coffee travel mug that morning.”

I knew he needed me to listen, to simply validate what he had been going through. God knows I had been there myself. I knew not to shift into “therapist mode” and suggest how he could have gotten on top of his upset—unless I wanted to shorten my friend list!

For readers of this book, however, I offer the relevant therapeutic “nugget” for situations like my friend’s: when strong parental emotion is surging, try to bring mindfulness into the picture. It can help to “name it” (or as I’ve heard the psychiatrist and mindfulness expert Dan Siegel say, “Name it to tame it”).

The idea here is to say to yourself (and say out loud if the situation permits) what negative emotion you are experiencing, as you are experiencing it, in order to begin getting some distance on it. Somehow, as the clinical wisdom goes, simply labeling a difficult emotional experience allows you to take the reins back, if only briefly.

Research backs up the idea that mere verbal labeling of negative emotions can help people recover control. Matthew Lieberman at the University of California, Los Angeles, refers to this as affect labeling, and his fMRI brain-scan research shows that this labeling of emotion appears to decrease activity in brain centers such as the amygdala. This dampening of the emotional brain allows the brain’s frontal lobe (the reasoning and thinking center) to have greater sway over solving the problem du jour.

And this is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness gives us that one second of space as reactive emotions (like anger) are rising. If we can see the anger, then we do not have to be it—we can mindfully notice the body and mind crackling with reactivity and acknowledge (or name) our emotions as we are having them. This naming seems to put the emotions at arm’s length. We can see them, and then we can begin to choose how to act. We can choose to open ourselves and connect with others, rather than be carried away in a flood of emotional neurochemicals that wash us over the cliff. We might also learn about the other painful feelings our initial negative emotional reaction (anger in particular) might be covering up.

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