4. Construction or Destruction

 

I was watching my son's baseball game once and it was his turn to step up to the plate in a difficult game where the team was struggling to get points on the board. I watch him take a few pitches and then he hits an amazing high ball to right field where it drops to the ground just out of the fielder's reach. He runs like the wind rounding first and sliding safely into second. 

I'm cheering with pride when I hear the umpire call him out... My young boy's breakthrough moment has just been shattered and I start shouting at the umpire from the little league stands. He was clearly safe. Everyone saw it. Why would the umpire not open his eyes and pay attention?

It's at times like this that my emotions start generating reactions that I'm not thinking about. All of a sudden I'm yelling when I'm normally a pretty quiet guy. As I reflect on my behavior later it's clear that my feelings and actions, however justified and appropriate they felt at the time were pretty destructive.

The emotion from a bad call at a baseball game usually passes in the matter of a few hours or less but when an argument with someone I love gets in my soul or a mistake I make at work brings up insecurities about my own value, the pain usually lasts a lot longer. In fact there have been seasons of my life where these insecurities put me into a negative emotional spiral for weeks before I realized what is going on. Eventually I started to recognize that my emotions don't need to control me. I have a choice in how I respond even when my strong emotions make it feel like my destructive thoughts are the only authentic option.

After experiencing a mental health crisis in 2010, I've been learning a lot about describing my feelings. Giving words to my feelings started to identify some regular patterns. My feelings usually surface quickly after a trigger event but I find that it's possible to decide whether there is a more helpful alternative response that I would like to move forward with.

The initial reaction comes from my fight or flight system and I don’t think that can be controlled a lot in the short term. What I can control comes next. After I recognize that initial response and decide that it could be destructive, I can choose to shift my focus to an alternative perspective and usually a new constructive reaction follows my change in perspective. With this new focus and more constructive reaction, the initial reaction starts to fade as the new constructive one grows.

Learning this new approach got me excited about the possibilities. I started building two lists of reactions with the emotions that drove them, constructive ones and destructive ones. My long list of emotions started to converge down to 5 constructive emotions and 5 destructive emotions that I eventually become very familiar with. I’m sure they are different for everyone but here are mine.

This may be different for you but I find that some of the negative emotions have positive counterparts that often apply in similar situations. For example if my initial reaction is to get frustrated with something I can focus on becoming curious about the same situation and my mood becomes more constructive and positive.

This list has hung around in my journals for a few years now and each of these 10 emotions have become more nuanced and familiar with each new situation. Someday I may swap out some of these words for others when my life perspectives change but at this point they have been powerful tools to understand my choice between constructive and destructive responses to any situation.

I still respond with strong negative emotion to failure or disappointment, but more and more I'm able to recognize the negative emotion and intentionally choose a more constructive perspective. I can choose a perspective that has a more helpful emotion associated with it. The initial emotion often feels more authentic but I know that it will be destructive and I have the opportunity to choose a better more constructive path even if it's harder.