Validating Your Emotions Rather than Justifying Them

Some of the most transformative moments in life can come in the most ordinary circumstances.  You might be minding your own business, having a conversation with someone you talk to all the time.  Then that person says something that stops you in your tracks.  They might not even know that they are transforming your life- it could be a throwaway comment to them, but there it is, making you stop and think.

One such moment for me went like this:  I was complaining to a friend about someone that I worked for.  I didn’t know this, but I really didn’t want to work for this person any more.  I know that I was probably ranting, not really hearing myself listing all the reasons I felt the way I did (jerky boss, unfairness, exhaustion, what have you), when my friend cut in and said, “You don’t need to justify yourself to me.  It’s okay that you feel this way.”  In that moment, I realized that I had turned my friend into the judge and jury, and I was on the stand making my case to her.  I wanted her to convict my boss as guilty of jerkiness.  Unconsciously I was begging her for permission to feel the way I did about my boss and my job.  In that moment, everything changed.  I realized that not only did I hate my job, I was afraid that I wasn’t allowed to hate it.  I realized that I was trying to get my friend to validate my feelings, which she nicely did in that moment that she told me that it was okay to feel that way.  Once I was able to feel the anger I had toward my boss, I was able to see that I wanted to quit that job, and did so.  Over time, I learned to do for myself what my friend did to me: I can now catch myself when I start to justify an emotion, and then take that moment to validate that emotion.

If this sounds familiar to you, then you probably grew up believing that certain emotions are not okay to have.  You can identify those emotions by noticing if, like me, you justify yourself when you feel certain emotions.  Stop your justifications for a moment, and notice what you are saying.  Are you listing a lot of reasons that you feel the way you feel?  Emotions never need justification, because they are natural.  Nature does not justify itself.  It just does its thing, and we respond accordingly.  Emotions need a response, too.  Validate your emotions when you notice that you are justifying them, and you will know how to respond accordingly.  This will save you a lot of energy and time in the long run.

The 30 Day Emotional Challenge

Recently, I discovered an interesting article on a financial blog titled “Kickstart New Habits with a 30 Day Challenge.” It lists some great ideas for trying to save money, reduce clutter, and earn more money.  I like this concept because it is a great way to try on a new habit to see whether it suits you.  This got me thinking about the emotional equivalent for the 30 day challenge.  What are some emotional habits that could be changed for 30 days? Here are 5 rough ideas:

1)If you feel that you don’t deserve love, pick out one trait that you like about yourself per day, and spend that day noticing just how lovable that trait is.  By the end of the challenge, you will have found 30 of your lovable traits.

2) If you eat emotionally, try once a day to notice what you are feeling when you eat more than you want to.  As you reach for the food,  ask yourself how you feel in that moment.  As you eat the food, notice what you are feeling.  Write down the food and the emotion.  Do this once a day for 30 days, and you will learn a whole lot about your relationship with food.

3) If you are in a relationship with someone who treats you badly, give yourself one hour a day to do something very kind for yourself that has nothing to do with your partner.  Are you able to treat yourself kindly for 30 hours in a month?

4) If you are someone who has a hard time noticing your feelings, get a journal.  Each day, spend at least 10 minutes writing about one emotion that you feel or have felt during that day.  Name the emotion, write about what might have triggered it, and how you experienced it.

5) If you tend to be the overwaterer or the underwaterer in your relationship (meaning you come forward far more or far less than your partner emotionally) choose to do the opposite once a day.  But first, tell your partner that this is your plan, and find out whether they’d like to try this challenge too.

The idea here is to try on a different behavior, to see if it helps you to change one that isn’t working for you, or to at least see it in a different light.  Happy experimenting!

Is it Okay for Parents Give the Silent Treatment to Children?

As I’ve mentioned before, I like to look at the search terms people use to find this site.  I’ve noticed that people regularly search about whether to give their children the silent treatment.  I have a very strong opinion about this, and feel that parents should never give their children the silent treatment.  To avoid confusion, let me describe what I mean by the silent treatment, versus other forms of silence.  The silent treatment is a form of punishment with the intent to inflict pain on the person that you are giving it to, and it is done with no communication as to why it is happening, how long it will last, or what the receiver of the silent treatment can do to stop it.  This is different than giving your child clear consequences to a behavior (such as a well-defined time-out), or not engaging with your child who is mid-tantrum.

Giving your child the silent treatment means that you are punishing them in a manner that inflicts pain, that you are suddenly not speaking to them without telling them why, and that they have no defined way to get you to speak to them again.  This is painful and terrifying for a child.  In their minds, you have disappeared and all attempts to get you to reappear are not working.  They have no idea why this has happened.  It is terrifying because a child cannot survive without a parent or caregiver.  The silent treatment sends a message to your child that they are not safe in the world, that their provider may or may not be available to them at any given time, for no apparent reason.

If you are considering punishing your child with the silent treatment, then it is time to step back and examine your emotions.  Are you feeling angry with your child?  Anger is inevitable- parenting is a difficult job, but feeling the anger is one thing, acting on it is another.  It is okay to feel angry, and it is hard work to feel that anger without taking it out on your child.  The first step is acknowledging and accepting that you are feeling angry, and that you are so angry that you want to hurt your child.  You are less likely to act on an emotion if you are aware of it in the first place.  The next step is finding out what you need to do to keep yourself from hurting your child.  If you find you are unable figure this out, then it is time to ask for help, whether it is from your spouse, a therapist, a minister, a relative, a friend.  Find someone you trust and ask for help.  Taking this step may feel difficult, but it will save your child and yourself from an unmeasurable amount of pain in the future.

More articles that may interest you:

When the Silent Treatment Feels Like Your Only Option

Dealing With the Silent Treatment

Dealing With Your Anger

More on the Silent Treatment

Following Through With Consequences

Using New Year’s as an Emotional Benchmark

Another year is ending, and many people use this time to make New Year’s resolutions, hoping to do things differently in our lives.  I’ve mentioned before that I am not a fan of making changes that are externally motivated (i.e. the calendar page turning), rather than internally motivated (i.e. you are ready for the change).

I don’t like to make changes according to an external date because the motivation has nothing to do with your internal state of being.  Resolutions tend to be about changing a behavior without looking at its internal roots.  This is like putting paint on a car in an attempt to solve its engine problems.  Common New Year’s resolutions are to spend less, eat less, drink less, exercise more, and so on.  These all involve behaviors with emotional roots.  When you try to change a behavior without looking at its emotional roots, your chances of maintaining that change are slim.  Then, when you “fail” at what you committed to do, you feel worse, which feeds the emotions that drive the negative behavior in the first place, and that behavior comes back with a vengeance.  It is a bitter cycle.

Instead of making a resolution to change, you could use this time to investigate the emotions driving the behavior you wish to change.  Look at how it has played out in your life.  So often, we are so busy looking forward, we don’t think to look back, but that is where all the helpful information lies.  Take the behavior you’ve targeted for change, and look at how it has shown up in the past year.  Look for evidence of the emotions that drive that behavior.  Maybe you drink to numb feelings of anger.  Perhaps you eat when you feel lonely.  It could be that you shop when you are sad.  Are you ready to feel these emotions behind the drinking, the eating, the shopping?  If the answer is “yes,” then this could be an  emotionally adventurous year for you.  Happy New Year!

Dealing with Your Anger

Today, I was cleaning out the fireplace and thinking about embers and how they can stay alive for days after a fire, even though they look spent. You can’t just stick them in the trash or vacuum them because they could reignite. They need to be disposed of properly, so that there is no danger of them catching fire in a place where that fire can’t be contained.

Anger is a fiery emotion that many people are afraid of. It is not a bad emotion, but we’re often taught that it is. Just like embers that need to be carefully disposed of, anger needs to be expressed carefully. Most people aren’t taught how to express anger, and are instead shown various dysfunctional approaches, such as pushing it down inside until it comes out uninvited in the form of rage.

Suppressing anger doesn’t make it go away- just like the heat in an ember. Just because you seem calm on the surface, that doesn’t mean that there is no anger deep inside. Anger that isn’t dealt with will eventually come out one way or another, and when it does, it will be out of control. Just like a fire that gets its start where no one can see and then becomes an inferno, anger that has been pushed into a corner easily becomes rage over time. Rage controls the person it has taken hold of, and lashes out at whoever happens to be in that person’s way.

A good start to dealing with anger is first to accept it as the emotion that you are having. There is nothing wrong with feeling angry. It is just an emotion, and there are no bad or wrong emotions. Let yourself feel anger, and get to know what it feels to be angry. If you haven’t done this before, and if you have a lot to be angry about, I recommend finding a counselor or other healing professional who can help you to navigate this process. In the short term, learning to deal with your anger might feel scary. That is because anger is a powerful emotion, just like fire is a powerful element. In the long term, the skill of dealing with your anger will help you to find your power and truth.

The Silent Treatment vs Stonewalling

Occasionally, I am able to respond to comments on this blog, and today is one of those times.  In response to the post “Dealing with the Silent Treatment,” Meltdown asks what the difference is between “stonewalling” and the silent treatment.  Here is the gist of the comment:

“My husband shuts down, walks away or completely ignores me if he even begins to sense that I am talking about any kind of real life issue. Sometimes he will respond with a simple, I forgot or I didn’t know, which is then sufficient and so begins the silent treatment….

Like Louise above, my behavior completely escalates into verbal abuse – I am then “an abuser.” In fact, he has a book all about verbal abuse in a drawer. By reading these blogs, I realize that I am attempting to inflict pain back on him. Though, I’m not sure he cares.”

The silent treatment is a form of punishment meant to inflict pain.  Stonewalling is a delaying tactic meant to buy time.  The stonewaller hopes that if he or she ignores the issue being presented, then that issue will go away.  Of course, as in the above comment, the opposite often happens: the presenter of the issue gets increasingly frustrated and the issue escalates.  The stonewaller shuts down even more.  This is a common relationship dynamic with two equal partners that I have described in this post.  One partner tends the relationship more assertively, the other more passively, and both get something out of this dynamic until the inevitable conflict arises.

Meltdown, your husband passively retreats into silence, and you react with verbal aggression, which does not get your husband to open up, and this only frustrates you more.   You both seem to be seeking out help- he’s hoping to find it in the book he’s reading, you are hoping to find it on this blog.  This desire for help is a positive sign for your relationship.

I am impressed with your willingness to see that your verbal attacks come from a desire to inflict pain in reaction to the pain his silence is causing you.  This awareness is powerful, because all that you have control over in a relationship are your own actions.  If you change how you react in conflict, the conflict itself will change.  If, during a more peaceful moment, you are able to tell your husband that you feel hurt by his silence, and that your reaction comes from a desire to inflict similar pain onto him, you invite him to admit his role.  If the two of you are able to have this conversation, then you can strategize ways for both of you to respond in future conflicts.  If you aren’t able to have this conversation, I recommend that you seek out counseling with someone who can help facilitate this conversation and give you strategies for how to communicate with each other.

Other posts you might find interesting:

Disengaging from the Silent Treatment and Engaging with Each Other: An Experiment for You to Try

“Handling” Conflict by Ignoring the Problem

Communicating about Taking Space in a Relationship- An Alternative to the Silent Treatment

Act Like You Deserve Love

Telling yourself that you deserve love is one thing, but actually believing it and acting like it is something else. If you grew up believing that you don’t deserve love, then that belief has ruled your relationship actions for your whole life. Lifelong actions become habits. Turning those habits around takes awareness and practice.

If you believe you don’t deserve love, you might be in the habit of meeting someone else’s standards rather than finding out whether they live up to yours. This is most common in romantic relationships. You meet someone and you are smitten. You wonder if they like you. You wonder if you are doing things that they don’t like. You worry that you don’t measure up to their standards. If you are operating from the belief that you don’t deserve love, you don’t even think about whether this person meets your standards. You might not even believe that you deserve to have standards in the first place.

When I was much younger, I was in the habit of dating people who were not good matches for me.  Being new to the world of romance, I was just thrilled that someone I was attracted to wanted to be with me, so I jumped right into some pretty questionable relationships.  Time went by, and I became rather frustrated with these unsatisfying, painful relationships.  A more experienced friend of mine asked me if I’d ever written down a list of qualities that I wanted in a partner.  A little light went on in my mind.  It hadn’t occurred to me until that very moment that I could make a list like that.  I realized that I had been so caught up with trying to please, that I didn’t even know what pleased me.  In fact, one of the things on my list was that I wanted to be with someone who was interesting to talk with.  I had been with people who were certainly physically interesting, but I was bored to tears by some of our conversations.  Learning that I deserved to have standards was a revolutionary moment in my life.

If you are someone who acts as though you don’t have standards, a little bit of awareness can help turn this habit around.   Notice when you are trying to impress someone, and ask yourself what it is that would impress you.  Are you trying to look attractive for them? Ask yourself what it is that you find attractive, and see if this person meets that standard. Maybe you want to make this person laugh. Is this a trait that you value in a partner? Does this person make you laugh? This exercise will help you to see just what your standards are for a partner to meet, and having standards is a typical habit of a person who knows that they deserve love.

Following Through with Consequences

Some days I just hate to give consequences.  The ensuing tantrum from my daughter is no fun to deal with.  I often hope that the threat of the consequence is enough to get her to listen to me.  I’ve definitely learned that I need to be ready to back up whatever consequence I tell her about.  Here’s an example: one night at dinner, she was yelling rather loudly.  We have a rule about not yelling at the dinner table.  I told her that if she did not stop, I would take away her favorite shirt for the rest of the day.  It was a very special shirt, and normally, the idea of not having it for even a moment would be enough to stop her.  Not this time.  She kept yelling, and it was clear she was trying to see if I really meant it.  Taking that shirt away sent her into The World’s Worst Tantrum.  I held firm, but it was hard.  Her reaction was so dramatic that I started to wonder if I was The World’s Cruelest Mother.  I had to remind myself that it is not cruel to confiscate a shirt for a night.  The happy ending to the story is that she learned from this experience- she knows that she is not allowed to yell at the dinner table, and she knows that her mom means what she says.

The most important thing to me about following through with consequences is to teach my daughter that I mean the things that I say to her.  If I consistently don’t follow through, she will learn that I don’t mean what I say, which ends up being a scary thing for children to find out about their parents.  After all, if I keep saying there are consequences to her actions but then there aren’t any, why should she take my word about anything else?  I want her to take my word for the fact that putting her hand on the hot stove will burn her, or that running out into the street is dangerous.  I don’t want her to find out the hard way.  I also want her to take my word for it when I tell her that I love her.  I want her to know that she can trust me, and I earn that trust by following through in what I say I will follow through with.

In all relationships, there are things that we wish we didn’t have to follow through on.  Of course, in adult relationships, you aren’t teaching your partner about how to behave in the same way you would be with your child.  You are however, teaching them about your world and how to behave toward you. The goal is similar: you want your partner to learn that they can trust you, take you seriously, believe that you mean what you say.  Just as a parent knows that they can survive their child’s tantrum, a person who is being true to themselves in relationship knows that they can survive breaking up with a partner who doesn’t like the terms.  If you don’t know that you can survive a child’s tantrum, you end up accommodating all sorts of crazy behavior from your child.  If you don’t know that you can survive a breakup, you accommodate crazy behavior from your partner.  Rather than doling out threats and ultimatums in the hopes that they will be enough to make your partner act the way you wish, take a deep look at what scares you about following through with those threats and ultimatums.  You’ll find out a lot about yourself, and if you can face those fears, you will have a much more honest and fulfilling relationship.

Money and Emotions

I’ve been meaning to write about money and emotions for a while now.  Yesterday, I felt inspired to do so after reading a blog entry entitled “Why Financial Literacy Fails (and What to Do About It). In it, the author states that the behavioral aspect to spending needs to be  addressed as much as financial literacy does, if not more.  All behavior is ruled by our emotions, so why not also look at money from an emotional perspective?

Money is a deeply emotional part of everyone’s lives, but it gets treated as if it exists apart from our emotional world.  If  we take something that triggers deep emotions and treat it as if it doesn’t, those emotions are still operating, but without our awareness.  This is much like letting small children play unsupervised; just because it is quiet in the other room doesn’t mean all is well.  Just because we say that money isn’t triggering our emotions doesn’t mean that it isn’t.  If we bring awareness to our emotions about money, we can gain more control over how we deal with our finances.

An example of this is emotional spending; “retail therapy” is a well-known phenomenon where someone feels blue and goes out and buys a bunch of things to feel better, rather than face the sadness they feel.   Retail therapy makes about as much sense as dealing with a sliced thumb by going shopping.  You may be distracted for a bit from the fact that your thumb is bleeding, but in the end you still have to deal with it, but now you are out some money, too.  There are other ways that emotions can affect how we deal with money.  Maybe you’ve been settling for less than a decent wage because you are afraid to face the emotions that come up when you picture asking for a raise, trying to get a better job, or even starting your own business.  You may feel as if you’ve escaped facing those emotions, but in reality they are ruling your life, because your wages are now being dictated by your fear.

Take some time to really explore just how your emotions rule your financial world.  Notice what you tell yourself about the things you buy, the job you have (or want), the clothes you wear.  See if you can build in a little pause every time you do anything that has to do with money.  You might find an emotion in there that wants to be dealt with.  Deal with that emotion, and you may just save yourself some money.

Not All Silence is the Silent Treatment

I’ve written quite a few posts about the silent treatment, and have gotten very many responses from people who are on the receiving end of it.  I also have had a few responses from people who believe themselves to be silent treatment givers.  Some of the people who are on the silent side of things are not actually participating in what I am describing as the silent treatment here, but tend to retreat into silence when they are overwhelmed or scared.  For the silent treatment to be The Silent Treatment, a person must be being silent AT someone with an intention to hurt them with that silence.  Not all silence qualifies.

There are different reasons a person might be silent in a relationship, and not all of them are bad.  The cooling off period after an argument is one example.    There is also the silence that comes when a person feels overwhelmed by a partner who expresses emotion more passionately than he or she is able to.  There can also be a pacing issue in relationships, where one partner is able to process and verbalize their emotions much more quickly than the other.  The silence in this situation comes from the slower-to-verbalize partner needing to think before talking.  Silence can stem from a person’s need to have more personal space in a relationship than their partner.  Silence also happens when a person is truly listening to their partner and thinking about what was said.

Whatever the reason for silence in a relationship, the crucial factor is communicating about it.  If you just withdraw into silence and expect your partner to understand why, then you are asking them to mind-read, and that is not fair. Instead, you can say that you are feeling overwhelmed, or that you do not process things as quickly and need some time to think, or that you want to let what you’ve just heard sink in.  Then, respectfully let your partner know just what kind of silent space you need and for how long.  Understand that you are asking for something that may be very difficult for your partner to give.  And, if you are the one being asked for this space, also understand that it was probably very difficult for your partner to ask you for it.

Other posts on the Silent Treatment:

When the Silent Treatment Feels Like Your Only Option

Is It Okay for Parents to Give the Silent Treatment?

The Things We Do To Avoid Asking Questions

Communicating about Taking Space in a Relationship- An Alternative to the Silent Treatment

Swallowing the Conflict to “Keep the Peace”

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