The 3 Ways We Can Respond to Emotional Upset: Express, Suppress or Watch
The first two don’t work. The third leads to spiritual gold.
When a person or situation upsets us, we have three ways we can respond: Express, suppress or watch. Only one of these three works.
The bad news is that few of us choose the right response. The good news is that consistently choosing the right way of responding puts us on a glide path to experiencing real, sustained joy in our lives. I’ll tell you how later on, after describing the two responses that DON’T work.
What’s emotional upset?
First, let me explain what I mean by emotional upset so we’re on the same page. It’s how you feel after your boss lobs a passive aggressive comment your way about your work performance; or how you feel after seeing your girlfriend talking with her ex at a party; or how you feel when your husband calls you an idiot for missing the deadline to sign your daughter up for soccer. You get the drift.
What happens in each of these and millions of other examples is that we feel a disturbance inside. That disturbance can be characterized as a field of energy that has been aroused. It’s energy that we’ve stored, for decades in many cases, in our lower selves that wants to flow upward.
