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.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

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.

The soccer mom explodes

Let’s use the idiot/soccer mom sign up example to explain the three ways she can respond to this energy being aroused in her. The first is to express. What does that mean? It means that she blows up with all the vitriol she can muster at that SOB husband of hers. “If I wasn’t so busy working because your dumb, lazy ass can’t find a job that comes close to paying even HALF of our bills, maybe I’d do a better job of looking after our kids!” In other words, she lets him have it.

How does that work inside of her? This part is crucial so lean in here. What happens first is the husband’s words stir up the energy in mom’s lower self.

Immediately after that, a second, different energy comes into play. It’s the energy that reaches up to her consciousness/seat of self and tries to pull that consciousness down into that lower energy. Once that second energy succeeds in yanking mom’s…