Something, something thoughts, something, something, emotions.

You know those moments when you look back at yourself reacting and all you can ask is:

What in the Strawberry Lemon Cake just happened there?

A while ago, I was having cereal with a flatmate when he asked if it would be ok to throw away some old appliances . I immediately reacted:

• Please talk to everybody before doing anything (he was trying)
• You know we really use everything (lie)
• I have been trying to get this house in order for a while now (then why was I resisting this?)!

I went from Offense to Defence to Victim real fast.

So how do you get from someone saying something innocuous to you overreacting?

We can better conceptualize how this happens by understanding the concepts of Thoughts and Emotions and how these help create habitual patterns that reflect in actions.

What I found out is that left uncheck, you will bring your thoughts to life because they have a very smart ally behind them: Emotions.

So where do Emotions come from?

Say you had a thought flowing around in your brain and you noticed it. You said: “Oh, now that looks interesting.”

And you start entertaining it, you had a few chats, drank a few beers together, you had a bit of fun.

So you give it the validations it craves and boom, next thing you know you’re pregnant and having an emotional baby. (Too much?)

Ok, Say you had a thought floating about and you noticed it.

You start entertaining it with a conversation, you engage with it and you validate it.

You basically tell that thought: You are real, you are part of my reality. You use your imagination to label the thought (or the possible effect of the thought becoming reality) as bad, good, beneficial, dangerous And that is how emotions are born. (Better?)

Let me give you some characteristics of emotions:

• They appear after a thought is validated.
• Emotions are LOUD! and INTENSE! and ABRASIVE! they demand immediate attention! Now, Now, Now cry the emotions!
• They do not stand up the test of time and reality.
• You get disconnected from reality.

Emotions then feed the thought another large amount of validation and in turn this leads to the creation of different emotions. So you keep stacking false information on top of old false information until you have a Babel tower full of anxiety.

I will break this down for you:

1. Get yourself born into a human vessel.
2. Add 1 spoonful of thoughts.
3. Throw in a dash of emotions and and mash them together.
4. Allow it to cook steadily for years and years until the flavours of the initial thought and initial emotion cannot be separated anymore, nor can you make them distinct.
5. Enjoy a life led by immediate responses and reactions that do not belong to you, as you are in the Present.
6. Stay stuck in a crappy life where you are not in the driver seat.

Now let’s go back to my silly example.

Basically I was responding to something that I had experienced prior. Because I was used to this happening a lot, just someone using the same words in a somewhat similar context, got me to react, emotionally.

And before you judge me for being too emotional, remember that… I am.

I was a very emotional child and teenager. Mega Dramatic 🦇

For the longest time, I kept a half broken ceramic figuring my Great Grandmother gave me when I was 10. It was the last thing she gave me and I kept it close. That ceramic figuring was symbolic of the love she had for me and the love I was not be able to show her. (she was such a bad-ass with a lovely heart, I love you Grand-Grandma).

My dad did a spring cleaning and threw away the ceramic figurine. So naturally, I had a fit.

“I can not believe he would do something so horrible!” was just one of the many thing I yelled.

In hindsight he had no idea what that figurine meant to me. And in the end, the lesson meant for me was: Love is not encapsulated in an item.

My love for my grandmother did not change after the figurine disappeared from my life, it actually made it stronger. Because now she was allowed to be with me even when I wasn’t in the presence of the said item.

My dad threw away a lot of stuff from around the house throughout the years and that always got a reaction from me.

Every time he did that, I felt like I was losing the small sense of control I had on my life.

Being a pre-teen, hormones don’t really give you the best handle on reality so I was scrapping the bottom for leftovers.

The real enemy behind the front lines

I wanna drive this point home as best as I can:

It’s all about control!

Coping mechanisms are there as a soothing technique and you best soothe by creating the illusion of controlling your environment.

In all fairness we can only control 3 things: mindset, attitude and energy. I will be writing a blog on this later down the track.

Trying to go back, finding the root of the my over-reactions (cause that’s what we do! ye-yey) can be traced to an initial thought :

I have to gather, I have to keep things around me to create the perfect environment in order to feel safe and when people try to take away my stuff, I need to stand my ground and make them stop.

And then I labelled the thought and its external reflections as: Losing things is: BAD!

These types of thought patterns are so primitive that just using the word BAD, feels right to you in the moment.

When you are a kid, the only thing you really understand is: this makes me feel bad, this makes me feel good. You live in a very black and white reality.

Just understanding that my reactions come from another place entirely, helped me be more mindful and catch myself in the act the next time the situation presented itself.

Understanding this will help you be more present in the day to day waking life that is the Now. (I love it when I write these cheesy lines, hi-hi).

Understand yourself-Understand others

As you can see in the example with my flatmate, I resorted to 3 different tactics in just one situation. That can get confusing to people who notice it.

As you see yourself more an more, you will start seeing this in others as well. If a person is clearly triggered (by triggered I mean their reactions is exponentially larger and unequally balanced to the situation presented) and uses multiple tactics to convince, deter or silence you, you can tell that this situation has happened in their lives repetitively and constantly for a long time.

If you are in the situation aforementioned and you realize this behaviour in someone, all I can say is: …

Be gentle with them, they might still not know what is happening. And don’t tell them then and there. Wait for the moment to pass, wait a day or so and then bring it up with empathy and curiosity.

Ask them: Hey, you remember that moment when we talked about such and such and you said Y,X and Z? What happened there? I just want to know, no judgment.

How to handle a dear one being triggered can be a difficult discussion in itself.

For now, I will just leave you with the following question? When was the last time you overreacted and why do you think that happened?

Don’t forget to be kind to yourself and others! Muah 💋

Please comment below. I would really love to see your real life examples 💟