Classmate Invades My Space!

I took a class in Interpersonal Neurobiology recently and learned why it’s so hard to get over strong emotions. I’ll use myself as an example. In the class, we were in small group sessions and I was really enjoying my small group of four women. Suddenly a male classmate joined us in the third session. He seemed argumentative and took over our conversation. The other women didn’t seem to mind, but I got really incensed. Actually, I was really surprised by how angry I was feeling. And as the minutes drug by, I couldn’t seem to get over it. My default setting for the limbic system defense mode is flight, so I began to plot how I would abandon the group next time he joined it.

According to my professor I was the innocent victim of my way out-numbered Cognitive nerves. I’ll explain about that tomorrow.

The Good Mother

Remember that mom you envied as a child, or maybe she was your mother, who was so compassionate when her kid fell down? That mom did not scold her child for not looking where he was running, or explain to him that his cut wasn’t that bad, no, she exclaimed, "Oh that must have hurt!" And immediately her face reflected her child’s triggered emotional state. She joined her child in exclaiming over the hurt and then she held the child until he had cried all of his fear out. Now that’s being empathetic.

Her empathy gave him the sense that he was not alone in this terrifying event. He could rest in her compassionate presence until his emotion was spent. Then the rational part of his brain could come back online. The emergency was over. Her calm presence helped to shorten the duration of the emergency. Now he could think clearly with his whole brain about how to avoid falling in the future.

Take Home Point: A good mom allows the emotional state of her child. A good friend does the same 

thing. Empathy calms a triggered person down far faster than advice and reason.

Happy Weekend

It's the holidays. Time to visit family. Next week I'll share some cool brain science that explains just why it can be so difficult to recover from an emotional event and what to do about it.

I'll join you when you feel something

To avoid feeling emotion, many of us become very intellectual; hence the reasonable explanations and advice. But a friend having an emotion needs company. When they get that promotion and are excited, they want to hear – wow, that’s exciting! Right? They want to hear wow, that’s exciting and they want to see that emotion on your face. 

Your friend wants you to look like you just got a promotion too. Any emotion wants company. So if your friend is scared, they want to see that you at least look a bit concerned.

They need to know that you understand, that you get why they are afraid. And most of the time, if you actually allow yourself to get inside their shoes, you can completely get why they feel emotional. I don’t mean that you have to agree with your friend. From your vantage point, you may not see anything to fear from your point of view. Just as it is likely that you didn’t get a promotion at the same time as your friend. But you empathized with her joy then and you can empathize with her fear now.

Take Home Point: All emotions, positive or negative want to be accepted and understood.

Outlaw Emotions

So getting back to the horse metaphor from the Nov 14^th post, the horse wants to be joined by other horses. When we’re emotional, we want company, too. For humans that means that our friends empathize with our emotion and have a personal insight into just why we feel the way we do.

Empathy is super easy to do biologically and super difficult emotionally. Inside key areas of the brain are neurons whose sole job is to pick up other people’s signals and feel them the same way. These neurons are called mirror neurons. Here’s a great video by NOVA on the subject - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mirror-neurons.html We can feel sad while watching an unhappy TV or movie character, we can easily relate to the Hallmark card image of a smiling face, and we can quickly guess just why a child is crying over a spilled ice cream. Biologically, we are wired to easily empathize with one another and quickly guess each other’s motivations. A useful trait for a complex social animal.

On the other hand, we’ve been taught since babyhood that some motions shouldn’t happen at all. Some of us even got punished for feeling sad, afraid, or angry. For years, we have been practicing the art of ignoring our emotions, distracting ourselves from our emotions, and belittling our emotions. Not a surprise then that when we see someone having an emotion – we freak out.

Take Home Point: Empathy is easy to do. We happily empathize with emotions that are on the OK list like happiness. When a friend is happy, we join them. We mirror their happiness. Why would one try to advise someone out of happiness right? 

Feeling Alone

The two things we do that stress out a triggered person even more is isolate them by what we say– even if our words are well meaning. Advice, even if it is good advice, essentially says, wow, you should have done this or this to avoid your problem. You should have said this or done that. If only you had known what I know, you would not be in this trouble. Everyone knows better than you, you sure made a mistake no one else makes!

Therefore, not only is the triggered person not thinking clearly in the first place because of their stressed brain, they also now feel isolated in their stress – which is even more stressful. If you have ever broken something when you were young and then had an adult lecture you on being more careful – then you know how ineffective and stressful uninvited advice is.

The second thing people do that stresses a triggered person even more is to offer logical explanations. No one can hear logical explanations when stressed anyway. But what they do hear is that they are alone in their ignorance, because hey, this never happened to anyone else, because everyone else knew the reasonable explanation.

Take Home Point: When we are triggered by an actual or perceived event, we stress out even more if we feel alone in our experience.

Feeling Alone

Fight, Flight, or Freeze