How do you express yourself when you experience strong or negative emotion? Do you find that people are drawn to you, making you feel more connected? Or does it seem to have the opposite effect of pushing people away. . . avoiding you whenever you are experiencing strong or negative emotion?
What if I told you the way you show up when you are in strong emotion is one of the biggest lost opportunities for deeper intimacy? Understanding your own emotions and how to invite others into understanding your emotions is a learned behavior. Unfortunately, many of us were not taught this skill, and so, rely on our instinct and impulses, harming our relationships.
Over the next few posts, we're going discuss three very simple steps to effectively express your emotions. With practice in patience, applying these principles to your life will help you feel more connected and engaged with others—even when expressing negative emotions. This practice will cause you to no longer put people off or cause people to avoid you.
The very first step is that you convert your own feelings into words. It is very common for a person to experience strong emotion and be asked, “how are you feeling?” Yet too many people lack the words to accurately express the emotion. Rather, the default expression is:
I’m angry...
I feel bad.. .
I’m not happy…
But the more you take the time to check in with yourself, the better you develop an accurate description of what you're experiencing. Are you feeling disappointed? Are you feeling betrayed? Are you feeling confused, frustrated, or resentful? Are you enraged? These words, communicate the degree of pain or discomfort you are in. Taking time with yourself is the very first important thing to do.
What was modeled for many of us is that when you feel a negative emotion, you blow up and you vomit on other people in the moment. But what does that accomplish? How do you feel when someone just—all of a sudden—vomits on you? Even when you caused it, even when you made a mistake? Is it fun when someone pukes their negative emotion on you? Yet somehow, we were taught this this method of expressing negative emotion. On the opposite extreme, what was modeled is total shutdown, withdrawal or avoidance. On either extreme, we gain the exact opposite of what we really want. What we really want is to be understood. What we really want is to be connected with. But instead of seizing our connection opportunity, we vomit on people or totally withdraw.
When people get vomited on, or when they are unsure about your withdrawal, they're going to find ways to avoid you more and more and more. Or in other instances, when they notice the little pressure buildup happening, they find convenient, exit doors to get away from you.
So what do you want to do? You actually want to take a “time out.” You want time out, you want to have a conversation with yourself. This is your soul's way of telling you need to pay closer attention to yourself right now.
It’s time to attend to what you are experiencing in the emotional realm.
What is it that I'm feeling? How can I express this in words and how can I take care of myself in this moment? How do I puzzle this out in words before I attempt to communicate it to another human being? Fifty percent of our interpersonal conflict can come to closure so much more quickly when we practice this very, very important step.
Take care of yourself and communicate with yourself in words. What are you actually feeling?
Be blessed and encouraged,
Judge Char
Are you a professional woman of faith who is dominating in the workplace but struggling in your marriage? You checked off all the boxes. You went to school. You nailed your dream job. You settled down with your husband. You are attending church and are faithfully serving others.
But the coldness in your marriage is trying your faith. You are questioning everything you were taught. You have been praying and nothing has changed. You are looking for the exception to the “God hates divorce” guidance everyone keeps giving you.
What if I told you that the problem is not that you lack faith? What if the answers you have been hoping, praying and crying for is simply because you do not understand the law of love?
Read more...
Do you struggle with embracing your inner child? Is life constantly serving you an overwhelming dose of adulting that you just can’t seem to get a break from? Are you tempted to explode into tantrums or outbursts, but shove it all down deep inside for the sake of appearances?
If you struggle with connecting to your inner child, you’re not alone. Many people struggle with embracing themselves because of societal definitions of adulthood. This often drives internal conflict. And when a person is pressured to constantly repress the childlike aspects of themselves, that child eventually shows up at the worst times.
Our inner child finds a way to show up and show out when we are in conflict with others.
Read more...
Are you more preoccupied talking about and complaining about all of the things that your husband does wrong? Have you found it difficult to even imagine anything redeeming about him? Anything that you're grateful for towards him? Do you struggle to recognize anything that he actually does right half the time?
What if I told you the solution to address your misery is rooted in a fruit problem? Today I want to confront you about the fruit that you've been serving. This fruit being the key to the sweetness that you really desire out of life.
Today’s story comes from an episode of my own life. I was dominating at work, and performing quite well. Yet I was struggling in my marriage. I really just felt lonely and frustrated with everything that was wrong with my husband.
I mean, you name it, I had a problem with him.
And so I found a small group Bible study, a women's group that met Friday nights. This was perfect, because I was longing for connection and an opportunity to let my hair down after saving the world all week. I showed up every single Friday. Each week, I was a little more willing to open up about the anger and frustration I had been hiding for so many years. This continued for several months—my complaining and crying about my husband’s wrongness. But then one day, the small group leader hit me with a compassionate confrontation. She directly challenged my own mess. She redirected my focus to consider how I was constantly complaining. For crying out loud, I was so hyper-focused on the misery of my marriage, I didn't even have anything good to say about my own child.
“Please keep in mind that I do not want to hear the two of you fighting.”
This was the love note that our child, who was 11 years old at the time, passed to me and my husband during one of the rockiest seasons of our marriage. Have you lost sight of how your children are impacted by your fighting at home? Have you convinced yourself that “kids are resilient” and they simply just roll with the punches while mom and dad are going at it?
What I'm about to share with you is what we've unpacked with more than 127 weeks of regular family meetings, and perhaps it's time for your family to consider a similar type of meeting.
When our child said to us that he felt dishonored when he could hear us having our disagreements, my husband and I had to take a real serious look at ourselves. We had to reconsider how we were treating him. We had to face the hard truth that we had lost sight of him while we were going through our different power struggles.
We accomplished this through small family meetings. We meet once each week. Each meeting takes about 30 to 45 minutes most weeks. For our agenda, we cycle through three different areas of life. Everyone gets to share what it is that they need from the family. For example, week number one is love. Each person shares three to five things that makes them feel loved.
[Side note: When you're starting off, the fewer requests, the better.]
Everyone takes turns sharing how they feel loved. The next week, you talk about honor. Honor is how you feel valued as a human being, as a child of God. How do you feel honored? How do you feel valued?
And this was the week when our kiddo said, “Keep in mind, I do not like to hear the two of you fighting.”
We had to accept this meant even when it would be a “civil” disagreement where we were obviously not agreeing with each other, and the tension could be felt in the room.
He didn't like it. It created stress and anxiety for him because he loves both of his parents. He didn't want to be privy to the fact that mom and dad don't always get along and that it doesn't always sound so nice. So we made a decision as a family that we were going to honor each other in different ways. For him, when it came to when and how we would have disagreements, we made some changes so that he would no longer feel dishonored by us.
The third week of the meeting agenda is respect. “When my family does this for me, it communicates respect to me.” So you talk about those things and you give feedback to your family. How did we do the past week? How can we do better moving forward? How can we all be accountable and show up differently?
And after 127 consistent meetings, when we cycled back into the week of honor and our kiddo said. “Keep in mind that I don't like to hear the two of you fighting. Hey . . .I haven't heard you guys fight in a really long time. High five for everyone!”
This is what the business of family looks like, the business of marriage, the legacy of love that we take our relationships as seriously as we treat work outside of our homes. We take it so seriously, we are actually tracking KPIs through our meeting agenda.
And our reward? An unsolicited kudos that hugged us with the sentiment, “thank y'all for honoring me in this very pow erful way.”
And if you would like to practice our family meeting, I have a template. I'm happy to share it with you. Just click on the link, sign up for it.
You'll get an email. Tweak it. Make it your own. The most important thing is to do it consistently. That is the one thing that I'm very thankful to my husband for. He has the discipline of a pro athlete. We rarely miss a meeting unless mom wigs out and forgets to put something on the calendar.
Treating our family like a business has changed all of us in very meaningful ways. I believe it can do the same for yours. So click on the link and download your copy of our family meeting, which got us an A++ from our own child who was once terrified to hear mom and dad having disagreements. The same child who was tired and afraid each time we had a blow up is now giving us kudos for honoring him as a very important part of our family.
He doesn't want to hear it.
I believe all of our children deserve room, to have a voice at the table. What do you think?
Be blessed and encouraged,
Judge Char
Human connection disclosure: This post is 100% human curated and is not generated by Ai.
