IIC 9: The Flip Side of the Huge Mistake We Make with Our Emotions in a Crisis

Dr. Peter discusses the flip side of neglecting emotions — that is, letting our emotions dominate us in a crisis. This episode, we review a quick, effective way to calm down when your emotions run high.

[00:00:11] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in a time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 9, launching on April 17th, 2020, and it’s entitled The Flip Side of the Huge Mistake We Make with Our Emotions in a Crisis. In episode 7, one week ago, we discussed how some of us make the huge mistake of neglecting our emotions, of disregarding them, of disconnecting from them. We discuss the costs of that neglect. We discussed why we suppress or neglect our emotions. So if you’d like, go back to episode 7. Listen to that if you didn’t have a chance to listen to it last week. Today we discussed the flip side of that huge mistake, and that is the mistake of being dominated by our emotions. Heartset is essentially the positions we take because of our feelings, and heartset is one of the four pillars of psychological resilience, which we covered in episode 4 of this podcast. So today we’re working through what happens when we’re dominated by our emotions. And at the end of the podcast, I’m going to give you a handy tip for you to help yourself when you feel dominated by your emotions.

[00:01:37] I’m going to show you what I do when I’m feeling a lot of emotional intensity, a quick technique to help you calm down and get recentered. So quick review here, because this cannot be stressed enough. Emotions are not morally right or wrong. They come up spontaneously. They’re outside of the influence of the will. They’re outside of the intellect. And so therefore they’re called first moral acts. They don’t carry a moral weight until they’re acted upon in some way. That’s when the moral quality comes in, when we do something with that anger, right, or when we don’t do something with that anger, or with that sadness or with that jealousy. So emotions, even the ones that we consider “negative,” they don’t carry a moral weight until we do something with them. But we often feel that those emotions carry a moral weight. And why is that? Why do we condemn some emotions and approve of others? Well, we have an innate sense of right and wrong. It’s our conscience. But we also learn what’s right and wrong by what our parents reward and punish. Feelings that our parents like are rewarded. Feelings that our parents don’t like are often punished when we’re little. Parents like pleasant feelings in their children and they don’t like the unpleasant feelings. So feelings that are generally considered “negative,” anger, disappointment, sadness, fear, parents sometimes don’t tolerate these emotions very well in their children.

[00:03:17] Let’s just take anger as an example. A lot of parents don’t tolerate anger in their children very well at all. In some cases, no expression of anger is tolerated by the parent. So no matter how a little child attempts to express anger, it’s rejected. So if you’re a little kid, and no matter what you do to express anger, if you get punished for it because you’re being mouthy or you’re being disrespectful, or you’re not honoring your father and your mother, or all the other ways that parents can come down on kids for expressing anger, even when it’s developmentally appropriate, you’re going to associate punishment not with all the ways that you expressed anger, but with the anger itself. With the anger itself. So there’s this association that every time I’m angry, I get punished. So anger must be bad. So there’s a couple of things here for parents. One is always make sure that you’re pointing out the behavior that you’re disciplining, not the emotion, right? Otherwise kids get very wrapped up in, feelings are bad. Certain feelings are bad. Also, kids are not very nuanced when they express, especially when they’re little, they’re not very nuanced when they express their anger. Right? I hate you, mommy. You’re a bad mommy. How many times have mothers heard that from kids that are just learning to express emotions? And sometimes that’s really threatening to a parent.

[00:04:51] Sometimes that really sinks in hard. And it can lead to a parent’s own anger coming up, or their own sadness coming up, or their own fear coming up. So they shut it down in the children so as to not be destabilized themselves. And there’s something adaptive about that. There’s something protective about that. And it’s helpful in a way, in the short run, but it also leads kids to like have these conflicts about their emotions and about how to express them and how to express them appropriately. Also, there are no people on earth better able to confront parents with their inadequacies than their children. Kids have a way of getting right under our skin as parents. And so what do we as parents do? Oftentimes, we try to regulate that. We try to like get those emotions under control. One of the things that I see often as a psychologist is that parents will ban certain words. Like hate often is a word that gets banned in households, right? Because we don’t like the thought that kids might actually hate each other, that siblings might actually hate each other. That’s such a strong word, Dr. Peter, they tell me. It’s such a strong word. They don’t really hate each other. They’re irritated with each other. No. Siblings hate each other.

[00:06:12] It’s a strong word because there are strong emotions. I think some of the time parents try to minimize the intensity of that emotion because it’s threatening to the parents. Getting rid of words like hate is like burning a map. It doesn’t destroy the territory. It just makes it harder to talk about what’s really going on in kids’ lives. So now it’s confession time. We used to ban words, also. When I was a young parent, I thought also that if you banned the words, you wouldn’t actually have the problems that the words represented. And one of the words that we banned when I was but a wee parent was the word stupid. It was one of the things that my kids would call each other. My oldest kids would call each other when they were eight and six years old, my oldest two. And one day I was coming into the living room when my eight year old daughter, with her big brown eyes full of intensity and full of anger towards her younger brother, had in a very loud pitch of voice informed him in no uncertain words that he was a stu-, And then she saw me. She saw that look that dads give their daughters, dads give their sons across the room. She was caught in the middle of the forbidden word. But she’s a quick thinker, my oldest daughter. She saw me. She assessed the situation.

[00:07:40] She came up with a brilliant solution. You’re a stew pot. Called him a stew pot. It actually was hilarious. We all broke out laughing. My wife was there. We were all laughing about it, about her creativity. And it was in that moment that I realized, you can’t ban these words. Banning a word is not going to actually make the feelings that go behind those words go away. Now, there are certainly words should be banned that are that are obscene, right, that are swear words. Other things like that. We certainly don’t want to have that kind of language in our houses. But words like stupid, words like hatred, these are words that convey things that are important for kids to be able to convey. We don’t want to ban those. There’s another way that parents can put their kids at a disadvantage when it comes to managing their emotions. And these are the really laissez faire or the really lax families in which children are not taught to regulate their emotions. These are the ones where kids kind of run wild. There aren’t standards in the family home to help those children contain those emotions. So they just allow all kinds of emotional expressions and this laid back acceptance of all emotions. The child learns to accept all kinds of emotional expressions. All emotions are validated, so they all must reflect truth.

[00:09:10] One complicating factor in all of this too is the temperaments of the children. This stuff is really complex. But here’s where Saint Therese of Lisieux is an example. She had a very intense emotional temperament, and some kids do. Some children have very intense emotional temperaments. They have much more difficulty with regulating their emotions than other kids. Saint Therese of Lisieux was an example of this. She really struggled with managing her emotions and prayed about it a lot and worked on it a lot in order to develop emotional maturity. There’s two major ways to be dominated by our emotions. One is to be overwhelmed by emotion, and then we wind up driven by our passions, and we might lash out in anger, or we may flee in fear when we shouldn’t, or we may break down in sadness. That’s one way. That’s the obvious way. Another way that’s not so obvious to be dominated by our emotions is to give them too much weight in our thinking. So, for example, you might hold a grudge against someone, harbor resentment toward that person, bitterness in your heart. You’re not overwhelmed by emotion, but you’re letting that emotion really drive the way that you’re interacting with that person, the way that you’re perceiving that person, the way that you’re interpreting that person’s behavior, the way that you are reading that person. So you’re not overwhelmed with emotion, but you’re allowing that emotion to have an undue influence on the way that you’re interacting or the way that you’re considering that person.

[00:10:47] When we allow ourselves to be dominated by emotions, and when we assume that our emotions just reflect reality, our heartset leads us to a mindset of what’s called subjectivism. And subjectivism is a philosophical position that basically says, my subjective experience is what is true. My subjective experience, my feelings, my intuitions, that just reflects what is. If I feel it, it must be true. And that’s where you get into these weird types of dynamics in which people say, well, I have my truth and you have your truth, which is an abuse of the word truth. What they’re saying essentially is I have my internal experience and you have your internal experience. And maybe those experiences reflect something about what’s actually real, or maybe they don’t, because our emotions can be very, very fickle and they can be very unreliable guides for recognizing what is actually true. So we want our emotions to be integrated and we want them to be regulated. So what do I do when I’m struggling with intense emotions? I actually feel things really intensely. I have very strong emotions. And I have spent a long time learning how to regulate those emotions without stifling them. And so there are times during the day where I feel intense emotion.

[00:12:15] And so I have a four step plan to help me get through times of emotional overwhelm. And the first thing is to breathe because that sends a message to your nervous system. It sends a message to your autonomic nervous system that it’s okay to be calm, right? This is a very body-based thing. We’re starting to get into a little bit of bodyset here, where we start talking about how do we incorporate our bodies. So we take a quick inhale and a slow exhale. And I do two of those. And I say the holy names, the holy names of our Lord Jesus Christ and of our Blessed Mother Mary. So kind of goes like this. Quick inhale, slow exhale. And silently I say inside, Jesus. Inhale. Exhale. Mary. And that’s a form of prayer, right there, invoking the names of Jesus and Mary reverently as our bodies are calming down. And then I take a recommendation from Saint Therese of Lisieux, who also struggled with really intense emotions. And that is to confide all of that internal experience, those emotions, those impulses, those desires, those attitudes, whatever is going on inside, to tell Mary, especially I tell Mother Mary, that’s who I go to. I just tell her whatever I’m experiencing, no matter what it is. Just share it with her. It’s just like when you’re a little kid and a little kid is able to share what he or she is experiencing with mom, is able to get it out, to put it into words. It has this huge calming effect.

[00:14:07] And when I am able to pray that out and confide in my Blessed Mother, in my mother, what I’m experiencing, I’m able to calm down more rapidly. So that’s the third part. First part, breathing, second part, invoking the Holy Names, third part, confiding my internal experience to Mary. And the fourth part is to listen. Because there’s a moment there after I’ve confided where I want to be able to take in whatever she wants to tell me as my mother. And so it’s really important to create that space, to be able to listen, to be deliberate. And also throughout all of this, I’m slowing down. I’m calming down. I’m getting recollected. I’m getting centered again, grounded in the present, being able to let go of whatever’s agitating me. That’s really important when we have these moments in these troubled times that we’re in. It’s also been important for me in actually doing this podcast. I totally underestimated how much work and how much learning would go into this podcast. I was really optimistic about, you know, how I would do with this. It’s actually turned out to be kind of like building an ark. It’s not working out the way I expected.

[00:15:29] It’s interesting because I’ve always thought of myself as a good public speaker, you know? But when you’re actually in a room and you don’t have your audience right in front of you, I mean, I lose a whole a whole set of feedback. I cannot see people’s eyes. I can’t see their body language. You know, we’re speaking over this medium of the internet and it’s much, much different. So it’s been much more of a challenge to find out how to connect with you. So it’s been amazing in the last few days because several of the listeners have reached out. I’ve gotten phone calls and emails that have just been so affirming and so gratifying and so helpful to me. I’m really appreciative of that. So I want to thank all of you that reached out to me and contacted me, that gave me recommendations. I’m really happy that we were able to connect and to be able to talk. It was great to be able to hear how this podcast has been impacting you. So I want to especially thank Christine, and Jane, and Sylvia, Bridget, Joyce, Diane, Julie. Thank you, all of you, for getting in touch with me and letting me know how this has impacted you. I really appreciate that. There have not been a lot of consolations in doing this podcast up till this point.

[00:16:50] And it’s been really humbling, frankly. It’s been really good for me in the spiritual life because it’s helped me to really approach this with a beginner’s mind. We’re working on a forum for how we can connect. As I was listening to the stories and the themes that were coming up, I’ve been really thinking about, okay, how do I get these people together? How can I pull together a group of people who devoutly embrace the Catholic faith, who live a life of prayer and sacrifice, who are convinced of the importance of psychology? These aren’t just dabblers. You’re not just dabblers, people that are interested in it, but who see psychology is essential in this day and age, essential for human formation, and who value that human formation, not just the spiritual formation. People who are willing to change and to grow, who want to apply what they’re learning in this podcast and what they’re learning from Souls and Hearts. It’s experiential learning, not just some dry academic exercise. And who are willing and able to use the technology that we have at Souls and Hearts that have to be able to use the internet and so forth, who can engage remotely. And what I’m finding out is that so often people that meet these four things, especially the interest in psychology and the value of psychology, they don’t have a lot of people that they’re talking to about it.

[00:18:11] They feel kind of siloed or kind of isolated. And if that’s you, I really want Souls and Hearts to be a place where you can come together with like-minded Catholics and that we can grow together, and that we can journey on this pilgrimage of life together. Feedback is going to continue to make this better. Please let me know what you’re thinking. Email me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com. My voicemail is (317) 567-9594. Feel free to leave me a voicemail if that’s easier for you. Now, I’ll warn you, sometimes I do pick up. Some people were surprised when they thought they were just going to leave me a voicemail, and I actually had really pleasant conversations with folks. So thank you for those calls. Please let me know what you need. People are starting to give me recommendations for topics for future podcasts, things that they’re struggling with, that they would like me to be able to comment on. So I’m super excited about all of the good work we can do together. I’m thankful for you. I pray for you every day. I beg you to pray for me. I also think that a lot of it’s going to be the sacrifices, right? The little things that we give up or the big things that we give up. So prayer, fasting, you know, sacrifice, even in the season of Easter that we’re now in.

[00:19:35] There are times where that’s really appropriate and helpful. Those sacrifices. So know that you’re near and dear to me. You’re in my heart. It’s been so great to get to know some of you. I look forward to getting to know more of you. I’m also looking forward to getting together on webinars as soon as we can get a critical mass of like 25 people that have registered. We’re going to start talking about how we can come together in various ways in other formats other than this podcast. This podcast is going to stay a solid, twice-weekly touchstone or touchpoint for all of us to be able to get together, but we’re looking for more ways that we can interact interpersonally. Sign up for this podcast at soulsandhearts.com on the Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem page and you’ll get the Wednesday email that I put out. It’s got sneak peeks and extra tips and other little things that I put in there just to kind of help us keep connected in the middle of the week, on that Wednesday, which happens to land right between when the episodes come out on Mondays and Fridays. So know that you’re near and dear to me. And with that, we’ll wrap this episode up. We’ll invoke our patroness and our patron. Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.