HURT MORE, SUFFER LESS
“A well-thought-out principle and long-term view can guide decision making in preference to acting on feelings and anxiety in the moment” (Kerr, 2019).
It hurts more in the ‘here and now’ to manage one’s own impulse to react. My older child has hit my younger child, my partner has not offered to pick me up from the airport on my way back from a work trip, my best friend has not returned my calls. What ‘hurts’ in the moment when one chooses not to yell, not to distance and not to complain, is experiencing the discomfort of one’s heart racing, one’s chest tightening, one’s irritability increasing. In the here and now of one’s automatic reactivity we do not pay attention to what we are actually experiencing. Unless we train ourselves to observe our physiology and feeling state in the moment, we are not present to it, we simply jump from ‘I don’t like what you are doing’ to reacting to what the other is doing. We do not see our part in the dance: the part where we are reacting to someone else’s action or reaction. It is not pleasant to observe our anxiety and stress response, which is why instead of observing it we react. A reaction is an action fuelled by an emotion/feeling/stress-response. Instead of observing our internal process we act on it. Observing the process allows us to slow down enough to have choice in the moment and ask ourselves: How do I want to respond? How do I want to behave? How do I want to be? We can still experience the reactive process internally but we do not necessarily have to act on it externally. If we can engage the ‘thinking’ (cortical) process rather than the emotional (sub-cortical) process we can choose how to respond. Accessing the cortical components of the intellectual system enables human beings to think, reason, reflect and use those abilities to exert some control over some of our emotional reactivity. The (relatively) recently evolved cortical circuits enable self-regulation, a key ingredient for deciding how we want to behave in response to others. Choosing to ‘hurt’ more and do something different in the short term allows us to suffer less in the long term. When we can quell our impulses we interrupt the chain reactions, the emotional reactivity ceases to cycle from one person to the other person and back again. This does not mean we cannot or should not respond and clarify our thinking to the other: I am not willing to buy you ice cream when you hit your brother; I would really appreciate you to picking me up from the airport when I am tired from a work trip; I am confused about you not returning my calls and it effects my capacity to be present in our friendship. Yet this way of being more of a ‘defined self’ in relationship to another, whereby we share our thinking and what we would like, is a thoughtful process guided by principles rather than an automatic process guided by feelings and emotions. If we don’t apply a long term vision to the here and now we extend the suffering by perpetuating the ill feeling in ourselves and others. Hurting more by feeling the feelings and observing the stress-response in the moment leads us to suffer less in the long term. We have not perpetuated the emotional chain reaction in ourselves which will make us feel angry, sad, anxious, guilty, etc., and which in turn will invite the other to react back.
