Thursday, October 23, 2008

epiphany

I felt like I had a breakthrough the other day. On Sunday morning we were late getting out the door to church as usual and I felt all pressured and stressed and sort of pissed off. Then I thought about how anger is always a secondary emotion so I thought "what is it that I'm actually upset about?" and I realized I was sad about being late because I was scheduled to help in the nursery and I didn't want to be late for that and disappoint Amy (who coordinates the church nursery). So I thought about that and just let myself be sad about it while I finished getting ready, and it actually felt sort of nice, me with my sadness, just sitting with it and accepting it and letting myself think about it. So I got the kids in the car in a calm and orderly fashion when usually I would be being huffy and bossy and "come ON, we're LATE!" about it all. But we were able to get out the door all calmly and have a happy drive there.

This was big for me because my growing up was marked by rushing around and being late and us all blaming each other. Now I feel like I have one more tool towards turning the tide in my own little family.

3 comments:

Kami Crawford said...

I liked this. This is good for me to remember too. What is at the root of why I'm being all pissy with my family? Cause I hate it when I'm like that too, but I think its really helpful to step back and reflect on why. Thanks for this post, Stephanie.

D. Lee Grooms said...

Late is almost never fun, but huffy-late is the worst—it can tank a whole day (at least) and just makes it that much harder to ever want to do anything or go anywhere in the future. That almost invariably, makes us run late again. Vicious cycle much?

Losing the time, missing out on things, possibly letting others down, and having our shortcomings exposed all suck, but the rot of that cycle seems almost exponentially more damaging.

stephy said...

Yeah...being upset about something (in this case, being late) triggers an anger reaction...and that anger is just a symptom of either sadness, fear or hurt, but it's much easier to access anger than sadness. So we just deal with the symptom and don't get to the true source of our sadness/hurt/fear...