In psychologist Guy Winch’s book The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships, and Enhance Self-Esteem, I came across one of the most descriptive explanations of how to handle the emotional load of uncomfortable situations.
What we call feelings are complex experiences composed of several elements. Anger, frustration, sadness, rage, exasperation, etc., are our subjective experiences (“feelings”) of particular events in our life.
First, these emotional experiences are always accompanied by physiological reactions: potential elevated heart rate and blood pressure, stress hormones possibly released into the bloodstream, the electrodermal activity (the electrical chemical conductivity) of our skin has probably changed too.
Then, we have the behavioural expressions of our emotional state: our voice can change dramatically, our faces tighten, redden or pale, our eyes bulge or weep.
The last component of emotional responses is our thoughts and beliefs about our emotional experience. For example, if we are too late for a family reunion, we might believe we are terrible people for missing it.
If we want to change how we react to an upsetting situation, which one of these three components of our emotional experiences would most effectively bring a balanced and reasonable emotional response?
By far, the most challenging component to fully manipulate would be our physiological responses. We can try to lower our heart rates or blood pressure by counting to ten or breathing in and out, but adequately controlling our nervous system (dropping our blood pressure or heart rates at will) is not realistically possible for most of us.
As we all are social creatures, a significant, if not the most important, part of why we are doing things in a certain way is because other people are watching. And so, when we are watched, we control our behavioural expressions by hiding them, smiling when we feel rage, being quiet when we want to spew fire. Containing the behavioural manifestations of our emotions by hiding them is called suppression.
Some of the behaviours we suppress are what make us civilized. In a book I read as a child, The Code of the Good Manners by Aurelia Marinescu, the author described a mother’s and daughter’s dialogue. Another person invited them to lunch, and the daughter asked what she should do if she didn’t like the food and felt sick. The mother replied that the daughter would have to wait to feel sick until she returned home.
Suppression might be efficient in some cases. If we lose a flight, angrily approaching the clerk to put us on the waiting list will do no favours. Instead, we might suppress our frustration by speaking slowly, maybe forcing a smile, even if our hands are clenching under the clerk’s desk.
We still experiment with all the devastating effects of uncomfortable emotions with suppression, but we focus on hiding them from the outside world. As in the words of the glorious Queen, “Inside my heart is breaking / My makeup may be flaking / But my smile, still, stays on.” Watching poker players with their “poker face” is suppression in action.
The last component of our emotional response that we can modify is our thoughts and beliefs about our emotional experience. Psychologists call this technique cognitive reappraisal (it is called reappraisal because we reframe or reinterpret our appraisal of our subjective interpretations of stimuli and experiences).
We all use a combination of suppression and cognitive reappraisal (reframing) in our daily lives. Some of us might use suppression more, and others might favour reframing.
Not surprisingly, reframing our perspective on a situation to decrease its negative power over us is far superior to suppressing or manipulating our physiological responses.
There are a few methods to apply cognitive reappraisal. First, we have positive reframing, a way of thinking positively about a challenging situation.
- Are there any lessons to learn?
- Are there any positive outcomes from this situation?
- Are we grateful for any part of this situation?
- Can we grow as a result of this situation?
An example of positive reframing is the following poem written by Kurt Vonnegut.
JOE HELLER
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!
Another strategy for cognitive reappraisal is recognizing that thoughts are merely guesses, not facts.
Examples of reframing are how parents can help children reframe thinking about homework as a transferable skill to apply to real-world scenarios. Or can we use reframing against procrastination by realizing that we don’t need to feel a specific state to start a task. Doing is a choice that shouldn’t depend on feeling. The actual click as a parent for me happened when I began to use reframing more than suppression.
To recap, we can modify any of the three characteristics of an emotion (physiological reactions, behavioural expressions or beliefs) to make them more bearable. Changing our beliefs or perceptions about a problematic situation has the highest chance of altering the emotional impact of that situation.
Unfortunately, we can’t escape our automatic responses most of the time.
And still…
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Viktor Frankl, Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor