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Yesterday, I watched my son experience an emotional storm. We were in afternoon traffic, and he realized that he had left his new favorite book from the library on the outside playground where it would lay for the weekend, and probably get wet and ruined in the spring rains. The librarian had let him take out an extra book, which was a personal favor, and then he had let it outside, and we weren’t going to go back for it in that amount of traffic!
I learned all this information later, because what I saw in that moment was an emotional storm.
A gasp, a “Oh no!” and then a series of hard cries. I’m catching hints of “My book!” and “Miss Laura’s going to be so mad!” and I’m encouraging him to breathe through it. During the emotional storm is not the time to try to talk it through.
Followed by… him promptly stopping the entire storm, shutting down all emotions, opening another book, clearing his throat, and beginning to read.
Whoa. Those were major emotions! They took over like a storm! Since when do we just shut it down and open another book?
I am driving the car, slowly through the traffic jam, and thinking, “My oh my! This is the stage we are in, is it? Boyhood where we have learned to shut off the emotions and distract ourselves?” So I did what any mindfulness educator, men’s coach, proponent of healthy masculinity would do! And I asked him to close his book and rewind with me.
Reluctantly, he did, but it took some time.
When the emotional storm took over, he felt so bad. I think I actually heard him say in there, “Oh no, I’m gonna die!” So he went from realization to absolute overwhelm in a matter of seconds. And then, not knowing what to do, he had shut it all down. That is a LOT of emotion and foregone conclusion to just shut down! That gets trapped in the body, trapped in the psyche, and no solution arises from that. This is how we stuff emotions, but it’s not the ideal way to manage.
We started by breathing. I specifically asked him to make his exhales longer than his inhales, which helps to quickly bring the parasympathetic nervous system back online. That’s the part of the nervous system that helps us to calm, rest, and digest. The sympathetic nervous system is the one that scans for and reacts to threat, in the fight/flight/freeze mechanism.
When people are not able to speak rationally, they are in fight/flight and it is not a good time to try to have a conversation. In fact, it’s impossible. I used to be a school principal, and what do most people do when two kids have a scuffle? They want them to immediately talk about it. Nope. It is not even physiologically possible to rationalize after the brain has just freaked out.
When someone is able to breathe deeply again, and rationalize, then they are ready for the next steps. After he was able to breathe and there was evidence the storm had passed, I asked him for the details.
And then something interesting happened. I asked him for potential solutions, and he just said, “I just don’t know.” It was a literal roadblock, all around! The brain is not able to solve problems if in a recent freak out, and, we need help finding solutions to problems! There is often a lot of social and internalized pressure for men of all ages to just know what to do. I was surprised that he had zero ideas on how to problem solve this. We needed to do this together, and it was vulnerable, so I needed to go slow and continue encouraging even when I might have had my own judgements of how it should be handled.
After we’d problem solved, we talked about the decision to just open the book and avoid all of the emotional storm and the problem solving. Since the storm had passed, he had checked in with his breath and body and was feeling better, and he’d now problem solved, I could point to the fact that none of that would have happened if he had just kept the book open and avoided the process.
He agreed.
Emotional processing and regulation are not something we just naturally know how to do. It takes intention, time, practice. And it’s never too late to learn. The brain is able to rewire old patterns at any time, and emotional awareness through the lens of watching the body sensations is a really helpful tool that not many of us practice. If you are someone that escalates quickly or becomes reactive and want to learn new skills to experience emotions and gain greater connection to self and others as a result, stick around for more articles in this weekly column, drop a comment, or visit my website. I’d love to hear from you.
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