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What do you do when the interlocutor unleashes his anger on you? Do you respond to him with the same aggression, start making excuses or trying to calm him down? To help another, you must first stop your own «emotional bleeding,» says clinical psychologist Aaron Carmine.
Many people are not accustomed to putting their own interests first, but in conflict situations it is normal to take care of yourself first. This is not a manifestation of selfishness. Selfishness — to care only about yourself, spitting on others.
We are talking about self-preservation — you must first help yourself so that you have the strength and the opportunity to help others. To be a good husband or wife, parent, child, friend, and worker, we must take care of our own needs first.
Take for example the emergencies on the plane, which we are told about in the briefing before the flight. Selfishness — put an oxygen mask on yourself and forget about everyone else. Complete dedication to putting on masks on everyone around us when we ourselves are suffocating. Self-preservation — putting on a mask on ourselves first so that we can help those around us.
We can accept the feelings of the interlocutor, but disagree with his view of the facts.
School doesn’t teach us how to deal with situations like this. Perhaps the teacher advised not to pay attention when they call us bad words. And what, this advice helped? Of course not. It’s one thing to ignore someone’s idiotic remark, it’s quite another to feel like a “rag”, allow yourself to be insulted and ignore the damage that someone does to our self-esteem and self-respect.
What is Emotional First Aid?
1. Do what you love
We spend a lot of energy trying to please others or leave them dissatisfied. We need to stop doing unnecessary things and start doing something constructive, making independent decisions that are consistent with our principles. Perhaps this will require us to stop doing what we have to do and take care of our own happiness.
2. Use your experience and common sense
We are adults, and we have enough experience to understand which words of the interlocutor make sense, and what he says only to hurt us. You don’t have to take it personally. His anger is the adult version of a childish tantrum.
He tries to intimidate and uses provocative statements and a hostile tone to demonstrate superiority and force submission. We can accept his feelings but disagree with his view of the facts.
Instead of giving in to the instinctive desire to defend yourself, it is better to use common sense. If you feel like you’re starting to take the torrent of abuse to heart, as if the words really reflect your worth as a person, tell yourself «stop!» After all, that is what they want from us.
He is trying to elevate himself by bringing us down because he desperately needs self-affirmation. Adult self-respecting people do not have such a need. It is inherent in those who lack self-respect. But we will not answer him the same. We won’t belittle him any further.
3. Don’t let your emotions take over
We can take back control of the situation by remembering that we have a choice. In particular, we control everything we say. We may feel like explaining, defending, arguing, appeasing, counterattacking, or giving in and submitting, but we can restrain ourselves from doing so.
We are no worse than anyone in the world, we are not obliged to take the words of the interlocutor literally. We can acknowledge his feelings: “I think you feel bad,” “It must be very painful,” or keep the opinion to ourselves.
We use common sense and decide to remain silent. He still wouldn’t listen to us
We decide what we want to reveal and when. At the moment, we can decide not to say anything, because there is no point in saying anything right now. He is not interested in listening to us.
This does not mean that we «ignore» it. We make a conscious decision to give his accusations exactly the attention they deserve—not at all. We just pretend to listen. You can nod for show.
We decide to remain calm, not fall for his hook. He is not capable of provoking us, words have nothing to do with us. There is no need to answer, we use common sense and decide to remain silent. He wouldn’t listen to us anyway.
4. Get your self-respect back
If we took his insults personally, we were in a losing position. He is in control. But we can regain our self-respect by reminding ourselves that we are valuable despite all our flaws and all our imperfections.
Despite everything that has been said, we are no less valuable to humanity than anyone else. Even if his accusations are true, it only proves that we are imperfect, like everyone else. Our «imperfection» angered him, which we can only regret.
His criticism does not reflect our value. But still it is not easy not to slide into doubt and self-criticism. To maintain self-respect, remind yourself that his words are the words of a child in hysterics, and they do not help him or us in any way.
We are quite capable of restraining ourselves and not succumbing to the temptation to give the same childish, immature answer. After all, we are adults. And we decide to switch to another «mode». We decide to give ourselves emotional help first, and then respond to the interlocutor. We decide to calm down.
We remind ourselves that we are not worthless. This does not mean that we are better than others. We are part of humanity, just like everyone else. The interlocutor is not better than us, and we are not worse than him. We are both imperfect human beings, with a lot of past that affects our relationship to each other.
About the author: Aaron Carmine is a clinical psychologist at Urban Balance Psychological Services in Chicago.