Image credit: Vanessa Brantley Newton
The specifics of what happens when exploring emotional matters
Here are the 5 steps of emotional healing that Gael Lindefield outlines in her book, The Emotional Healing Strategy, that has helped me understand a lot of what was going on when someone was revealing their vulnerability and their conversation partner was fixing, rejecting, or numbing - hence upping the emotional display that they were trying to avoid:
- Exploration: first the person has to search for what it exactly is
- Expression: give voice/shape to the intensity of the feeling associated with the circumstances
- Comfort: get human warmth (I'm sorry, that must be really tough, I'm so happy for you, etc. = empathy)
- Compensation: get something good to compensate for the bad stuff (give yourself -or get- a bath, a training, etc.)
- Perspective: learn something as result of it - but never as a first step: you will only get more despair, anger, sadness, etc. and A LOT of resistance to you. Nothing can get in at this point, when they are supposed to be taking care of and feeling their own emotion. This is fundamental: just like with children, connect with the emotion/heart (appease them by being there with them in the emotion), then with the brain.