How to Tolerate an Emotional Situation

Everyone has to deal with emotional situations that they do not like. These emotional situations can be very uncomfortable. They can result in us feeling embarrassed, guilty, disappointed, sad, frustrated, fearful, or other emotions that we do not like to experience.

Pairing

Our body is programmed to keep us alive. When an emotional response to a situation is intense and painful, our body will remember that situation. It will then turn on a sympathetic nervous system (survival) response when we see the situation or one that resembles it. Our body will pair specific contexts with the sympathetic (survival) response.

Contexts

As we move through a relationship with someone, our body starts to label specific contexts as dangerous. These contexts will be anything that caused a painful physical, spiritual, financial, or emotional feeling in the past. When these contexts appear, our body will turn its survival response. When that response is on, the body will proceed to remove the threat. It will do this by using distancing, controlling, or using anger.

Some of these contexts might include, date night, phrases such as “we need to talk,” certain topics, your spouse’s irritable mood, or your child misbehaving in public. The body is not very good at distinguishing contexts either. The body will often react with a survival response towards anything resembling the fearful context.

Repairing (pun intended)

The body can learn to pair a different physiological response to a specific context. For example, if you watch a horror movie about someone getting killed in the bathroom, you will probably feel anxious and fearful every time you go to the bathroom. After visiting the bathroom for a few weeks and having nothing bad happening to you, your body will stop pairing the bathroom with a survival response.

You have a lot of control over your body’s ability to pair a different physiological response with a specific context. All you have to do is calmly experience a different emotion, in the context. Then do so repeatedly, until your body understands that the context is not a danger to you.

For example, a fearful context might be my spouse saying, “we need to talk.” It is fearful because when she points out my mistakes, I feel embarrassed. Feeling embarrassed makes me feel anxious. It makes me feel so anxious that my body has decided that the “feeling of embarrassment” is also a context that is a danger to me. To teach my body not to turn on the survival response in that context, I first need to teach my body that the “feeling of embarrassment” is not a danger. The second thing that I need to do is to teach my body that the phrase, “we need to talk,” is not a danger either.

In order to teach my body that the “feeling of embarrassment” is not a danger, I need to calmly experience the feeling, whenever it arises. If I really want to train my body quickly, then I will take time out of the day, every day, to feel embarrassed in a calm manner. I will even make the event as boring as possible, because my body will never label a boring event as “dangerous.” To make the event boring, I will spend an extended period of time experiencing the “feeling of embarrassment.” I will sit in a room and for thirty minutes to an hour, I will do nothing but experience the emotion and remember times I was embarrassed. I will do this every day. At the end of the week, my body will be so bored by the experience that it will no longer label “feeling embarrassment” as a danger.

I will then do the same thing with the phrase, “we need to talk.” I will spend time picturing the moment happening. I will imagine the worse possible scenario. I will repeat the scene in my head for thirty to sixty minutes every day. I will maintain a sense of calm the entire time. When the scene happens in real life, I will calmly experience it, so my body will decide that the specific context is no longer a danger.

There is a danger that a person must absolutely be aware of when teaching their body to be calm in a specific context. If I am experiencing a context, and I become anxious and leave the context, I will be training by body that the context is a danger to me. For example, If I am imagining the “we need to talk” scene, and I become so anxious in my imagination that I stop trying to imagine it in a calm manner, then I will effectively teach my body that the context is a danger.

If I am having a real “we need to talk” conversation with my spouse and I get anxious, there is nothing wrong with leaving so I can take time to cool down, as long as I return and finish the conversation in a calm manner. In fact, it is wiser to leave the real conversation, cool down, and return, then it is to try to push through it. This is because, pushing forward in the conversation will probably result in escalated anxiety and escalated conflict, which will definitely teach the body that the context is a danger to me.

It doesn’t matter what emotion I experience. It doesn’t have to be a happy emotion. I just need to experience the emotion in a calm manner. As long as I’m calm, when I experience the context, the context will not be registered as a threat. My body will then not respond to the context in a survival mode.