What does it mean to you?
Of all the questions I ask people, this is probably the one that gets me the most annoyed responses. It’s not that I ask it in a mean way (I try to avoid that) or that the question is difficult to understand (it really isn’t).
People get upset because when I ask them this question I am usually trying to move them from an ‘orbital emotion’, and into a directional, or a ‘vectored emotion’.
Ok, sorry… that probably needs an explanation.
An orbital emotion is one that just goes round and around. Like a satellite in orbit, it never really goes anywhere, it just does the same thing over and over, never progressing, never changing. It probably gets you some kind of need fulfillment, but you don’t grow from it.
A ‘vectored emotion’ is one that has a direction, and technically a speed as well. It gets you somewhere, but it often requires effort to get you there. You can grow from it if you handle it correctly, but chances are in the short term it’s going to be hard going.
When I ask the question above, it’s usually because the person I’m talking to is doing orbits in either the emotion of anger, or the emotion of sadness. Not that either of these are necessarily bad, but they are response emotions, which do not get us to the heart of the problem.
Think about it for a minute, and tell me if I’m wrong.
You never get angry without some emotion precipitating the anger. Maybe it’s a feeling of being disrespected, or mistreated, or devalued, or even physical pain. There is always an interpretation of a stimulus, creating an emotion, that you then get angry about.
It’s the same with sadness. In the absence of mental illness, sadness requires some kind of stimulus to provoke it. Maybe it’s grief at the breakup of a relationship where you feel like you have been torn from all that you knew by the acts of another.
Maybe it’s at the passing of years that you will never get back (loss again) and the bitter taste of regret (so a sense of failure).
However we get there, the orbital emotions are not of themselves bad unless we stop there. Anger or sadness are signs that we need to go deeper, and find the real meaning behind that emotion.
Unfortunately, going deeper is a direction, and that usually requires effort and often the acceptance of some pain for a while, until we can find a new balance to our emotions.
And sometimes when I ask the question, I know it’s going to annoy the person, but I feel that it’s necessary to break them out of their current orbit.
Staying in orbit will never get you the answers you seek. Eventually you’ve got to come down to earth, spend some time in your deeper self, and truly face what hurt you, and deal with it.
And that hurts.
But it’s the only way you’ll ever move beyond where you are right now.
-- Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings