You can choose to respond rather than react

 We have all been in situations where the person we are talking is created a very intense emotional reaction inside us. In general, the way you might deal with it would be to get angry or sad, and eventually express these emotions by yelling, or saying things you do not mean. Great, that's called reacting. In order words, your emotional reaction, together with you twisted perception of the reality, took over control and decided for you what was the best behaviour to adopt. And there are several problems with this approach. 

The first one is the one we actually already mentioned. You might do and say things you don't mean. And this can lead to an escalade of violence. That's the very basic reaction circle between two persons arguing. Person A says something, thinking that it's ok. Person B gets upset, and react by saying something upsetting. Person A is now upset and tries to upset Person B, who is already upset. So Person B might start to be violent, verbally, physically, it doesn't matter at this point. The point is: there is no positive outcome from this situation. You might end up being in a long term conflict with a friend, just because of "stupid" argument. 

The second point I want to raise here is that this process is mentally exhausting. When you start reacting violently to triggers (oh, finally this word is out), this drains your energy. A lot. Why should you waste your energy into fights that are not worth? I am sure you have better things to do with that energy. 

A little disclaimer here: I'm not saying that you should avoid conflict at all cost because it is tiring. I am saying that you should not react when being in a conflicted situation. Instead, one should try to respond. But this takes a bit of understanding, time, and practice. So what's responding?

To make it clearer, I'm gonna go through an example. It's Saturday morning, I am supposed to go for a hike with some friends. I'm the driver, and I told them to meet me at the car at 10 am. But they are late. 10 minutes, 15 minutes... I start to feel angry. Badly angry. When they finally arrive, I am cold and mean to them, no yelling but a very passive agressive attitude. I just want to make sure they understand and feel how pissed I am. This is reacting. Now, let's dig a bit. Why was I angry? What does the fact that I am angry make it mean about myself? Well, probably that those people do not respect me. Or they do not care about me. I am not important to them. Because I am worthless. There you go. This is the core belief hidden behind my reaction. Worthless. The situation triggered this specific core belief. Now, let's think about other reasons why they were late. Maybe they got stuck in traffic. Maybe they had an alarm issue. Maybe they had an important phone call to take. Those are three valid reasons to explain why they were late. But what is, among those four possibilities, the most painful explanation? Of course, it is the one brought here by my core belief. That they don't care. But am I worthless really? Is it true that they don't care? If I think about examples, I could say "Well, they wanted to come with me in the first place so they do care", or "At work, people always ask for my opinion, so I matter", or "My family loves me, they care about me". That's it. You just realised that you core belief is pure bullshit. 

You never get triggered by a present situation. You get triggered because of your core beliefs. And they were built in your past. Finding the root of your core beliefs is not the subject of this article, but I want to bring awareness on this point: only by finding this root, you will finally be able to truly dispute your core beliefs. But here is the drill, and how you will start to respond rather than react. Let's start over. 

It's Saturday morning, I am supposed to go for a hike with some friends. I'm the driver, and I told them to meet me at the car at 10 am. But they are late. 10 minutes, 15 minutes... I start to feel angry. Badly angry.

"Oh, I'm getting triggered. What's the emotion? What's the core belief?" 

Ok, I found it. It's just my "I'm worthless" core belief yelling in my brain right now. This has nothing to do with the fact that my friends are late. Here they are. 

"Hey guys, you are late... This makes me feel a bit angry."

"Oh sorry, we didn't mean to piss you off, we got delayed because the bus never arrived..." 

"It's alright, thanks for apologising, let's go now!" 

How much easier was that? You just responded to the situation. Be careful, notice that here I didn't suppress the emotion (anger). I paid attention to it, accepted it, and acknowledged the fact that it was triggered by my core beliefs. 

This example might sound a bit silly. However, you need to practice on "easy" situations at first. If you start practicing this exercise every time you encounter a conflict situation, you will realise that the process gets faster and faster. At some point, you don't even need to think about it, you just know. Once again, the emotion you feel, whatever it might be, is ok, legit. But now you get to choose between reacting and responding. 

One last thing: responding on the fly will take some time. But what you can start to do is to think about past situation when you reacted. In the previous example, I did not respond, I reacted. And only a few months after, while in a mental health training (where I discovered all those concepts), I actually responded and found out about the core belief behind. 

The process of finding your core beliefs is extremely important, very powerful, but it is also extremely intense. Especially if you start trying to understand where those core beliefs come from. I strongly suggest you to do that with a therapist. 

A last point: remember that the person you are having a conflict with has their own core beliefs. But this will be a later article... ;) 

Until then, take care of yourself, you are worth.