Winter Garden Magazine February 2016 - Daniel & Mindy Hungerford | Page 40

A Good Way of Dealing with Bad Feelings
How Emotional Sanity makes for Healthy Relationships 

Sooner or later it happens in the
best of relationships: some little thing
catches us off guard and rubs us
the wrong way. Before we know it,
we find ourselves flooded with  inappropriate and, moreover, extremely
unpleasant emotional tides. These
moments are dangerous, because
frequently these emotional states
of emergency lead us to say or do
things we regret soon after. More often than not, we only realize it when
we can’t take them back. In real life,
words spoken or deeds done can
not be retracted with a simple ctrl-Z
command. Of course, we can
apologize, but in most cases, this
move will only work the first or maximum the second time around. Yet
how can we deal appropriately with
these challenging emotional tides?
And where do they come from?

The Emotional Backpack
We all carry a certain amount of emotional baggage around with us. I like
to call this our “emotional backpack”.
That’s where we store experiences
which were emotionally overwhelming for us at the time. These can be
experiences which were traumatic. They can, however, also be
experiences which wouldn’t really have
been a problem for anyone else — yet
for us they were.
When an experience is emotionally
overwhelming, we need the support of
other people to cope with it. As children,
we instinctively looked for this support: we fled into mommy’s arm or hide
in daddy’s lap when the other kids were
being mean, our pet died or some other terrible thing had happened. If things
went well, this was a place where we

could have a good cry or let off some
steam and soon enough everything was
back in place.
When their caretakers are available
to them in this way, kids are able to 
process challenging experiences. They
are still painful and might still be sad
when they think back on them later on,
yet they are no longer emotionally overwhelming.
When this kind of loving attention is
missing, the experience goes into our
emotional backpack, where it then
waits for an opportunity to discharge.
In theory, this is a good thing because
if we carry emotional baggage around