In a week when our country is again shocked by the evil in this world and grieving the needless loss of life, I wanted to share with you my husband Chris’ thoughts:
On a day our nation grieves a tragic mass murder and my boys must stay home from school because someone is threatening to shoot children, I am reminded how one key brain skill, Skill 11, Return to Joy from negative emotions, is increasingly absent in our society.
The effects of this missing skill cannot be underestimated because the human brain is wired for six negative emotions, which means we have to learn how to manage and quiet what we feel while we return to relationship. Emotions are signals of something specific going wrong that needs to be corrected.
When we do not return to joy and recover, our anger, fear, shame, disgust, sadness and hopeless despair turn into something else which is not always pretty. Just as my boys enjoy learning taekwondo through practice and training with excellent instructors, their young brains have to learn brain skills by practice and training with people who are equipped with the skills.
As I write in Transforming Fellowship, “Parents who have not learned Skill 11 cannot show their children how to properly manage and quiet big feelings. At this point “behavior-management” strategies shut children down from expressing themselves and hinder children from learning the path back to joy. Power-plays intensify. Parents try to modify behavior and soon problems become bigger than the relationship as parents revert to emotions like anger to stop the noise. There is a better way. We must learn how to quiet big feelings and return to joy with one another.” (Page 150)
Bullying, aggression, violence, depression, anxiety and more are not far when these important skills drop out of families, communities and society as a whole. Go on, get your black belt on and show those big emotions who’s in charge!
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