CREATIVE CONFLICT RESOLUTIONS » emotions

Top 5 Indicators of Pent Up Anger

alfaprima — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:48:45 +0000

Pent up anger is when you don’t realize how angry you are until you react to a silly situation that could be ignored easily (perhaps a 3 on the frustration scale), with a full-on anger explosion (a 10 on the frustration scale). This disproportionate reaction to “the small stuff” reveals that you are harboring anger deep inside, anger from older situations, which you express when the smallest chance arises.

Are you currently suffering from pent up anger? It’s important that you recognize whether you are, because pent up anger can destroy the trust and communication in a relationship, as people will start to withdraw from a person who is completely unpredictable, like a ticking time bomb.

Here are five signs that you’re suffering from pent up anger, which then needs to be expressed in a healthy way:

People often accuse you of having a “short fuse” and “blowing things out of proportion”
You often feel an uncontrollable urge to lash out (sometimes in juvenile ways, like breaking things)
You “see red” when things don’t go your way
You’ve been told (seriously) that you need anger management classes
Other people have been rejecting you or avoiding talking to you about things, out of fear that you’ll “take it the wrong way” or “jump to conclusions”

Each of these are signs that your anger needs to be addressed in your everyday life and interpersonal relationships (and perhaps also in the workplace). Right now, experiencing all of the above situations is perhaps making you to feel like you are out of control and a slave to your anger. It’s very likely that hours or days after you explode, you experience the consequences as feeling guilty, or lonely because you’re pushing people away with your anger.

The very first thing you need to do to stop lashing out and using your anger unproductively is to identify what’s making you angry. Now, this may seem silly and easy – until you try it. Don’t just say, “They got my order wrong at the restaurant.” Really think about why the thing that’s happening has made you so angry you can’t think about what you’re doing.

A lot of times, our pent up anger lashes out at little things because we’re really feeling the pressure of something much bigger – like social stress, stress at work, money worries, relationship worries, past pain, and many others. What pressures are you under?

There are many pressures in the world, more so than ever now that the financial situation is in the dumps. Due to accelerating factors such as strong economic pressure and financial hardships, jobs becoming more scarce and in short a more competitive environment, we find ourselves feeling more and more unable to control our lives.

How many sources of pressure can you identify? Do you see any ways of dealing with those pressures? If not, you may want to start by asking yourself whether anyone else knows the pressures you’re struggling with. Struggling alone under pressure can make you angry and lonely, feeling like nobody cares about you – even if you’re the one refusing to communication your pains. How can you deal with the pressures of life without getting angry?

Everyone’s situation is different, and that means that your best long term solution is seeking out the help of a counselor who can customize your anger management practices. However, we do have five quick, short term solutions for you to use now, so that you limit the damage you’re doing to immediate family, loved ones, friends, and co-workers.

Monitor your anger, week by week – At the beginning of each week, sit down and document what made you most angry the previous week. Ask yourself, what triggered your angry? What memories did it bring up? How did you manage your angry? Did you find yourself changing your mind about what you were angry about? That can happen if your anger is at a memory triggered by the event, but not the event itself.
Take a time out when you start getting upset
Request that the conversation be changed to a new topic
Make a point of apologizing and addressing your guilt when it arises, post-explosion. In this way, you reinforce the message to your brain that your anger must be handled in a way that doesn’t hurt others.
Find a group of people you can talk to about similar problems (an online community, for example) so that you can share anger management tips and also feel a better sense of “it’s not just me.”

If you’d like to learn more solutions to your pent up anger that you can implement today, saving your relationship from toxic behavior, you can visit Pent Up Anger to receive your copy of our book, “Recover From Anger.”

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to suffer alone in an unhealthy relationship for one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.You can begin with our passive aggressive system created just for men, at Stop Your Passive Aggression, with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

Fighting Again? Find Out If Your Relationship Is Do, or Die

alfaprima — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:34:26 +0000

We talk a lot about managing your differences and learning to see them as opportunities to grow as a couple. Quite often, subjective things like “opposite personalities” are opportunities to express respect and trust, and don’t have to be what breaks the relationship apart. Helping couples in trouble see that is part of why we write this blog.

However, some ask us, are there ever certain qualities that should be avoided (rather than “improved”)?

Sure there are, and that’s always important to remember. Sometimes, recurring conflict in a relationship isn’t caused by not knowing how to handle conflict – it’s caused by toxic personality characteristics.

In an article we found called “Yes, Virginia, Some Mates Really Are Wrong,” this same issue is discussed, and some basic no-no’s are outlined. The first? A partner who refuses to handle their substance abuse:

“An addict’s primary loyalty is not to the relationship, it’s to the addiction,” explains Ken Page. “Active addicts become cheaper versions of themselves and lose integrity or the ability to do the right thing when it’s hard. Those are the very qualities in a partner you need to lean on.” Gamblers fall into the same compulsive camp, with the added twist that their pursuit of the big win typically lands them, sooner or later, into deep debt that threatens the foundations of relationship life.

A partner who repeatedly strays away from the relationship can also destroy trust and intimacy. Like abuse or other forms of control, compulsive cheating is something that you should not have to put up with as a partner. The article also notes some other negative personality characteristics that should be red flags for any relationship:

[C]hronic lying; chronic worrying or neuroticism; emotional overreactivity; proneness to anger; propensity to harbor grudges; low self-esteem; poor impulse control; tendency to aggression; self-orientation rather than an other-orientation. Situations, such as chronic exposure to nonmarital stress in either partner, also have the power to undermine relationships.

If you’re wondering whether your current conflict-filled relationship is worth staying in, it helps to judge your relationship against these factors listed above. Do any of these qualities appear? Are they frequent, or simply once and a while slips? Learning to handle conflict effectively will teach you what conflict is worth dropping, and what conflict is caused by yourselves (and should thus be handled by the two of you). A common impulse is to run when things get hard, or to simply “not sweat the small things” so as to avoid causing discomfort. Both of these can lead to no communication, privacy walls that don’t need to be there, and issues that aren’t allowed to be discussed.

In “Yes, Virginia, Some Mates Really Are Wrong,” there’s a great passage to illustrate this:

If you get to the point where you’re delivering an ultimatum,” says Bradbury, you haven’t been maintaining your relationship properly. “It’s like your car stopping on the side of the road and you say, ‘It just isn’t working anymore’— but you haven’t changed the oil in 10 years.

(See the entire article here)

How about you? Are you managing your partnership properly, or is something more serious going on that’s poisoning your relationship? You can talk to Dr. Nora today, she’s our expert conflict coach. Your first conversation with her is free!

Neil Warner

A Better Relationship Means Telling Your Partner Where it Hurts

alfaprima — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:45:49 +0000

Much of the conflict in our lives begins when we feel that we are suffering (either alone or at the hands of those we’re in conflict with).Brian Lynch, M.D., has shared his thoughts on suffering and how we can see it in a different way. This helps tremendously when trying to create more peace and more constructive conflict in our lives. When we or our partner are suffering, we can remember these “four rules for managing suffering.” They come originally from Dr. Tomkins and his “central blueprint”:

1) We want to maximize the expression and the experience of interest and joy in our lives and the lives of those around us.

2) We want to minimize the expression of negative feelings of all concerned. Those feelings I will specifically name as: anger, fear, distress, disgust and shame.

3) The way to achieve the goals of # 1 and # 2 is to express ALL FEELING whether they be positive or negative!

4) We do this by educating ourselves and others about the importance of feelings both negative and positive. We develop understandings between us that it is ok to express any type of feeling. We develop articulated rules for doing so.

… Always keep in mind that this can happen to and be expressed by anyone in the room. We need not feel guilty for expressing our suffering if we are not the ill partner. Expressing our suffering lets the other know that their suffering has meaning and is reflected in the other. We all end in recognizing, on a higher level, that to suffer is human and in the end we feel better.

(See the whole article here)

This can apply to both physical and emotional distress. As Brian Lynch points out, we all suffer at some point in our lives, and really, we can understand suffering as caused by suppressed emotions.This means that we can relieve suffering by sharing with others those emotions that we are painfully unable (or unwilling) to share. For example, a current conflict in your life may be caused by the pain you get at being unable to tell someone how angry you are about something that happened last year. Or, you may be running into conflict because you are unable to tell someone, “I love you, please stay with me.”

It is important to understand how this ties into why we fight and get into conflicts with each other (and why we sometimes fight the most with people we love the most). Conflict is all about trying to get the other person’s attention, and make a connection someone whose understanding you want or need. Conflict, essentially, is about telling each other about our suffering. However, most of us grew up in a home where it was not okay to “whine” or “dominate” the relationship with our “problems.”

This is not what conflict is about – acting this way leads to deeply unsatisfying interactions in relationships. To achieve more happiness and peace with our partners (and even friends or family), we must understand that to freely express (on BOTH sides) emotions and ideas is not “whining.” To talk about your problems is not “domination” if you are willing to listen to your partner’s problems, as well.

Do you need help unlocking the source of your pain? Is there an deep wound that you don’t know how to express to your partner, something that’s eating away at your heart? Talk to Dr. Nora today, our expert conflict coach. Your first conversation with her is free!

Neil Warner

Emotions, the Hidden Engine of our Decisions!

Nora Femenia — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:05:19 +0000

Here’s some new content, inspired by a curated lens from Squidoo on Emotional Health. Do you know what your emotions are making you do?

What if you could harness them to get what you really want out of life? Dr. Silvan S. Tomkins has suggested through his work that we do the things we do in our lives because of how we feel. That is, we are not all as rational as we thought!

Our emotions, even when we don’t recognize them or define them consciously, drive us to make decisions and choose actions.To understand this better (perhaps you’re saying, “No, I’m completely rational!”), think about it in this way. Dr. Tomkins states that being interested in something is a feeling or emotion. That interest then motivates you to act or speak.

So, think about the last time you were interested in doing something. Did you come up with that interest in a logical way (reason), or was it a gut instinct/attraction (emotion)?This, in the end, helps us to understand that when we plan out our lives, and live them each day, our deep interests and desires are driving us to act.

You might think that working a 9 to 5 job is not the result of your emotions, but if you employ your reason, you will probably find that it is: perhaps you are interested in the money, which translates to happiness for you. Perhaps you are interested in the power of one day getting the top position at your company, or the distant possibility of doing something great in the company’s market sector. Or… perhaps you are hiding in a cubicle because you fear that you will fail if you try to do greater things.

When we are infants and young children, we feel more often than we use cognitive processes (think). Our interests are simple: food, shelter, warmth, play, love… i.e., – HAPPINESS! Those feelings still drive us (because who doesn’t want to be happy?), but as adults we’re taught to “think logically” and not let emotion rule us. We think you could have the best of both worlds instead of being pulled in opposite directions.

If you put your brain to work, and look deeper for an explanation of what you’re feeling and why, you could end up creating a life plan that actually makes sense to you, that gives you actual fulfillment by pursuing it. Remember, pursuing happiness can be just as rewarding as achieving it!

If you need help getting your emotions to “explain themselves,” you can talk to one of our coaches in a private, one on one phone session.

Visit us at Conflict Coach to schedule a meeting, your first consultation is free!

Nora Femenia is a well known coach, conflict solver and trainer, and CEO of Creative Conflict Resolutions, Inc. Visit her blog and signup free to be connected to her innovative conflict solutions, positive suggestions and life-changing coaching sessions, along with blog updates, news, and more! We can begin by you having a complimentary consultation at Conflict Coach, with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

Are you passive, assertive, or aggressive?

neilwarner — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:39:47 +0000

Your communication style is important to recognize and define, as it affects how people react to you and how they address your needs. In the workplace, it can be especially important to know how you are communicating (and thus how you are perceived) as a professional colleague. It is also important in personal relationships, in order to give and receive needs satisfaction.

The American Management Associationbreaks it down in this way:

1.     ”This is what I think.” (Assertive)
2.     ”This is what I think—you’re an idiot to think otherwise.” (Aggressive)
3.     ”This is what I think, but it’s probably not important to you.” (Passive)

When you have an aggressive communication style, other perceive you as disrespectful of alternate opinions (not good in the workplace!). This can lead to anger and resentment, especially if you are in a leadership position (this goes for managers, parents or partners!). When you are passive, others may think you are not committed because you either feel guilty about offering criticism, or blindly agree with all criticism pointed toward you. You end up being controlled by others in this way, which can make you feel resentful, uncooperative, or unfulfilled. In all cases, relationships cannot grow or move forward when only being pulled toward and satisfying one person’s needs.

Assertive is the most conductive for a healthy life, because it falls between these two. An assertive communication style allows you to express your own ideas and opinions, but also allows for respect of others’ ideas. This promotes an atmosphere of equality, positive progress, and cooperation.

Which communication style are you? Is it affecting your work and home life in a negative way? You can talk to our Conflict Coach about it, and receive a free consultation on your first visit!

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion.
You don’t have to suffer alone in an unhealthy relationship for one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.You can begin with our passive aggressive system created just for men, at Stop Your Passive Aggression, with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

What Child Abuse Does to The Brain

alfaprima — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:44:07 +0000

Child abuse is just as prevalent as it ever was, but now that the psychological effects of abuse are being studied in more depth, we are gaining more understanding about the effects of abuse on a person’s life, both as a child and an adult. Child abuse can lead to an adult who practices the same behaviors he/she was taught (which can damage their relationships), but it can also physically harm the victim’s brain.

According to an article on Live Science by Jennifer Welsh, the part of your brain that deals with memory (the hippocampus) can be damaged during childhood abuse, neglect, and/or maltreatment. The damage seems to occur when exposed to high levels of stress during certain ages. With that damage comes a lower ability to “talk” to other areas of the brain, like the brain’s reward center (dopamine system). In the article, a researcher from Harvard University suggested that this may be why many victims of abuse are at greater risk for depression, drug abuse and mental illness in adulthood.

Read the entire article at Live Science.

These findings are extremely important for telling how the brain reacts to its surroundings – if a child is especially vulnerable to stress-based damage in his/her early years, learning how to interact and deal with conflict in a healthy way can protect your children. If your child is often exposed to loud, explosive fights or is humiliated or embarrassed by punishment techniques, what could the effects be later on in life? This is not to say we’re all turning our children into drug addicts later on – but new research consistently shows us that our brains are always watching and making note of our lives.

Neil Warner

Don’t Let Work Aggression Spread to Your Home

alfaprima — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:16:11 +0000

Today we’ll highlight an issue that affects most of us: balancing workplace conflict with our home life. We’re all guilty of letting our frustration at work spread to our homes, but do we always notice it? And what are the effects?Here’s an interesting article from Scientific American that might open your eyes. “If you think that nasty co-worker is creating problems for you alone, think again. His rudeness may have a ripple effect that extends as far as your spouse’s workplace.

A recent study at Baylor University found that working with horrible colleagues can generate far-reaching stress that follows you home, causing unhappiness for your spouse and family and ultimately affecting your partner’s job.”

The study was published in August in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. According to the author of this study, Merideth J. Ferguson, exposure to rudeness at work resulted in stress for the family as well as the partner. What she also discovered (but you probably know already) is that there is a direct relation between rudeness experienced at work, and how stressful the workplace felt.

What we may not think as deeply about is what else Ferguson found: when you are exposed to rudeness on a regular basis (in the form of unkindness, humiliation, etc) you can lose self-esteem, or become anxious or depressed.

As we discussed on this blog before, low self-esteem and anxiety can cause you to behave in ways that aren’t conducive to your life emotional balance or your family’s. You may be irritable, aggressive, use the silent treatment, avoid conflict, or be excessively critical of others. All of that creates hostility at home, which is the last thing you need!

So, what can you do if you are being exposed to rudeness and conflict at work?

Ferguson suggested that being mindful of where you are (home, not work) and what you are doing can help you separate things in your mind. However, sometimes it’s hard for us to concentrate fully on our family and friends when our day has been really stressful. For that reason, it’s important to find someone you can talk to about the issues you’re having and how they’re making you feel.

Keep in mind that if your behavior towards your family has been negative because of your stress at work, they may not be receptive to you at first. It’s important that in this case, you talk to a counselor about your stress. They can teach you stress-management techniques that you can use directly in the workplace.

If you’re struggling with rude or aggressive behaviors in the workplace, we also have a resource available for your use, at Passive Aggressive Workplace.

Quotes from: Workplace Rudeness Has a Ripple Effect

Neil Warner

I’m the “relationship guru,” and my main focus is to increase the quality of love-based relationship experiences. In this ground-breaking guide I offer useful strategies on healing a difficult angry relationship with love and compassion. You don’t have to stay in an unhealthy relationship one more minute. Let us share our tools with you today.We can begin by you having a complimentary consultation at Conflict Coach, with a plan for action to change your life with new skills included. Just click this link and get started now!

A Fast and Easy Way to Send Your Love

alfaprima — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:34:00 +0000

We’re always on the look out for new resources that can help you achieve greater relationship happiness in your life. Whether they’re books, forums or programs, our colleagues in the field of relationship psychology have a lot of interesting new ideas to share.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we wanted to share with you this free new guide called “3 Magic Texts.” That’s “texts” as in “text messages”! Sometimes relationships are hindered or their quality diluted by the use of texting instead of face to face interaction. This isn’t a fault of the technology, only that we don’t know how to use it the right way!

“3 Magic Texts”is a great way to change the way you think about texting your significant other – you can use “3 Magic Texts” on your wife or girlfriend to add romance back into your relationship, literally overnight.

Here’s your link to the “3 Magic Texts” you can use on your wife or girlfriend to add a startling amount of of romance into your relationship literally overnight.

We won’t give too much away but, here are some hints about the 3 Magic Texts:

One is the “Curiosity” text
One is the “Attractive and Powerful” text
And the last text is just called “Planting the Seed”

Go ahead and have fun, it’s fast!

Get The “3 Magic Texts” Now

Apply and Enjoy!

Information about this method of re-starting the romance with your loved one is free. However, if you decide to buy Mike’s system, here is a disclaimer:

If you purchase anything through a link in our emails, you should assume that we have an affiliate relationship with the company being promoted. This means if you buy something from a link in this email or from the website, or based on our express or implied recommendation, we may be paid a commission. It’s how we do business, by promoting our own products and sharing other recommended and tested products. Please do your own independent research before purchasing anything. Thanks for your business!

So you believe to be a rational decision-maker? How wrong can you be?

alfaprima — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:19:25 +0000

According to researchers of the brain, we all make most decisions based on emotions and passions. Surprising, right? It challenges the common notion that we are logical decision-makers, and that emotions (when uncontrolled) are part of the immature self.. As much as we may try to pretend otherwise, in our natural state, we really only use rational thinking when we have to justify our emotion-driven decisions.

The emotional side that makes our decisions has been charmingly called “the old brain.” The old brain doesn’t understand words (a product of reason), but it does understand threats, survival and reproduction.

This changes up the way we think of conflict. It’s no longer a perceived difference of rational opinions (Wikipedia); there is the new idea that conflicts are emotional, in and of themselves. Conflicts seem reason-driven because they are covered up by a cost-analysis rationalization that legitimizes the confrontation.

Here is how the human brain works:

The new brain thinks: it processes rational data.
The middle brain feels: It processes emotions and gut feelings.
The old brain decides: it takes into account the input from the other two brains, but it is the actual trigger of the decision. In other words, the old brain is the boss.

This idea is very practical, because day to day, we can ask ourselves: what primordial needs has my old brain today?

Do I feel insecure in my relationship or my job?
Do I feel threatened?
Is there some basic anxiety around my gut today?

After that, the path is clear: your job is to activate your middle and new brains and evaluate those panic triggers that the older brain is activating:

Is a sure thing that you will starve today?
Are there enemies at your door or is it a simple alarming noise?

In this way, we avoid making decisions ruled by the survival brain, the older one! Our decisions will be more rational and emotional if we evaluate and discard the messages from the older brain. The point is not necessarily to avoid all conflict the old brain alerts us to, but we can learn to separate defense mechanisms (being unnecessarily aggressive with a co-worker) from constructive conflict (a discussion about how to reprimand your children).

New Year’s Resolutions Doomed to Fail?

alfaprima — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:00:32 +0000

Isn’t it wonderful how we submit to the pixie dust of year end’s magic? besides running here and there to present our best image, our best table and food, our best dress, house, etc, we also enter into a magic territory when it is necessary to design vital goals for us. Because? Just because now, only now, there is an open door to making them happen!

Yeah, right.

Year after year we have promised ourselves to exercise more, eat better and fight fair with our loved ones. It’s not that we ignore the improvement areas in our lives, far from that! Is that it looks more and more like a dialogue of deaf people, an impossible conversation between out higher self images, provided by the more developed parts of our brain, and an old, reptilian core of primitive survival forces located at the base of our head.

We, rational beings, know exactly how much good it would do us to keep an exercise structure…and cherish this wish as if we had an only rational decision-maker in our brain. What is what we deny or ignore? Other parts of our brain…

Even when we don’t know it, we are split and two parts of our brain compete for dominance. Facing a threat to the status quo, your reptilian brain reacts automatically to this planned change as an imaginary attack to the status quo. What are the choices that the rational, thinking cortex has of winning and imposing an excellent program of exercise over this primal resistance? Almost zero.

The brain stem is the oldest and smallest region in the evolving human brain. It evolved hundreds of millions of years ago and is more like the entire brain of present-day reptiles. For this reason, it is often called the ‘reptilian brain’. Group of cells in the brain stem determine the brain’s general level of alertness and regulate the vegetative processes of the body such as breathing and heartbeat. It’s concerned with fundamental needs such as survival, physical maintenance, hoarding, dominance, preening and mating. The basic ruling emotions of love, hate, fear, lust, and contentment are generated from this first stage of the brain.

Everything else, (including our self improvement plans) the reptilian brain ignores or leaves behind.

How can you convince your primitive brain that losing weight and starting a running program will be beneficial? Not with logic, of course! The primitive brain continues to feel only basic emotions….so you need to make a nice package:

Wanna change a big part of your personality, like beginning therapy, stoping smoking or controlling anger in your relationship? These are major changes, so you need to plan for the component of seducing your older brain into loving the new activity.

~Convince yourself that you are not changing your life because of running, you are only “adding up to life maintenance routines” feel proud about that;

~Remember the previous (and smaller) behaviors in each time of your life (like when you did learn meditation), recover that attitude and then teach yourself anger management techniques…they are only a continuation of what your brain already knows!

~ In short, you are embracing the basic brain reactions, and building upon them, not uprooting them. We yield to our primitive, survival emotions by accepting them and building upon them…Nothing wrong to include a plan to deal with our basic resistance while dreaming with new behaviors promised in our new year resolutions, but keep in touch with your reptilian core…and throw it a bone! Otherwise, your dreams will go up in smoke as last year!

Neil Warner

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