My Journey to Emotional Maturity

Last Wednesday, I saw a news article that was particularly relevant to me and it upset me . The topic is irrelevant to this post, but it was heavy and not something I could personally affect. Later that evening, I was hanging out with my boyfriend, and I wanted to talk about it so I brought it up. His initial reaction was to be sympathetic, offering “I’m sorry” and “it sucks to feel that way” in abundance. When the conversation started to slow, he tried to cheer me up by being silly and playing music. All of his responses still left me feeling annoyed and hollow, and when I needed to leave, I told him I was still upset and that I would go home, sleep, and probably feel better the next day. He asked if I was also upset with him, I told him I wasn’t, and I left soon after. 

For the next few days, I kept thinking about the interaction. I bounced my feelings off a couple friends and realized what I had wanted in that interaction was more engagement with the topic. I wanted him to ask me more questions about how I felt about it, I wanted him to offer his thoughts, and create a discussion. On Sunday, I brought this up with him and told him that in the future, if I’m upset about something heavy like that, I’m looking to process it verbally, talk through it, and really like it if he engages with me about it rather than trying to cheer me up. He commended me for sharing that with him and told me he would try to do that in the future. 

I tried to stick to the bare facts in this initial description because this interaction would not have been possible for me even a couple years ago and I wanted to break it down in detail from here. 

First off, I used to get REALLY worked up over things, especially things I felt were unjust, which usually put me in an intense frame of mind. In the past, if I had been met with “I’m sorry, that sucks” when I’m like this, I would’ve been incensed. I would have probably said something accusatory, along the lines of “really?! That’s it? So you don’t care about this at all?!”

If someone tried to cheer me up while I was like this, I would’ve probably tried to make them feel stupid for doing so - saying something along the lines of “seriously? THAT’s what you think is the right thing to do right now?”

Basically, I would’ve picked a fight to burn off the conflicted energy I was feeling about a completely separate issue.

So right off the bat, I was able to do two things I haven’t always been able to do. The first was to regulate my own emotions. I was able to stay calm about the topic and even though his responses weren’t quite helpful to me, I didn’t get mad or try to make him feel bad about what they were. I didn’t misdirect my feelings about the news article onto him or the interaction.

The second was that I was able to see where he was coming from in the moment. I recognized that everything he had been doing was his best effort to make me feel better in the only ways he knew how. I know enough about him now to know that his initial responses to something that upsets him are either to fix it, or to let it go if there’s nothing he can do (what a peaceful life he lives). Because there was nothing either of us could do about this particular issue, he opted to try to help me let it go. Furthermore, I had never been upset about something like this before in his presence, and his usual ways of cheering me up had worked for other scenarios, so his reasoning that they would work again made sense.

So when he asked me if I was upset with him, I could honestly say that I wasn't because I knew that he was trying his best. I knew it wasn’t his fault he didn’t know what I needed, that part was on me. 

I had never told him what I needed in situations like these, and in this particular scenario it even took me a couple days to pinpoint it. In the past, I would've stewed about a bad interaction but wouldn’t have done much self reflecting on what had made it unsatisfactory and what my part in it had been. 

When I brought this back up on Sunday I told him all of this as well. I told him that the interaction had left me feeling upset, but it was because I wasn’t able to tell him what I needed in that moment, and I appreciated what he had done to try and make me feel better. Only then did I tell him that in the future, if this type of situation arises again, I prefer to have a discussion about it which is my mechanism for being able to let it go.

To his credit, he also intuitively did a lot of things right. In the initial interaction last Wednesday he gave me multiple opportunities to tell him what I needed or if there was anything he could do. He created that space for me even though I wasn’t able to fill it. He was also quick to pivot when something didn’t work. Even though cheering up wasn’t what I wanted, I appreciated that he tried all the tactics that normally work on me. Lastly, when I brought it up on Sunday, he was very receptive. He didn’t take it as a criticism of him,  he complimented me for being reflective and recognized that I was sharing a need with him. 

This may seem like a simple interaction to many of you. Alternatively, some of you may have related to my thought process - past or present - and gotten stuck. As I mentioned before, this interaction, as seemingly small as it is, wouldn’t have been possible for me a few years ago - I was getting stuck too. I would get mad a lot, pick fights, make up, and never really examine the reasoning behind any of it. 

Since then, I’ve ended up spending a lot of time developing two key skills that I used in the interaction above. The first is emotional self awareness. Being able to identify what I’m feeling (or not feeling), why I’m feeling it, when I’m feeling it, is huge. This allows me to identify which feelings are caused by which stressors and how I should cope with them. In this example it allowed me to recognize that my upset feeling was tied solely to the article, not to my boyfriend. It also pushed me to think about it in the following days to really assess what I needed so this feeling could be mitigated in the future. 

The second skill is emotional awareness of others. When we’re experiencing strong emotions, we can have the tendency to become more self involved. We think other people don’t understand what we’re going through and if their reactions don’t line up with what we want, it is easy to convince ourselves that they are just inconsiderate of our feelings. But that’s not true: everyone acts in a way that makes sense to them. Being aware of how other people perceive your feelings and what might be normal for them is crucial to keeping perspective and being able to communicate well. This skill allowed me to realize that my boyfriend was doing his best because he just wanted me to be happy and it also pushed me to think carefully about how to share my needs so he knows I’m appreciative of what he did do while still helping him understand me a little better. 

Relationships can be funny in the sense that the more you like the person, the easier it can be to simply expect them to know what you need. You feel automatically connected on so many things so it’s confusing when they don’t act in a way that is in line with your expectations. But people are not mind readers. It’s ok to have to explain yourself sometimes to create a deeper understanding of each other. Especially if it’s the first time you’re experiencing a situation together. However, you must first understand your own feelings in order to explain them to someone else and that’s the key so many of us are still missing.

For me to get to this point took a lot of quality time alone, some therapy, and probably just a little bit of age as well. As we get older, experiences start to repeat themselves and the emotions they activate become easier to recognize and cope with. At the same time, I spent a lot of time by myself, thinking about why I feel things, why I do things and circling those back to my wants and needs - therapy helped a lot with this exercise.

I mainly wanted to write this to recognize how far I’ve come in my emotional intelligence and in my ability to communicate, but I also want anyone reading this to remember that every interaction is an opportunity for connection, for learning, for understanding. When your emotions are running high, that might be a signal that something is important to you - which means it’s doubly important you understand why and are able to share that reasoning with your loved ones and they to you.