1:00PM
Emotional conflict. Perhaps that’s what it is.
For the past eight years, I’ve been searching for ways to describe the work that I do, to hone the essence of what I want to do for people and for myself. I have gone back and forth, up and down, and yes, all the way around, trying to figure it out. Recently, I’ve stumbled on the phrase “emotional conflict” a few times. Maybe it’s it.
I think about some of the most difficult situations in my life and they seem to have resulted from emotions in conflict. For example, me feeling tired of a relationship with one person and the other person feeling madly in love. Me feeling very focused on a project and the other person laughing and feeling very open and flexible. Me feeling very raw and vulnerable and the other person feeling distracted and avoidant.
And then I think about some of the times in my life that I have most cherished: when both of us have felt joy, when both of us have felt raw, when both of us have felt open and flexible. The specific emotion seems to matter less than the sharing of that emotion.
I’ve tried to look at this morning from this lens of emotional conflict, and more so, emotional conflict resolution. Sitting there with my dad while watching a TV series that required deep focus, I found myself feeling glued to the TV. Well, until my mom entered and started asking us questions. She seem to feel grateful to have returned from radiation and excited to be back and share what happened. I felt frustrated that she interrupted my focus. Really, I was wishing that she were also feeling focused or at least noticed that emotion.
How often does this happen? I think almost all the time. We feel one thing and someone else feels a different thing, and we wish they were the same. I get angry, I want the other person to be angry, too. If they’re too quiet, I get even more angry. If I feel sad, I want the other person to feel sad, too. I don’t want them to feel excited and grateful to be alive, laughing and smiling all the time.
I think framing it this way also helps me feel much more confident and motivated than how I had been framing it: “emotional connection.” I think the challenge I’ve had with emotional connection is that in a way, I’ve feared it—or in other words, it creates conflict for me. So to say that I’ve wanted to strive for something that actually causes me fear and makes me want to run away, has caused me a lot of trouble and internal conflict about whether it’s what I wanted to pursue.
When I think about hate, indifference, and love all being different vectors that may lead to conflict, I feel a lot more excited to resolve them. How to deal with the person who hates me? The one who ignores me? The one who loves me?
I sometimes feel self-conscious about what I write here and then, again, if I frame it as if we all have internal conflict, I feel grateful that I’m having the courage to show some of that conflict to myself and to others. Now time to get better at resolving it.
1:10PM
