Robert Strock explains emotional containment: letting yourself fully feel anger so you can access the vulnerability underneath it, fear, sadness, grief. He describes using friendships or a mediator to process strong emotions safely, then shifting your tone when you communicate what you actually need.
What it seems like you're really talking about is containment. It's a very, very similar principle. And the key is when you really give yourself permission to be furious or just exasperated, then you'll naturally find, or will naturally find vulnerability underneath. There'll be fear or sadness that will help us rather than being against. We'll be able to experience our own grief or our own fear, our own insecurity. And being able to feel that say, well, what is it? I need to be able to help take care of that fear, that insecurity that griefs. And so that process is invaluable. What you're doing, George, what that is doing, is literally creating peace. Because instead of getting into your story and you're allowing yourself to experience the emotion so intensely, you realize it's a dead end if you keep going. But if you allow yourself to fully experience it, you can drop down to the vulnerability and discover what it is you really need, which is the courageous aging that Ken's talking about in his book. We're never going to fully arrive at doing this. We're all going to be amateurs for life. But the idea that we can really use every angry opportunity as a chance to feel it, and then try to find our vulnerability underneath and then try to discover our needs and then communicate our needs. And if we can't have nobody on the other end learn how to come to an inner kind of acceptance or trust or peace or letting go because it's futile, then we're just burning up our own bodies with holding on to the anger and frustration, and we're punishing ourselves rather than what we think we're holding onto our anger about somebody else. It's going to require a third party, and it really requires a tonal sensitivity. You can sense. I'm sure everybody in the room can sense different people they know in their lives where they speak at a certain tone. I know in my earlier part of my childhood, my mother had a certain tone. I wasn't going to convince her it wasn't going to happen. So if you feel there's a tone that's escalating into it, like a violence and a righteousness, you're going to need a third party. Stepping away is one thing for sure. If the tenses are pretty good, you're going to keep repeating. If it's somebody that has that kind of closeness, the first thing is you need a lot of permission to feel it. And when you've spent enough time feeling it, if you have a friend, hopefully a lot of you have started to build friendships where it's based on this kind of thing. I'm absolutely furious. Somebody can listen and not just collude with your story, but actually support you to be angry. And then at that point, that's when you start to reflect and say, what is it that I'm. What way am I vulnerable underneath this? And what do I really need? So it really does require feeling it fully, looking for vulnerability and then looking for what it is you really need, and then attempting to try to convey what you really need with a different tone. Because you can find out what you need and speak from the same tone. It doesn't improve things much. The hundreds of millions of conversations that can be happening now, this is the time for conversations. And this is a part of what friendship is. This is a part of what sanity is, is to have these conversations. And I think it is happening. It's starting to happen, but it's not yet mainstream. I think trusting yourself that this conversation throughout all the realm of your friends and family is the conversation matter. The beginning stages has to be a third party. And there has to be an agreement that both parties are free at the first stage to share or to be furious, to be enraged. And then there has to be, I believe, an upfront agreement that there's going to be a shifting of gears in the moderator is going to shift gears and a willingness to share pain or fear and then a willingness to go to. Are we open to consider anything else? Are we really open to considering any kind of mutual suffering, mutual pain, mutual anger? The tone. The tone of voice that was actually conveyed internationally, that's also a part of the intelligence. It's a common language. It's the music of our heart, whether it's angry or whether we can say the right words. But if our heart is in the right place, the tone is going to be off. So part of the mass communication is going to be in tone and listening to the music, because everybody can hear that, or maybe not everybody, but a lot. It's an international part of being human. It.
