Last week I talked about overwhelm.
Overwhelm is when you as one person are in a situation that has too much for you to bear and you don’t know how to process what’s happening around you.
This overwhelm forces you to deal with your emotions.
I do want to say that you may ‘know’ what caused the overwhelm in a logical sense - but that’s different from the emotion.
For instance, we all have that one relative who no matter how hard you both try, it ends up that you’re both mad at each other by the end of the family gathering. And it’s always an offhand comment that makes you feel things which turn you into the ‘bad’ person for responding.
In this case you ‘know’ what happened - but you can’t always spot the set up, or the feelings that made you react in a manner that put you into overwhelm.
This is called, ‘flipping your lid.’
Your logical brain - the part of the brain that deals with time, space, situational awareness and words, leaves the room when the emotions show up and reach a certain level.
This leaves your emotional brain in charge. And the emotional brain is very good at survival, but awful at engaging in a civilized manner.
new idea - that others have relatives that push us into overwhelm and not just me. I find that so encouraging.