I No Longer Get Annoyed; I Only Look, Think And Take Emotional Distance If Necessary
When you have to deal with complicated situations, you learn to create emotional distance if necessary, to deal with how you feel and to think before you decide on something. Learning this requires both time and experience. Much experience.
Therefore, one could say that emotional distance is an unwritten code that allows us to see and feel things in a different way. It gives us time to let both the emotions and the irritation lose their power and instead make room for the thoughts, which allow us to understand what we really think and how we want to act with greater clarity.
In other words, doing this helps us to manage our emotions better and achieve greater coherence among our opinions and actions when it comes to, for example, a person’s attitude.
What do you need to create emotional distance?
How to create emotional distance? This answer has no magic recipe, but it depends on many personal factors as well as the circumstances and the relationship.
There are people who are deeply rooted in one’s emotions and distancing oneself from them is a very complicated task, but which may be necessary in order to be able to collect one’s pieces of the puzzle again.
Although there is no perfect recipe for creating emotional distance, there are some basic guidelines.
When you are treated with rudeness, it first glows yellow and then turns red. In other words, when we begin to feel irritation, boredom, joy or any other emotion, our traffic light will be on red and we should therefore not make any decisions.
Look, observe and create emotional distance if necessary, but do not make permanent decisions with temporary feelings, even if you feel like saying some things to the other person or shouting and walking away forever. Give yourself time to calm down your emotions, go out for a walk or let it go for a few days before talking to the person you are annoyed with again.
As time goes on, some things stop being important and some details that used to give us anxiety become unimportant and we accept the circumstances as they are.
It can be said that the passage of time causes one to move away from the emotional intensity that creates disappointments and expectations. It is possible to control your emotions and as with everything else, it becomes easier with exercise.
The inner compass is a great advantage when it comes to creating emotional distance
When we succeed in distancing ourselves emotionally from what has happened, we will be able to listen to that inner compass that shows us what is bad and what is good. These intuitions are often correct.
The decisions we make when it comes to others around us and what has happened will be much better if they are not based on temporary feelings. In this way, we will be able to know who deserves our attention and who should be ignored.
It is very important that you create emotional distance when you are faced with complicated situations, so that the emotions do not create decisions that you then regret.
Photos by Claudia Tremblay.
