Do you have good emotional control or do you lose yourself easily? Do you want to know how to acquire or improve your self-control? Emotional control is a crucial skill that everyone should acquire.
It’s interesting how people who are connected to the world via the internet get involved in studying so many subjects or disciplines, run a company or government institution, manage their financial life well, do a master’s degree, a doctorate. But a good number of individuals don’t learn to control themselves from an emotional point of view. The people we popularly call nervous argue that they received a hereditary burden from a father or mother who was or still is emotionally uncontrolled.
We can’t blame genetic inheritance, because it acts on parents, from parents to children, at most 30 to 50% of our behavior. The rest is the influence of what was learned in childhood, the influence of epigenetics, the cultural environment and the individual’s own sensitivity when making choices. This means that genetics is not a condemnation, but rather a propensity. If your father or mother, or both, were nervous, impatient, you may have inherited this behavior from them, but not completely.
So-called normal people live their day-to-day mental life on autopilot and hardly realize that, and how, the everyday routines of life involve emotions. They seem to live in focus. Living in focus is different from having fluctuating attention. Fluctuating attention is thinking about details, thinking more broadly. Living in focus is good for carrying out a task and achieving a goal, but it’s bad in relationships, because it reduces the perception of important factors for a good relationship.
I’ll explain. A person who lacks emotional control seems to look only at their navel, and may have an unconscious psychological belief that their relatives, husband and children are just there for them. This belief can appear, such as getting very angry when someone doesn’t do something for him or her that they should do for themselves. Even if they are autonomous in terms of daily work, they can be dependent in terms of affection.
On the other hand, the person who exercises fluctuating attention at certain moments in their life, focuses on various factors that influence their behavior, is more aware of their internal world and what the other person may be feeling. They can be talking to someone who is annoying, listen to the conversation with respect and at the same time think in their head: ” Boy, that person is unpleasant, but I’m going to exercise patience with him now.” Those who are easily out of control emotionally just react with irritation when faced with an annoying person, without making this parallel reflection.
Those who are able to look at others, which is an external reality, and at the same time look inside themselves, which is an internal reality, and perceive certain feelings in themselves and others, can have better emotional control and possess what we call Emotional Intelligence. This doesn’t depend on culture, academic training or even economic power. It depends on a sensitivity to life that is partly innate, something you are born with, and partly something you can develop. It is possible to learn to be an emotionally balanced person so as not to remain too rational or too sentimental.
In order to learn how to deal with your emotions, it is therefore important to step out of the focus and into a broader view of yourself, life, others and the environment. When a person takes the step of being willing to leave their comfort zone by moving away from their focus, they may even lose money, but they’ll gain a lot in terms of quality of life and self-control, because they’ll learn to be more aware of their emotions, they’ll see that others have feelings too, they’ll understand that life is more than abusing others, and that people aren’t office boys to them. Emotional control is about learning to take a broader view, learning to deal with frustrations, developing patience, helping people for free, tolerating unpleasant feelings without getting angry, learning that they will change at some point.
How do you acquire emotional control? By doing things differently than usual, fighting against the basic pattern or tendency to act as you have been acting and taking different actions with the awareness that it will be better for personal development. Also by cultivating gratitude, putting an end to resentments, getting involved in voluntary philanthropic work, stopping destructive thoughts that spring up in the mind and choosing better thoughts.
Nervousness is a popular word used for different types of behavior. Sometimes a person is said to be nervous because they can’t control themselves and have what we call a short fuse, or they are said to be nervous because they can’t remain calm in certain situations, becoming anxious, restless and insecure. Someone is also said to be nervous when they are a very irritable, quarrelsome person. Other people comment that they are nervous because they tremble in the face of challenges such as a new job, a new relationship, a trip, feeling unable to cope on their own with a situation that, for them, is frightening.
So-called nervous people without self-control may have psychological identity problems, a lack of inner security and perhaps weaknesses in the structure of their personality. If you got the tendency to be out of control, partly through genetic inheritance, because your father or mother was nervous, and you copied the model of the influential person who raised you, if you got that way after a stressful event, it doesn’t matter. The responsibility to change is personal. So, in order to mature and acquire healthy self-control over your feelings, you could try doing the following:
- Accept that there is a lack of emotional control and that it is your problem. Accept that you brought it into this relationship, whether it’s marital, at work or in the religious community where you participate. Think about it and admit that it existed in you before. Your tendency to be emotionally uncontrolled or nervous may have come from your past and perhaps even worsened in your current relationship, but it already existed.
- Decide to stop and think, and stop blaming past and present people and circumstances for your nervousness and lack of control. You have to decide this for yourself so that the outcome is beneficial.
- Understand and accept that you need to change. Acceptance is looking at reality and seeing that some things about it aren’t pleasant, whether it’s the reality inside you or around you, and not turning around and hurting people and yourself with your emotional recklessness. Acceptance is about stopping fighting with reality or pretending that what bothers you doesn’t exist. It does exist, but now you’re no longer going to run away from it, you’re going to look at the problem from a new angle, working with yourself to control it.
- Cultivate the desire to change, nurture this idea. You’re realizing that the process of learning to control yourself is like a stairway with several steps. The first step is to admit that you have this problem. The second step is to stop and think about the fact that you tend to blame people or your past to excuse your nervousness. The third step is to understand and accept that you need to change in order to improve your relationships. And the fourth step means cultivating the desire to change, thinking about it a lot, nurturing that desire.
- Be ready to make a change, in other words, decide to act differently because of a deep personal desire to change the way you are. Being ready to change is like saying to yourself: “Now I’m ready to change because I’ve already climbed the other steps, I’m in the mindset that from now on I can function differently and better.”
If you recognize that you are not making progress on your own in changing your behavior for the better, then seek help from individual or group psychological counseling. A little counseling with a professional can really open your mind and encourage you to behave in a way that is not nervous or emotionally out of control. It’s very important to read good books on how to acquire self-control. Perhaps an acquaintance, relative or friend can recommend some literature on the subject. Try to attend a lecture or seminar on how to acquire emotional control. You can do this by looking to see if any institutions in your city are offering lectures or by searching the internet for Christian-based educational videos.
To learn how to deal with your emotions, ask friends and relatives for an analysis, i.e. ask them to tell you how you are behaving and have the humility to listen and the courage to accept what is true of what they tell you, using the person’s comment as a source of change. This is important because we can’t fully see how we act in our relationships. People can see things in us that we don’t see ourselves. Decide to stop functioning in the same way. Using your conscious thought, you can say to yourself, for example, like this: “I’m not going to act like this any more.” Then you bite your tongue, go for a walk, take a shower, sing, pray, take a deep breath, write, but don’t let your nerves get the better of you.
Consider that you can choose a new behavior. Understand and believe that having emotions is not the problem, the challenge is to have emotions without letting them have you, without letting them hurt people around and yourself. If you have a relationship with a person who lacks emotional control, at home, at school, at work, in the religious community, consider that you didn’t cause their lack of control, you can’t control it and you can’t cure it. It’s up to the person to learn to control themselves and take on the consequences of their lack of control.
And if you’re emotionally out of control, don’t be discouraged. You can learn to control yourself. Do your part, as I’ve just explained, and God will do his part by giving you strength, enlightenment, discernment, humility, wisdom and serenity. Ask Him and He will help you.
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Dr. Cesar Vasconcellos de Souza is working as a psychiatrist and international speaker. He is author of 3 books, columnist of the health magazine “Vida e Saúde” for 25 years, and has a regular program on the “Novo Tempo” TV channel.
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