When I left my last job in Montana and moved to Arizona, one of my primary hopes was to orchestrate an environment and a routine that would cultivate a shift in my internal experience. Calm, centered, attentive, deliberate and thoughtful could potentially replace a more reactive and sharp edged inner landscape.
Throughout my life I’ve thought a lot about behavior vs. emotional life experience. Without question, behavior is incredibly important, like center stage with the curtain up, it is what other people see. I believe how we act and what we do matters greatly for our relationships, livelihood, and sense of confidence in being able to exact an intended outcome. But, what about how we are, how we feel inside ourselves? For whatever reason, be it homesteading, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, no nonsense ancestors or just a focus of the American culture, it seems that a person’s experience in our world is often afterthought. Somehow, feeling bad is an acceptable second place ribbon as long as a person is looking good, on paper, in person.
I worry that this nuanced downplay of internal suffering in part silently drives some of the most powerful deleterious forces in our society. For example, I wonder why opiate use, alcoholism, suicide rates are at such a high? In my mind, I can’t see how these aren’t at least partial attempts at a remedy for emotional discomfort, a desperate grasp at banishing unwanted emotional states. I know that for me, how I feel matters for my happiness as much as how I act.
Today, I have a challenge to the internal serenity I have fought so hard to find and maintain. Parenting teen children seems to provide an ever-present sinkhole of anxiety and emotional discontent. This particular sinkhole is of the academic variety. Allowing my 14 year old son some autonomy in his online schooling (a result of the COVID-19 outbreak) seemed appropriate given his regular assurances that his grades were fine and all appearances indicated that he was completing the work. Having received an email reminder from the school suggesting parents also check grades independently, I decided to dig a little deeper. The investigation turned up a missed test in Geometry last week, a mishap that has turned a B into a C for the boy and spiked anxiety in his mother.
Five years ago, when my daughter was 14, a similar problem, refusal to eat or insistence upon wearing a mini skirt for a sub-zero school day would’ve launched me into a tirade. The girl certainly suffered a number of yelling matches and emotional responses as part of her teen parenting. Five more years of emotional work, better sleep, exercise, mindfulness, emotional skills, understanding myself better, cultivated self-compassion, yoga, less work and the wisdom of age, when faced with challenges for the boy, I catch myself.
I don’t immediately go yell at him. Is this better for him, probably, but it is definitely better for me. I want to stay calm because I have decided that what happens in my emotional realm matters. If I let the anxiety spike, yell and scream, I suffer. I want to do everything I can to avoid feeling bad. So, I stop. I tell myself that I can take my time, figure out how to handle the problem and proceed thoughtfully. I’ll figure it out; for now, I just keep reading my book.
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