Danny ChaiI think I tend to emphasize the bad more than the good when I blog, like with issues regarding the kids. Some of my family really worried when I wrote about Abby’s tantrum phase. In reality, it was just a brief thing, probably related to sickness and tiredness as much as anything, and things got better soon. I should probably write about the good stuff more. But that’s not my nature.
In any case, she still does throw (much milder) tantrums and goes through stages of general disobedience and crying. In the past couple months, though, she’s started to do something new: in the midst of her crying, when I ask her if she’s going to listen or continue to disobey / throw a tantrum / whatever it is she’s doing, she says “I don’t wanna cry. I don’t wanna throw a tantrum.” She basically asks us to help her stop crying.
I find that completely fascinating. She’s expressing desire and emotion on two separate, conflicting levels. On a higher level, she doesn’t want to cry, she doesn’t want to throw a tantrum, understanding the consequences that come with it. But on a lower, more purely emotional level, she can’t help feel but what she feels, and she can’t stop crying.
To me, that brings up an interesting question about how much we can control our own emotions. Can we at all? I say yes. Mainly because I feel like I’ve done it myself. Like, I’ve written about this before, but I used to have road rage. Someone would do something to me and I’d be a total jerk on the road – tailgating, following people for long distances, other jerksauce stuff. It was especially bad (and in retrospect, highly dangerous) on the long, boring drives to and from SoCal. At some point, I decided this is bad behavior, and I remedied it by imagining that every other driver could be someone from church. And it worked. Haven’t had real road rage since. So I know from experience that it’s possible to control your emotional response.
The question is, how reasonable is it to expect that of others? That’s one common theme of conflict in our marriage; we get upset at how the other responds emotionally. But how much can you change that? When you feel frustrated, you feel frustrated. When you feel angry, you feel angry. It’s a visceral, almost reflexive response. It might be possible to change it. But it is a reasonable expectation?
I think where I stand now is, we can’t necessarily control our emotions, but we can control our behavior in light of our emotions. Even if we feel angry, we don’t have to yell or swear. We can control how we act, even if we can’t control how we feel.
In fact, doing that is one thing that separates us from animals. Animals act completely according to instinct and emotion. Humans don’t have to do that. And we shouldn’t. That’s why (to rehash an old topic) I hate the phrase “keeping it real”. Someone saying it typically means they’re going to act according to how they feel and not hold back. And if you think about it, that’s saying they’re going to be no better than an animal. WTG.
Abby doesn’t want to keep it real. She doesn’t wanna cry. And for this – as strange as it might seem to say about a 3-year-old – I respect her.
Her disobedience is still pretty annoying, though. Especially the kicking.