Respond, Don't React

September 12, 2022

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I was going watching the football game and relax for the night, but at halftime I got a little bored, so I decided to flip through Facebook. This caused me to come across a post from a page that my partner had told me about. The post was by Julie Menanno of The Secure Relationship. It was incredible to read as I could actually understand, relate and appreciate what she was talking about. It pertains to choosing to respond as opposed to reacting.

Reference: www.thesecurerelationship.com/

Reacting has been my goto for years and recently I have been learning to stop the reaction, sit with the feeling, process and then figure out how I can better respond. The little bit of time that is taken between feeling and reacting, allows the prefront cortex to do it's job, processing our thoughts, giving better cognitive flexibility and controlling impulse. Basically it is the think before the act, part of our brain. When we immediately act from emotion, fear, anger, etc we are bypassing the prefrontal cortex completely. If it's a life-threatening situation, definitely react, but I'm pretty sure that a disagreement or upset with your partner is far from life-threatening. Processing the feeling and not going straight to react has been something that I feel I have made incredible progress in and will continue to work on, although it is a little difficult to gauge my progress without the opportunity to practice what I've learned.

Menanno, like me, loves analogies. In this post, she uses the example of riding in a car with your partner driving. I won't recap the entire post, I encourage you too check it out though... It's amazing.

Menanno states, "Responding means you meet a situation at a level appropriate to the real event. You take a problem solving approach with a balance of reason and emotion." This is an area that I struggled with previously. When triggered, my reaction was way more intense than the situation elicited.

So many times, I would react to a situation in a way that didn't make sense to my partner, but inside my anxiety ridden brain, I felt it was justified. I was scared and felt threatened and my inner-child was screaming because he was terrified of being abandoned. I didn't realize it at the time but this was my pattern of familiarity. I'm in no way saying it was right, it was just all I knew.

I now know different. As I'm gaining self-awareness, feeling secure in my own skin and confidence in my skills, I know that there is a better way of handling situations like that. Each day I feel more and more confident in my abilities to handle myself differently and look forward to the day that I can put these skills to use... Showing up in new and better ways for myself and for my partner.