Genvieve hurls insults at her partner when he says she should know better than to trust her doctor to give her the right advice for her injured foot. She runs crying out of the room. Later, she tells a girlfriend that she overreacted.
Oftentimes people believe that if their emotional response is out of proportion to the trigger at hand that they have “overreacted”. Overreaction is a popular misunderstanding about anger or hurt. It is used as a categorical label to describe a reaction misunderstood because it is not logically proportionate to the “weight” of the surface trigger. Yet children, our emotional teachers, sometimes cry voluminously at the slightest injury, taking advantage of every opportunity to offload accumulated emotional charge.
Instead of labelling Genvieve’s true response an overreaction, we could say she reacted exactly in proportion to her backlog of held emotions. The word “overreact” connotes that she was out of line for having the response she did. The concept of overreaction also reveals a widely held judgment that one’s emotional reaction should be controlled to match, but not exceed, the exact level of response stirred by the trigger at hand – input in, input out, the modus operandi of a machine or computer. The emotional body doesn’t operate under the same rules of logic as the mental body; yet, in its own world, functions perfectly logically at all times when one considers all that has been emotionally denied in our existential history.
Attempted non-reaction is not healing and dealing either. My friend Carmen wrote to me relating her attempts to suppress her initial angry response in a potential “road rage” scenario:
“What I hope is happening when I ‘refuse” to feel or ventilate road rage is eliminating the knee jerk reaction. I think we are somewhat programmed to feel ENTITLED to be angry when we perceive an insult.”
Yes, that old righteous indignation thing, where we’re “justifiably” enraged. “How dare they do that to me!” This comes from believing we have no responsibility for our experiences, another thing we’re programmed about (”everything that happens to us is random”), or we adopt a superior stance: “I would NEVER do that”. We feel entitled to strike back because of our cultural revenge imprint; miniature pitchfork devils whisper in our ear that “the score must be evened”.
Carmen continues, “It doesn’t feel like I’m burying it, it feels like I’m refusing to rise to the bait.”
As if to react emotionally at all is to overreact! Emotional responses are immediate, and natural. If your reaction is kneejerk, and you prefer a different response, then how to address that first reaction? Refusing to “rise to the bait” means refusing to acknowledge the reaction, therefore denying that you are having the reaction by enforcing calm as a secondary response. The debate is whether that first reaction is real. Instead of substituting a second response, one could address healing that initial, ‘kneejerk’ response by healing over time so that one no longer has the same over-the-top response to the same stimuli, ad infinitum. People on an emotional expression healing path are attempting this slow process of organic healing.
Healthy open expression of anger and emotions such as grief, hurt and fear seems farfetched because we live in a culture of denial, where holding them in is seen as natural. When something has been practiced for millenia, it seems that must be the right way. I disagree that it’s the right way; it does not lead to healing to hold feelings in as a matter of course. As Sinead O’Connor once sang, “Life’s backwards, life’s backwards/People, turn around”.