Understanding Why That Feeling Keeps Coming Back

You already know which situation it is. Perhaps it is a particular person, or a certain tone in a message, or being interrupted halfway through explaining something you had thought carefully about. Whatever it is, you have watched yourself react to it more than once, you have apologised for it at least once, and you have promised yourself, quietly and sincerely, that it would not happen again.

Then it happens again.

What makes this so frustrating is that you can see it coming afterwards with perfect clarity. You can describe exactly what set you off, you can explain why your reaction was out of proportion, and none of that description seems to make the slightest difference the next time the situation arrives. You are not short of insight about the event. You are short of insight about yourself.

Your reactions have a history

Every reaction you have is proportionate to something. The difficulty is that it is often proportionate to something other than what is actually in front of you.

Your brain is an extraordinarily efficient pattern machine, and it builds shortcuts from everything you have lived through. When a situation resembles an earlier one in shape, in tone, in the feeling it produces, your brain reaches for the meaning it made last time and applies it without checking with you first. That is why being talked over in a meeting at forty-five can land with the weight of being talked over at nine, and why the size of your reaction is genuinely puzzling to everyone present, yourself included.

This is the competency called Emotional Insight, and the journey it describes runs from blind to aware. The word blind sounds harsh until you realise it is the ordinary condition of a mind running its own patterns quietly in the background. Nobody hands you a list of your own triggers when you turn eighteen. You collect them without noticing, and they operate without announcing themselves.

There is a difference worth sitting with here, between knowing that you do something and understanding what sets it running. Knowing that you get defensive about your competence changes almost nothing, as you have probably discovered. Recognising that the defensiveness arrives whenever your competence is questioned in front of other people, and that it traces back to a season in your life when your competence was genuinely on the line, changes a great deal. The first is a label, the second is insight, and insight is what gives you somewhere to stand when the feeling next arrives.

You will also find that the pattern is remarkably consistent once you can see it. It is rarely twelve different problems, it tends to be one or two well worn paths that your reactions take because they have taken them for years, in the same way a track forms across a field simply because everyone walks the same line.

Two words, not one

Last time the work was to give a feeling one word. This time you add a second.

When the reaction arrives, name the feeling, and then name what triggered it, as plainly as you can. Frustrated, interrupted. Anxious, unprepared. Dismissed, overlooked. Angry, blamed.

Pairing the two is what starts to reveal the path, because the feeling on its own tells you that something happened, while the feeling beside its trigger begins to tell you what kind of thing keeps happening to you.

Now

The next time that familiar reaction turns up, once it has passed and you can think clearly again, ask yourself one question.

Where did I first learn to react like that?

You may get nothing the first time, or you may get an answer so quickly that it surprises you, and either response is useful information. Some patterns come from a manager, some from a family, some from a season of your life you have not thought about properly in years.

You are not required to resolve whatever you find, and you certainly do not need to excuse the reaction by explaining its origin. You are simply learning that the reaction belongs to a story, and once you can see the story, you get to decide whether it still deserves to write your lines for you.