TALK: LESSONS I LEARNED MOVING A COUCH
Hi, it’s Ron here, and I’ve got a few thoughts on guys and social circles.
As a general rule, us guys don’t invest much time in creating or maintaining our circles. We connect with others, but it’s not a conscious thing. It happens informally: on the ice, at a wedding, or watching the game. Even moving a couch.
One of the most profound moments I ever shared with my best friend was when he was helping me move out of my apartment after my girlfriend broke up with me. My friend was at one end of the couch, and I was at the other. Out of the blue and in less time than it takes to grab a beer, open it, and take a swig, he told me exactly why she broke up with me.
I had done everything for my girlfriend, including her university homework. My intentions were good, but to some people — including my girlfriend and my best friend — my behavior was controlling. At the time I didn’t recognize it. I needed someone more objective to see it and speak up.
That couch confession was a watershed moment — the right person at the right time with the right message — and I carried it into my next relationship (which ended up being with my wife). But my friend didn’t phone me up and arrange to meet over coffee to have a heart-to-heart. We were just two guys moving a couch.
Most men can identify our key relationships with no problem. But describing the positives and negatives about the relationships and stating what we’d like to be different? We may be able to do that with our intimate partners, but no one else.
There are probably some people in your circle whom you could rely on in times of need. And some people who piss you off. And some who are hard to read, and some who are awkward. My neighbor is an example. He’s a great guy but he reminds me of Spock — he has a hard time reading social cues.
All of those people should be on your circle — the good, the bad, and the awkward. By playing Four Questions with them, you’ll be able to identify what you like and what bugs you about the relationships. It’s information you can use later to help yourself feel better.
This Week’s To-Do List
Draw your social circle. Include both helpful and stressful relationships. Don’t forget people who used to be very important to you, but whom you don’t see anymore. There’s no right or wrong here — just a drawing with some names on it.
Play Four Questions. Choose four or five of the most important (and most stressful) relationships on your circle and answer the four questions. Remember, this is just about describing your relationships, not making changes to them. Write down your answers, record them on your phone, or ask a friend to help you.
Put your circle in a safe place. You’ll want to be able to come back to your circle in later weeks, so don’t toss it yet! If you live with others, choose a place that’s private, but that you can easily access. If you live alone, you can hang it up.
This week we help you make connections between your feelings and the interactions you have with others. With practice, you’ll become better at naming your feelings, understanding where they come from, and choosing how you want to handle them — with the end result of feeling better.
Let’s say you get home from work, and there are exactly eight pairs of your kids’ shoes cluttering up the hallway. Do you yell? Hide in your room feeling ashamed at your failure to instill personal responsibility in your children? Sigh, put the shoes away, and try to forget about it? Whichever reaction you have, how do you feel?
Imagine that you get a group text from a friend about a party everyone went to last night that you weren’t invited to. Do you text back something catty? Cry? Vent to someone? Depending on your response, how do you feel?
Your coworker invites you out for lunch and out of the blue tells you he doesn’t like the way you act in staff meetings. Do you listen quietly? Angrily defend your behavior? Say nothing and feel nauseous? Tell your spouse about it later? Whichever you do, how does it feel?
Your spouse calls to tell you that, for the third time this week, she can’t take the kids to soccer, because she has to stay late at work. Do you get mad and end the call quickly? Laugh and tell her she owes you dinner out this weekend? Tell her it’s okay, but inside you’re seething? How does your response make you feel?
There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. The point of our scenarios is simply to show that many of our feelings (and our resulting behavior) have an interpersonal component — they’re a direct result of the interactions we have with people every day. These interactions, either immediately or over time, affect our mood.
Making that connection between interactions, feelings, behavior, and mood is important for people who have depression. That’s because depression is a feeling illness. When we’re depressed, we feel sad, lonely, disappointed, angry, frustrated, hopeless, guilty, discouraged, ashamed, and pessimistic. The feelings add up, interaction after interaction, day after day, until we can’t imagine what it would be like to feel good again.
PEP TALK: When you can see connections between your relationships, feelings, and behavior, you’ll be able to make choices that help you feel better.
This week, we’ll help you identify the feelings that you experience as a result of your interactions with others and give you tools to express and manage them in ways that will improve your relationships and help you feel better. Let’s get started.
Feelings and Moods: What’s the Difference?
Feelings are the emotional reactions we have to experiences. When you put a number of similar feelings together, you have a mood.
A fight with your sister will trigger a feeling (or a few). That fight, plus the fact that you dropped your iPhone in the toilet, canceled a coffee date with a friend because you weren’t feeling up to it, skipped lunch, and ate a tub of ice cream, plus the fact that it’s raining for the fourth day in a row — all lead to a low mood. That mood might last for a couple of hours, lifting when your friend calls to check in, your kids come home from a sleepover, or the sun comes out. But it might continue into the next day if, for example, you don’t sleep well that night, stay inside the next day, and let the conflict with your sister simmer.
The Six F-words
The first step to managing our feelings is being able to name them — in the moment. It can be tough. When you see your mother-in-law’s number pop up on your phone, you aren’t asking, “How am I feeling?” You’re probably debating whether to answer the call. When your boss calls you into her office, you skip right past “How am I feeling?” You’re too busy grabbing last month’s sales reports and figuring out how to explain the results. When you’ve just told your friend something personal, you don’t ask, “How am I feeling?” Instead, you’re probably running through the conversation in your head again. “Did I say too much? Does he think I’m weird?”
It’s time to stop, take a breath, and ask yourself: How am I feeling? That’s because when you can name your feelings while you’re in the heat of battle or the throes of despair or anticipating a conversation with your mother-in-law, you’ll make better choices about how — and even whether — to act on them.
There may be dozens of emoticons on your phone, but there are only six main feelings — what we affectionately call the six F-words — sadness, fear, anger, surprise, happiness, and disgust.
These six emotions are hardwired into humans. Fear, for example, prompts the adrenaline-fueled “fight or flight” response. Disgust probably evolved to keep us safe from rotten food and contagious diseases. Anger helps protect us from threats.
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