What would your family culture look like if you modeled this:

Model Experiencing emotions WITHOUT acting on them…

So if your husband comes home 2 hours late, without telling you he was going to be late… you made his favorite dinner, he missed your sons soccer practice… and you are LIVID, hurt, anxious…

It's SO FREAKING VALID to feel those things. I would those and more.

But in this scenario how would you experience the emotions without acting on them???

Acting on it might be…

…punishing your husband

…yelling/screaming the second he walks in

…cold shoulder the rest of the night

Feeling without that acting on the emotions…That would be more like crying (valid) and saying, “I felt hurt and also pretty anxious when you didn't come home and I couldn't get ahold of you. I had made your favorite dinner and was really hoping we could eat as a family before the game. Where were you? Was something going on that made it so you didn't answer the phone or want to come home?”

You are still feeling.

You are still communicating that you're frustrated.

But you aren't acting on the feeling, you are just experiencing it and using those feelings to communicate in a healthy constructive way.

If you kids see this, this is such a healthy model!

Conflict is ok. Feelings are ok. Sharing feelings are ok.

You can also model this WITH your kids.

You walk into the kitchen and they have just DESTROYED the kitchen. Flour, salt, milk, eggs. It's all over the floor and counters.

Wow, I'm automatically overwhelmed. Walking into the mess, seeing it as the hours worth of work it'll take to clean up. Feeling annoyed they didn't ask. Feeling annoyed with the waste.

You see their happy faces mixing up their own playdough concoction.

And instead of acting on those being emotions you're feeling. You take a pause…

Feel it all. It is frustrating.

Breathe deeply.

What matters most… crushing their spirit for exploring and being creative… or the temporary messy kitchen?

Now you enter in a place that aligns with who you want to be as a parent. “What are you making? Wow, look at all those ingredients"

Experience with them.

Play.

The mess is already done and will wait.

Later when they are done, use it as an opportunity to teach them, it's so fun to do these experiments, but part of the experiment and cooking and using the kitchen is always cleaning up. Can you help me clean up?

Throw in some boundaries, Next time, just use the flour and water… the salt and eggs are off limits.

And that is modeling experiencing emotions without acting on them.

I'm far from perfect on this, but I've been working on this actively lately and wanted to share. There's a podcast episode below where I caught myself MID-REACTING and it was very eye opening to me to PAUSE.

listen to that podcast

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