Today's episode is about defensiveness at work, when you feel attacked, and the emotional cage error that can sometimes arise. So sometimes at work, something will happen that you sort of wish was not happening. And in some situations, you might notice that you're being defensive or frantically being defensive. And other situations, it's pretty clear that there is an attack that's going on, probably not physical, if it's physical, we will leave a space like in if you don't do that already, like please leave a space. Also when a parents type roles, they'll know and like deal with situation. But a lot of the time we end up in this gray area, especially in remote work, right, where we're like, oh, God, something horrible is happening. And it is attack energy, and we're not sure what to do to get unhooked from that situation. This is what we're going to be discussing today. And in particular, we're going to be peeling apart the layers around that experience of being attacked, psychologically, emotionally interpersonally. And Meredith has some interesting kind of guidance or insights for us, on triaging when that attack feeling is occurring, is it a boundary violation, or something else? And the something else we're going to discuss today? Is this idea called an emotional cage error boundary violation or emotional cage error? What's going on in your experience of attack? Meredith? What is the boundary violation? And what is an emotional cage error? And how can we know the difference?
And I think sometimes these do have overlap, I'll say at first, but I think, of course, you know, we talk about a boundary violation is someone coming into your space, and impacting your space. And so in that situation, we want to be cautious about creating safety for ourselves. Like that's the point that we attend to we attend to ourselves, create safety and create reward for ourselves. So we identify what we need to be safe and what we need to feel rewarded and thriving in that environment, a boundary violation becomes all about us. And it's not necessarily about correcting the other person's behavior, although that can be a later active component that we take. But really enforcing a boundary is about protecting us and attending to ourselves when we're talking about like, and so some examples of boundary violations that we've talked about are someone touching you and you don't want to be touched, raise voices, impacts on our time impacts on our work, things that are actually interfering with us
interruption, maybe, maybe like constant pinging, like gobs and gobs of DMS, like you could turn your notifications off. But like if you have to be in Slack, and someone's like messaging you a billion times like that could be an inch, there's a flood of messages for you.
Sometimes it can even be and so in that situation, you want to attend to yourself, right, you might want to turn off your notification silenced that person's, like the way you're receiving that person's notifications, even step away from your I've had situations where I've stepped away from my computer because I realized that I'm being triggered by certain manner of communication from people. Sometimes a boundary violation can be someone using certain language as applied to a person. So for example, racial slurs, gender slurs, ad hominem attacks, things that say you as a person are bla bla, that can
where you might one might respond with actually don't like on the TIC tock rails because I'm a parent, right? You get these reels that are like, actually, I don't let people talk to me like that. Yeah, it's like they're coming into your psychological space.
Sometimes they can have just general categories, like I don't like being described, I don't, I'm not particularly comfortable with people saying, You're so smart, or you're so dumb, like either one of them. I just like, that feels like it comes into my space, and it's my business who I am. And I have to have a certain amount of intimacy with a person before it's comfortable to me to have a person describe me, you know,
it's your narrative, you know, that people are putting characterizations and narratives on you unchecked, like, it's a thing, I get it that's in your space. It's your airspace for you.
People like don't like being called skinny or fat people don't like being called tall or short, like, well, like describing people is very common boundary violation. Yeah. And what you're looking for with a boundary violation is coming into your space. But there's also this other category of behavior that we see with other people, where it's not exactly coming into our space, but we still disagree with the behavior. We think it's not productive, or we think that behavior is harmful. So the behavior exists outside of our space, but we still might want to correct it. And this can be tricky because I don't I put bystander experiences related to, for example, racism or sexism in the boundary violation space, not in the emotional cage space. Because I think if you're watching and hearing racial slurs, sexist slurs, sexual harassment, racial harassment, disability harassment, any kind of normalized
stalking normalized antagonism, it sets your expectations.
Yeah, it brings you in your mind, that still is impacting you. So you could be seeing something that is not targeted at you, bullying, abuse, and it still impacts you, that can still be a boundary violation. And that's still a chance to make yourself safe, and contribute to safety and the environment. The emotional cage error happens when someone else is behaving in a way that we disagree with, we don't like and then our experience of it, our brains tell us, you must feel one way in response to this behavior. So the other person behaves the way we don't like. And we feel like it's automatic, that we have to feel hurt, offended, betrayed, humiliated, shamed, etc, that we have to feel a way we don't want to feel in response to somebody else's behavior. This is the most useful when the behavior is not a boundary violation, where it's actually somebody behaving outside of our context. That's the first way that you want to start to work with this. And then also, sometimes there can be overlap where there is a boundary violation, but we also have an emotional cage here. Yeah,
I've been there. We've talked to that recently. So okay, let me summarize this emotional cage air, it's like, it's not really when it's only an emotional kgr. Right. It's like, it's not really in my space, but I can't stop thinking about it. So maybe an example of this like to kind of triage is like, I always love coming back to the tuna sandwich in the lunchroom thing because like people have strong opinions about the tuna sandwich. Like, I suppose you could be like, That's a boundary violation because it's shared airspace. But if you like, don't like someone chewing with their mouth open, and there is no sound like you actually have islands, probably, you could remove your eyeballs from that location. But like, if you did leave the room, and then you just couldn't stop thinking about it. Like, this is like a loving, sweet, where we would be like, no, no, that's an emotional cage, or you can't let it go. Because and this is what you talk to your friends about at 6pm Happy Hour, or wherever you go, where you're just like, I just can't help it like Shelley, I don't understand. I don't understand how this is happening. Emotional cage error, because your brain says when I see x, I have to get concerned, confused, invested, like whatever those emotional states are. So when a happens, I see mouth open and chewing, be says, and who knows why, right? Oh, that's bad manners when you're a kid, and it means no one's ever going to take you to prom. That's a my mom would say about manners. And so you're like, Oh, I must, I must perform, or I must be loyal to being appalled. When I see mouth open, I need to be doing appalled. And it's like clockwork like it's
another example. It's kind of a silly example that I would always give and she would support me in this is that my very beloved friend and old roommate was not great at doing the dishes. When we lived together. She'd never had a dishwasher. So she literally didn't ever learn how to load a dishwasher. And she had very creative ways of loading the dishwasher. That to me, were shocking. And so sometimes, and actually don't mind doing the dishes. It's not something that bothers me, except that I felt like the division of labor should be that she did the dishes sometimes. So I noticed myself when I was working through these experiences myself, I noticed myself sitting on the couch being like, Why isn't she doing the dishes? She should do the dishes? Why isn't she doing? So sometimes it's inaction and why isn't this person doing their work? Why isn't this person coming to my birthday party or saying happy birthday to me? Why isn't this person reaching out when they know I'm in distress? Why is this person telling me what to do? You know, some examples, like,
like rumination kind of to like it could show up that way where we're like, I don't want to be ruminating on this. And I cannot get out of my own, I guess is what you call it. Emotional cage. Yeah, you're like, I am stuck in a cage. I don't want to be in here. And I can't stop thinking these thoughts about this person. And like maybe, yeah, yeah, the person and the tuner or whatever.
And then the other side of it that I just want to acknowledge is and you had said this before we started recording that there's also a power dynamic component to this. So, when you are in an equal or higher level power dynamic and you have an emotional cage about somebody in an equal or lower power dynamic to you, that is really different than when you are in a lower power dynamic. Because often, if you are if you perceive yourself in a lower power dynamic than the other person, so, for example, an employee and a boss, if the employee the subordinate employee is having an emotional cage around the boss's behavior, a lot of times that also involves a boundary violation that is quite common. And Michael
Scott from the office like, it's both, we hear something about it, but also like, there are real HR violations we need to discuss.
Yeah, Toby. But if you aren't in a peer, or you're the higher level person, oftentimes, it really is an emotional cage. And a lot of times, it's about our self narrative and the messages that we've absorbed about who we are what we have to do who we are as a leader, the harm that we don't want to cause. Yeah, yeah. So when so, like, we either
harm we don't want to cause or calling one out on myself here. The harm, we don't want to be held accountable or held liable for causing, because we like there's the goal. Yeah, like there's a harm I didn't want to cause like, I don't want everyone to have a really disrupted office environment. But I also don't want to get in trouble for letting everybody be too loosey goosey around here. Yeah, you know, are not professional. And I feel like that's where like a little bit of like internalized orderliness, policing can happen. We're like, I want to be a good big sister. And so we all need to look like we're really doing our work. But that serves to be like, the boss that everyone hates, who's like, Why does everybody keep breathing down my neck and being sure I'm doing fate, you know, enough face time or whatever? And it's partly because, you know, does the boss want to do harm to the company? No, but also, the boss doesn't want to look like they don't have control of the working environment. You know, that's the emotional cage, they don't want to be vulnerable to that. And so they're like, whatever, everyone can be scared around me all the time. Because I don't want to be scared that someone's gonna say my team is disorganized. Like, that's a vanity thing. I mean, that's something I've seen by work on it myself,
totally. And I think I mean, I just want to call out that the, the main space that I see this most commonly, is the space of racism, and like, white lady experience of being called out around racism, like I just see that as a very common space, where there can be two separate experiences of emotional cage and like, like, I'm just gonna share this having give me a give us an example. Yeah, with a number of and I don't want to, like betray anybody's competences, but just having worked with a number of specifically like, black women and men, who are in subordinate positions to white women. And so just a very common experience that I see is that the white woman feels or intends to create safety and structure within an organization. And in doing so doesn't have cultural competency to meet a black employee with their experience and recognize the good work that they're doing. And so the black employee may feel attacked and may feel justifiably attacked. And so, none of what I want to say about the emotional cage is that like people are, like wrong about feeling attacked. I think that feeling attacked, feeling shame, feeling betrayed, feeling harassed or discriminated against feelings are valid. There's a reason that we have those their instincts, and they can be completely helpful and self protective and positive. And then also, I think, in responding, it can be very scary in that space to respond to a white woman who's in charge, right? And then often white people who get a message of I'm not safe here, like, what the black employee often intends is I'm not safe here. I'm having an experience. That's racialized. And that's consistent with like a lot of racialized experiences that I've had that have led to physical danger or some how other very tangible dangers and then the white person involved often has this shame experience of now I'm being attacked. I'm being canceled. I'm having like a distress moment and then everybody is in distress, including the person who's in charge and does have the power. So in that experience, the key is when it feels like we Can only when we feel attacked. And it seems like we can only have one response, we're in this emotional cage error. The key is that our thoughts create our feelings, and our thoughts may be justified. But that doesn't mean that they're the only option in that space. So you kind of want to imagine that you're in this cage, but the doors open.
Okay, so that's a lot, because you're giving us all a genius at one time, so I'm gonna slow down, okay, part of it, the thoughts creating feelings is going to have a lot of people being like, wait a minute, we need to, like sit somewhere on that. But the first thing that happened there is this possibility that when you are in an emotional cage, they're not also a boundary violation, we're not starting there. This is like you can't stop thinking about the thing, even though there's no harm. When you're in an emotional cage air. The first idea here is you can choose to set down that feeling. If it's a boundary violation, and you're trying to get rid of the feeling, girl, your body is trying to help you. So it's going to, you know, you don't need to get rid of the feeling of it's a boundary violation, right. But if you're really ruminating, if it's just like you, you can't believe that the other person eats Cheerios every morning, and you're just like, just to be silly about it. Right? You can get out of there. The first thing is, you could choose to let that feeling you could give yourself permission to feel a different kind of way. The reason why that works, I think is what you're saying is like, in the science of, you know, thoughts and feelings, it's like, at the end of the day, our feelings reflect our mental picture of what's happening in a situation. And if it's not actually a dangerous situation, if it's not a psychologically dangerous, actual boundary violations situation, we're just like, people shouldn't eat Cheerios every day, it's going to kill them, you have if you have that repetitive thought, or a belief system like that, the Cheerios are going to take you off. And so you're telling me because my thoughts and for my feelings, if I want to, if I want to ease up my cheerio, rage cage, then I can look and work backward, and be like, here's how I'm feeling. Here's how I'm thinking. Got it. If I want to have a new feeling, I can be choosing new thoughts.
Yeah, and for myself, the most useful way to encounter that is to assume that my thoughts are serving me, even if I feel like I'm in an emotional cage, that there's some positive reason that my body has chosen those thoughts. There's some way this has served me in the past. And also, I'm allowed to choose something new if I want to. So I think that we can start to gaslight ourselves and say, Well, I'm feeling a feeling I don't like so I must be having bad thoughts. And I must be doing something wrong. Or I must be bad person or like I'm like self shame. Right? Start from a place of self shame. I think you have to start from a place of this, on some level is justified and make sense,
presumption of usefulness? In some context, if not the current one. Yeah. Like in yoga class will be like, is this serving you right now? And you're like, Thanks, really appreciate that. So you're like, No, don't do like that instead, when you can. But instead, you're like No, as to be like, Okay, how is this serving me? Assume charity, right? Because it's your own system, your system is, in fact, your brain is usually trying to keep you safe from something not always a real clear, clear and present danger. But go look for how it's serving us and find it. And then that's the thinking that'll show us the places in which this is useful. And the places where maybe it's not. And if it's not useful, we give ourselves permission to choose some new thinking around that.
Yeah. And I think you have these experiences where you have like to go back to the boss and the subordinate employee example, like you have a subordinate employee who has experienced probably a lot of marginalization in their life, for whatever reason, like this is just very common. You have somebody who has a disability or who is not male, or who is not white, like they've, they've had these aggressions in their past. And I don't even like to use the term microaggression because a lot of times microaggressions are just aggression,
Russians and the minimize again and again,
right. And so they've had these experiences. And then for example, they get disciplined or reprimanded for something at work, and they know that it's unfair. And they know that a person who had a dominant characteristic was not treated the same way. Right, they genuinely think that it's wrong. And because it's wrong, they feel humiliated, shame. Like, self doubt, undermined. And so in that space, the interesting thing is you can see don't know that it's wrong, but then unpack any of those feelings that feel stuck, that don't, that are aggressive against you. For example, if we feel shame, because somebody else acted unfairly, that creates a new unfairness to us. Because really, it shows that our brain is saying, I must be something wrong, or I must have done something wrong to create this other person's action of unfairness. And if we make a little bit of a shift, if we say, I'm not stuck in this, I'm not going to repeat these, I'm going to be open to the possibility that there's another way of thinking about this, that might create a more empowered feeling related to it. We can say this person's actions were wrong, and were their own, and doesn't say anything about me. This person was aggressive to me or was racist or was like disability discriminatory was homophobic, whatever it is, this person was wrong or was abusive. And I'm loyal to myself, I take care of myself, in these spaces, like, the shift a lot of times is the narrative that we caused somebody else's behavior, then if you look at it on the boss side, on which I'm just gonna call like the white woman side, because I've seen this happen a lot. A lot of white women have been raised to think I can't ever make mistakes or I'm a bad person and I'm going to completely fail
you sometimes they have to stop other people from making mistakes, which gives us into like control and codependency and also there.
Yeah, and white savior ism, right? Like, I need to make everybody else be safe so that I'm safe so that I prove I'm an okay leader, and they think me
or else I have no worth. And if they're not thanking me, then what's wrong with me or what's wrong with them, and then we just nice them more times, but it creates hostility.
Right away, maybe I'm an inherently evil person, because this person doesn't like me, right? Like, maybe I'm a bad person,
because like likeability is like, that also has to happen. So then the person is unfortunately putting you at risk of being damned and, and banished forever, every right person's nightmare.
And so then we say, I need to micromanage and control this other person's liking of me this other person's positive response to me their experience of reality, so that I can be safe. And this is like a major emotional cage, right? And, and I do think there is responsibility in that space to say, I am actually a person with power in this space. And part of my power is unpacking those narratives that say other people have to behave a certain way before I can be safe and own myself and own my feelings and treat myself kindly.
Someone what I love about the cage is that the cage arises because some aspect of us is trying to protect us. Yeah, maybe originally, it's a shield. Yeah. But then you find yourself trapped in there and you're like, man, what would it look like to find the door and make the choice? And I think it's a toolkit for, among other things, softening, like I think this is kind of like one one example pathway of a way I can soften rigidity around my own painful past experiences. I don't want to soften rigidity around painful past experiences when I'm actually in danger or there is a boundary violation, right? That's what that's part of what can be so complex to triage here. I think reflecting with others around you who you know, who know you and know the space can be one way to help be like, you know, asking the questions is a therapist once asked me and around trauma said when there are proposed the statement, when there's a difference between actual safety and perceived safety, trauma is at play. So like my husband, and I will be like, sometimes when we're totally tweaked, it's become an emotional cage match over there like error on error rumbling
and we must fight to the
robots to munchkins enter one, Munchkin leaves is bad stuff. We will we will sometimes in our wiser moments be like hold on. perceived safety, actual safety. How are we doing? And we're like, oh, 100% perceived safety is out will be like actual safety. Like, is there violence? Is there intrusion is there overstepping? And we're like, no, it's perceived. And when we remind ourselves, it's perceived. We're like, got it. We can choose we will you're not going to choose our perception next, which can which isn't what you're saying can sound that can sound a little, some coercion, self coercive or something and gaslight. It's not you're saying, but it's like when we notice it's a it's in the perception layer. We can choose how we want to relate to the fact that there is perception going on. And sometimes that actually means the kinds of boundary by, you know, boundary protection mechanisms, you're talking about changing the body state going and taking a bath. We do hungry, angry, lonely, tired, the whole thing in our house a lot like, you go to bed. Yeah, well, we deal with it tomorrow. Because if it is in, if we know there's a brain state layer to it, we can find more creativity by resetting. So we no longer need the cage as the only candidate for protecting us. Because we can create new, creative, inventive sources of both protection and connection.
Yeah, and I think that like one way that this can really go arrive for people is if they're trying to force one answer or another, because sometimes we're trying to force Oh, there isn't a boundary violation here. It doesn't matter that this impacts my salary, or my break time, or my relationships with colleagues that's not fit, like I'm not being murdered. So I guess I'm safe. And like, you want to take it seriously that if it is a boundary violation, do not try to happy yourself out of a boundary violation that can actually be dangerous, like you can't like don't like gaslight yourself into being positive about something that's not safe for you, like you are allowed to feel angry, you are allowed to feel scared, you are allowed to feel shame, even guilt, like a feelings are what they are, they are a human experience.
They're information. Yeah, they
don't last forever, they are in movement, they're like part of being human. So you don't want to say oh, I'll just pretend that this isn't dangerous, and that this isn't impacting me so that I can feel good. Because I'd rather feel good than be safe like that is a questionable. And the other thing that I think people a lot of times do with this kind of concept is say, I need to be fair to other people. And I'm not being fair to other people. So like they really orient towards making a lot of space for the other person to have bad behavior. And that's not really that's not what we're saying either. Like, you want to attend to yourself, attend to the outcomes that you want, attend to the feelings that you want to start cultivating in your life and have space to process what is already coming up in your pre programming make space that there's some adaptive reason, like, even if you notice yourself being racist, honestly, you were raised in a soup of racist society, there's a reason that we've absorbed that and that's not to say it's right, and we need to correct it, we need to, like shift that if we're all going to create safety like for ourselves, we need to like white people for ourselves, we need to shift that it is not working. And like you have to process it and acknowledge it first and identify it first before you can be ready to make that shift and step out of that cage.
I think one of the things I just want to crystallize there, as we kind of moved to a close is like emotional cage air, it might not just be that you're stuck in anger. You might be stuck in not anger. Right? Right. You might be stuck in not sadness. And you know how often or we're in numbness which is some people's experience of depression. This is obviously not mental health advice. They go talk to a practitioner, but it's like the not feeling can be the cage. And like in Chinese medicine, which I know little only enough about to have taught yoga for a while, which is like loose, I think loosely or totally based on it. knowledge gaps, y'all. I'm a Junior Ranger over here. Chinese medicine has this very different view to what I learned kind of in a western view, which is like I thought the problem with emotions was feeling them because I grew up thinking like oh, if you're angry, then you're going to be an angry person and angry people are hurtful, harmful, off, hit off handle and violent and I just thought the most important way I can protect my values and the people around me is by not being angry aka an angry person. But then Chinese medicine and like yen and all this stuff comes in and is like actually emotional blockage is what creates imbalance. So the not feeling of the anger is basically like put a giant rock in a river that otherwise would flow healthfully in balance and so like you know something happens and you know I'm eating about to eat lunch and something smells weird. And I'm like you disgust like that's for a reason. Right? It shows me what doesn't want to happen. I dropped something on my foot and I'm like, ouch and I'm furious for a second and I'm like, Great, I'm not going to drop it. Right? Those are healthy cues and signals that tell us information about our body and how to keep it safe. But when we have come to be in environments, or in subcultures, where that the the idea of the emotion gets all this bad rap, right, then we can end up in emotional cages called all feel anything but that Yeah, and it can be scary to come out of the cage for the first time, big plug on therapy, big plug on body based stuff, big plug on walking through nature, if you're going to start moving some stuff or legit acupuncture, but but being able to slow down and notice that the emotional cages there, maybe notice how long we've been in that cage, how long that's been true how that served us because we had to be in there, otherwise, something else would happen. Those can also all be very generative steps, so that we can start writing ourselves those permission slips, to maybe try it a different way. Maybe see what other kind of behavior options we can come up with, and experience mobility for ourselves in the workforce in a more creative way. Rather than just losing our minds about the Cheerios, or whatever else is the Cheerios for you, your direct reports, you know, sometimes not putting two spaces between the period of one sentence and the capital letter of the other or whatever other things we get hung up on, that we know affect our tone and mood and management results.
And like the more the ones that we can get much more caught up in in that feel much more serious, like being told being reprimanded, being called racist, or being called discriminatory in any way being told we were abusive or bullying, being just corrected, in general, I think, because
then you're not like, I have to freak out and show shame. You're like, oh, no, okay, someone's not getting their needs met. Something's landing sideways. That's not my commitment as a manager that's going to impact our ability to have this team get results. I get to be attentive, I get to be curious, I get to be concerned for the person, I get to be listening. I get to be quizzical, you know, rather than being like, bomb a bad way person. And I
mean, those are some options. And sometimes both exist, sometimes someone needs to be corrected, and is reporting harm around the correction. And both are valid, right? Sometimes someone is having a discrimination experience, and also need support and correction around their job. And like both can happen, right? And so like, it can't, so sometimes,
but not really from the emotional cage as easily as the manager is stuck there. But it's not that helpful.
And so I'm so I think part of it is that when you step out of the emotional cage, you have all these possibilities, like it's not one it's not into another is not an either or, like it's not like either you're self shaming, or you are curious, it's like, you might be stuck in a self shame, emotional cage air. And what is beyond that, like, there might be some magic beyond that we don't even know like, it's not one or the other. But it could be curiosity, it could be something else,
like idea babies, but of the ways of being. So it was like something else would happen. And you never seen it before. It's like a My Little Pony that no one ever heard of.
I mean, this is has been my experience doing like high conflict, workplace mediation, like when I'm in these spaces, watching people be very triggered, and working with them and holding space for them. When I'm doing like one on one work. When I see them come together. Sometimes I'm like, Who knew that could happen? Like I've just seen people have these beautiful conversations with like, very, like just courageous honesty with each other in ways that I couldn't even have with them, because I didn't know them as well as they know each other. But when they have that permission to step out of whatever cage errors they're in, and really be creative with each other. I just think it can be so beautiful. So I do think the first step is lean into whatever you are experiencing. Do not gaslight yourself about it. There's a reason that you're having this experience. Assume your brain is trying to protect you and serve you, right. The second step is Is this coming into my space and do I need to set consequences for boundary violation. The third step is how specifically am I feeling and why? And so then that's the point where I usually walk people through an impact model, and this is just the beginning of the impact model, where there's the incident is the eyeline and the impact model. That's the other person's behavior, and you neutralize it the extent that you can. And you you just describe it in a way that everyone could agree with, then whatever your answer was to Why am I feeling this way, goes in the M line, which is the meaning line. So in the eyeline, you neutralize the external behavior and just make it really generic. In the M line, you say, This is my thought about it. And this is a charged thing. So for me, for example, when I was in my harassment experience, that eyeline was, my boss has his hand on my shoulder, the M line was, I don't deserve respect. And that was my sort of internalized emotional cage.
Sometimes you have to wait a little, or go for a walk or take a bath, or, you know, it could benefit from a little time and space to let the layers of meaning sort of as free or conversation with a friend.
That's a good point, because that step of Why am I feeling this way that could be a week or a month or a year or a decade, or yeah, you might
have to base decision you know, or not have to, but this might, this one might be coming back for you. The meanings
that can be therapy that can be coaching, that can be the space where you have somebody else, where you reflect it journaling, writing a letter to yourself about it, like that's not just a one off like that, sometimes it is. And then and then the P line in the impact model is the feeling that's the physiology, the feeling in our body. And this is the point that I wanted to make the physiology line, the P line of the impact model. So say it's like shame or something or anger creates our actions or inactions. So that's the A line. So I am PAC T. And that action line is different than the feeling line. So what people say when they're saying, If I feel anger, I'm going to be an angry person is there like transposing action and feeling. You can feel a
feeling physiology like you can have the sensation, three people could be anger, or that movie like 12 Angry Men, or and 12 angry people in a room, and they all show up really differently. And one person like purses their lips, and the other person is pacing. It's like there's a lot of different actions and expressions. Some people for anger just looks like it looks like a firm, firm, clear. No thanks. You know, it can be really calm.
And you can find it and feel anger and know that it would motivate you to take action. But you do not have to take action. So I see some people try to embrace feeling more feelings by yelling at people more. And like that's not the point here, right? Like being meaner. Doesn't mean you're feeling more feelings. Right? Sometimes that could be resistance to feelings. Yeah.
You know, they say for kids now with anger. I heard this is that they'll have the kid press into a doorframe with their body.
Yeah, that's, yeah, that's a trauma. If you read the book, this is a wonderful book I just read. It's called Healing Trauma by Peter Levine. I'm like, I love Peter Levine anyway, but it's just 12 Simple steps like that. And one is tapping on your hands to remind yourself you have a body, but another one is pushing on another person or pushing on a doorframe. And like activating that anger, that healthy sense of your body in in processing that. And then I think the last step of the emotional cage, right? is saying, if these thoughts didn't exist, if this narrative that I had didn't exist, if the self shame didn't exist, if this holding myself back didn't exist, how would I feel then, you know, like, just opening yourself up to an experience? How do I want to feel, what's the outcome that I want, and if these thoughts just didn't exist,
just to be creative, and the T and impact, we got to a, remind me C and T.
C is the consequence of the actions. And T is like CNT. So sometimes you just want to even do an imp, right. But like the C you want to label because if you're not getting the results that you want, if you're not getting the consequences that you want, that's the space that you can be creative and shift about other actions you can take. And then the T is the theme. And, and that can just help categorize because a lot of these fall into buckets, right? So like, I have, like, I'll use the theme of white savior when I have an inclination to control someone else to keep them safe. You know, like, and I know I don't want to be a white savior. I want to let people have their human experience, but I also No, I'm pre programmed to be weaponized as a white woman and like, I want to pay attention to that, and I'm gonna
be honest about it. Yeah. Okay, so we've learned so many things today, we took on this realm of these moments of attack at work, right? We triage boundaries, which is like, oh, no, this needs to shift someone's in your space. And it is not safe, physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual, you know, your dignity and well being and how you the space that you the airspace you get to destroy describe yourself around identity. That's kind of the boundaries realm. And then we got, we started playing with this other language of emotional cage error, the cages that we end up in, including cages that are both feelings, cages, I'm stuck, and I feel stuck feeling one way, and also the not feeling ones. And what I imagine people are going to experience as we play with this a little bit more is that sometimes with complex situations, they're layered. There'll be a boundary and there'll be an emotional pager, and there'll be a boundary and there'll be a motional pager. So it's not like, Oh, good. Now the band aids off and the scab is healed, like, Don't worry, it's probably proof you're human. But our hope is that by opening up some of these easily compressed spaces, I probably said this before, I was thinking about it, like a grilled cheese sandwich that you sat on in the car, this stuff just gets all compressed. And so what are we doing, we're saying, here's the bread. Here's the cheese, like giving everything a little bit more room. It's not always pleasant at first, but it can give you more space to see more space to select and also know ourselves. And from there, we can find a little bit more process freedom. If you have had experiences around this, if you know what it's like to try and peel these things apart. Or if you're like, you know what, I think there's something here for me and I don't know what it is. We would love to hear your story. Meredith working people right in to share more about what they are experiencing.
They came right in at Aris resolution.com/story. It's e ri s resolution.com/story.
Thank you for your courage and joining us for this you know evocative conversation. And our greatest hope for you is that the next time defensiveness or that attacking sensation, a show up, show up in your workplace that it gives you just a couple more tools to pause and reflect and hopefully find some new space to be more like you and less like all the things we've seen that we're not trying to repeat.
