<ul><li>Americans are emerging from the pandemic more stressed out and reactive than ever.</li><li>Emotional flooding is an automatic physical and mental response to an unexpected negative reaction by another, usually a close person, an encounter we can perceive as a threat.</li><li>Beyond hurting personal relationships at home and creating all kinds of difficulties out in the world, emotional flooding significantly impairs decision making.	 </li></ul>

Emotional Flooding

Imposing a 30-second response delay on everyone reduced aggression significantly, but only when there were negative consequences (having to perform a task) to being aggressive.Counting to 30 only works when you have the self-awareness to understand your reality, and it can be challenging during emotional flooding.

The Challenge Of Staying Aware: Counting To 30

Sit quietly and think about the feelings you are experiencing.Then, say to yourself, "I am not this anger. It will not manage me or make my decisions for me." This metacognition will leave you calm and empowered.

Observe Your Feelings

Managing your emotions is like home improvement: You can teach yourself to do a lot of it well, but it's best to get some professional assistance when the job is particularly tricky.Journaling is one of the best ways to achieve metacognition, which in turn creates emotional knowledge and regulation, which provide a sense of control.

Write It Down

If you can prevent your emotions from taking over in the face of stress, you can avoid a lot of regret and set a good example for others.

Stashed ideas

How to Stop Freaking Out

Moving forward can understandably feel difficult. The only person who can decide if moving forward is in your best interest is you. Ask yourself these questions:“Did this person deliberately betray my trust?”“Did this person admit their mistake, or did I find out from someone else?”“Is the indiscretion in question unforgivable?”Your answers to these questions will determine your path forward.

Ask Yourself First

If you’ve decided to work toward forgiving the person who wronged you, understand that forgiveness comes from within. People make mistakes. While we’re all human, that mantra in and of itself does not mean they deserve a second chance.Consider if this person has betrayed your trust before. Has this become an alarming pattern of behaviour, or is this the first time in your relationship that they’ve broken your trust?Once you consider the context of the indiscretion in question, you can make an evidence-based decision that you have full confidence in.

Only You Can Choose to Forgive and Move Forward

While we should all always put ourselves first, oftentimes after being hurt by someone we love or care about, only then do we come to realize we have been putting the needs of others before our own. Take this time of clarity to mend the most important relationship of all: the relationship you have with yourself.Recognize the insecurities you may have struggled with and ignored in order to focus on another person. Work through those insecurities.

Put Yourself First

It’s important to communicate what expectations you have of your relationships with others.For anyone who has broken your trust, communicate what your expectations are of them moving forward. Let them know your trust in them is broken and that you need time to heal. Explain what they did to break your trust and what they can do to regain it.When you communicate your expectations with others and they fail to meet those expectations, you have the answer you need.

Communicate Your Expectations

Setting boundaries is important with any relationship, including your relationship with yourself. Communicate your boundaries with the person who has broken your trust. Let them know the behaviours you will not tolerate, like lying or not telling the complete truth. Then, hold yourself accountable to stick to those boundaries that you set.Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated by the person and end up in an endless cycle of forgiving the same indiscretions over and over again. Once you decide upon your boundaries, stick to them.

Set Clear Boundaries

Don’t allow anyone to tell you that you just need to “get over it.” Those people do not have your best interest at heart, or they are not sure how to build good boundaries in their own lives.Take all of the time you need to rebuild your trust, either with that person or with people overall moving forward. You may need more time to come to terms with their pain, and that’s okay.Communicate with the specific person and anyone in the future that they need to respect your space and allow you the time to work through rebuilding trust. The right people will respect that.

Realize That Rebuilding Trust Takes Time

Communicating your triggers will help you to become more comfortable with the uncomfortable and help you along your journey to healing with any future relationships you might have.Even if the person did nothing wrong per se, communicating with them that what they said or did was upsetting for you will help the two of you work toward more open and honest communication and avoid future missteps. And they will know why you may have reacted the way you did and how to remain true to themselves while also avoiding the words or actions that you’d like for them to avoid in the future.

Recognize Your Triggers and Be Honest About Them

Talk therapy, also known as <a href="https://www.lifehack.org/437604/cognitive-behavioral-therapies-for-anxiety-disorders">Cognitive Behavioral Therapy</a> (CBT), can provide you with actionable solutions to address the root cause of the lack of trust you have in others. Speaking to a professional can help you on your journey as you begin to heal from the trauma of being hurt by someone you love or care about.

Speak to a Licensed Therapist

When you’re learning to trust people again, you may be very hesitant and at times overly cautious. While it can be easy to listen to the words of others and trust that they’ve changed and that they won’t hurt you the same way again, watch their actions for change.Are they sliding back into their old habits? Are they listening to you when you communicate your triggers with them? People’s actions will tell you everything you need to know about trusting them. Believe them.

People’s Actions Will Tell You What You Need to Know

Many people will tell you that starting fresh means starting over and that you should forgive and forget. However, no one but you will understand the journey you’re going on to trust people again.Starting fresh can look like many different scenarios: cutting off certain people in your life even if just for a time, forgiving the person who wronged you while moving forward with clear and established boundaries, or a combination of the two. All are completely valid paths to starting over with a clean slate.

Commit to Starting Fresh, Whatever That Looks Like for You

Wondering how you can learn to trust people again after you've been hurt in the past? These helpful tips will show you how to heal and grow.

How To Trust People Again If You've Been Hurt

We feel more than we have the language to articulate and express, which is in itself profoundly frustrating. People work through emotions by being able to identify them and use them as signals. A lot of the time, we’re left in the dark. Enter the <a href="http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/">Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows</a>, the brainchild of writer John Koenig, who is here to give you words for the feelings you may not have even known you were having. Here are 40 words to describe your emotions.

Background

n . frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone—spending the first few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that you could start there and work your way out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until you’ve built up enough mystery over the years to ask them where they’re from, and what they do for a living.

Adronitis

n . weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.

Altschmerz

n . a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—briefly soaking in the experience of being alive, an act that is done purely for its own sake.

Ambedo

n . a conversation in which everyone is talking but nobody is listening, simply overlaying disconnected words like a game of Scrabble, with each player borrowing bits of other anecdotes as a way to increase their own score, until we all run out of things to say.

Anecdoche

n . nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins—and live in a completely different world.

Anemoia

n . the desire that memory could flow backward. We take it for granted that life moves forward. But you move as a rower moves, facing backwards: you can see where you’ve been, but not where you’re going. And your boat is steered by a younger version of you. It’s hard not to wonder what life would be like facing the other way…

Avenoir

n . the sadness that you’ll never really know what other people think of you, whether good, bad or if at all—that although we reflect on each other with the sharpness of a mirror, the true picture of how we’re coming off somehow reaches us softened and distorted, as if each mirror was preoccupied with twisting around, desperately trying to look itself in the eye.

Catoptric Tristesse

n . the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly.

Chrysalism

n . an imaginary interview with an old photo of yourself, an enigmatic figure who still lives in the grainy and color-warped house you grew up in, who may well spend a lot of their day wondering where you are and what you’re doing now, like an old grandma whose kids live far away and don’t call much anymore.

Daguerreologue

n . to find yourself bothered by someone’s death more than you would have expected, as if you assumed they would always be part of the landscape, like a lighthouse you could pass by for years until the night it suddenly goes dark, leaving you with one less landmark to navigate by—still able to find your bearings, but feeling all that much more adrift.

Dead Reckoning

n . the surge of energy upon catching a glance from someone you like—a thrill that starts in your stomach, arcs up through your lungs and flashes into a spontaneous smile—which scrambles your ungrounded circuits and tempts you to chase that feeling with a kite and a key.

Ecstatic Shock

n . the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world—who your baby sister would become, what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you who had volunteered to stay behind, who was still stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.

Énouement

n . a flash of real emotion glimpsed in someone sitting across the room, idly locked in the middle of some group conversation, their eyes glinting with vulnerability or quiet anticipation or cosmic boredom—as if you could see backstage through a gap in the curtains, watching stagehands holding their ropes at the ready, actors in costume mouthing their lines, fragments of bizarre sets waiting for some other production.

Fata Organa

n . an image that somehow becomes lodged deep in your brain—maybe washed there by a dream, or smuggled inside a book, or planted during a casual conversation—which then grows into a wild and impractical vision that keeps scrambling back and forth in your head like a dog stuck in a car that’s about to arrive home, just itching for a chance to leap headlong into reality.

Fitzcarraldo

n . a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.

Gnossienne

adj . finding a person so attractive it actually kinda pisses you off.

Hanker Sore

n . a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.

Heartworm

n . a hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head—a crisp analysis, a cathartic dialogue, a devastating comeback—which serves as a kind of psychological batting cage where you can connect more deeply with people than in the small ball of everyday life, which is a frustratingly cautious game of change-up pitches, sacrifice bunts, and intentional walks.

Jouska

n . the moment you realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.

Kairosclerosis

n . the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet—a school hallway in the evening, an unlit office on a weekend, vacant fairgrounds—an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative, who are so conspicuously absent they glow like neon signs.

Kenopsia

n . a moment that seemed innocuous at the time but ended up marking a diversion into a strange new era of your life—set in motion not by a series of jolting epiphanies but by tiny imperceptible differences between one ordinary day and the next, until entire years of your memory can be compressed into a handful of indelible images—which prevents you from rewinding the past, but allows you to move forward without endless buffering.

Keyframe

n . the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

Liberosis

n . a phenomenon in which you have an active social life but very few close friends—people who you can trust, who you can be yourself with, who can help flush out the weird psychological toxins that tend to accumulate over time—which is a form of acute social malnutrition in which even if you devour an entire buffet of chitchat, you’ll still feel pangs of hunger.

Mal de Coucou

n . the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.

Monachopsis

n . the frustration of knowing how easily you fit into a stereotype, even if you never intended to, even if it’s unfair, even if everyone else feels the same way—each of us trick-or-treating for money and respect and attention, wearing a safe and predictable costume because we’re tired of answering the question, “What are you supposed to be?”

Mimeomia

n . a feast celebrated on the day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires as a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they’ve barely taken root—and the point at which the days will begin to feel shorter as they pass, until even the pollen in the air reminds you of the coming snow.

Midsummer

n . a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time by quietly building a nest.

Nighthawk

n . the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.

Nodus Tollens

n . the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—that any attempt to make your way comfortably through the world will only end up crossing some invisible taboo—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, colder, colder, colder.

Pâro

n . the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience. Imagine standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

Onism

n . the awareness of the smallness of your perspective, by which you couldn’t possibly draw any meaningful conclusions at all, about the world or the past or the complexities of culture, because although your life is an epic and unrepeatable anecdote, it still only has a sample size of one, and may end up being the control for a much wilder experiment happening in the next room.

Occhiolism

n . the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness—to the extent you have to keep reminding yourself that it happened at all, even though it felt so vivid just days ago—which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut.

Rückkehrunruhe

n . a kind of psychological exoskeleton that can protect you from pain and contain your anxieties, but always ends up cracking under pressure or hollowed out by time—and will keep growing back again and again, until you develop a more sophisticated emotional structure, held up by a strong and flexible spine, built less like a fortress than a cluster of treehouses.

Rigor Samsa

n . a conversational hint that you have something personal to say on the subject but don’t go any further—an emphatic nod, a half-told anecdote, an enigmatic ‘I know the feeling’—which you place into conversations like those little flags that warn diggers of something buried underground: maybe a cable that secretly powers your house, maybe a fiberoptic link to some foreign country.

Semaphorism

n . the kind of unnoticed excellence that carries on around you every day, unremarkably—the hidden talents of friends and coworkers, the fleeting solos of subway buskers, the slapdash eloquence of anonymous users, the unseen portfolios of aspiring artists—which would be renowned as masterpieces if only they’d been appraised by the cartel of popular taste, who assume that brilliance is a rare and precious quality, accidentally overlooking buried jewels that may not be flawless but are still somehow perfect.

Silience

n . the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Sonder

n . a phenomenon in which your lived experience seems oddly inconsequential once you put it down on paper, which turns an epic tragicomedy into a sequence of figures on a model train set, assembled in their tiny classrooms and workplaces, wandering along their own cautious and well-trodden paths—peaceable, generic and out of focus.

The Tilt Shift

n . the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Vellichor

n . the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

Vemödalen

n . the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.

Xeno

These ideas are a like a trip down memory lane, and I could relate to a lot of the descriptions here that surprisingly have a name!

Heartworm: a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago…

My stuff

40 Words For Emotions You’ve Felt, But Couldn’t Explain

Practicing detachment is part of life.I’m not trying to say that success and happiness are bad things to be chasing, it’s just that I came to a realise : chasing something too hard can lead to a lot of expectations and attachment to the outcome of a situation, which in itself can lead to suffering. What will they say? What will they decide?

The Art of Detachment: Learning to Let Go

We all know by now that an outcome in any given situation is unpredictable. There are too many factors to know exactly what might happen. It may turn out the way we want, or it may not, but there’s no way to know which way it’ll go. Letting go of the outcome is a practice to work on every day. With our heart wrapped up in it, we become like sailors hoping for the blessed sight of land after a long voyage, anxiously waiting for that first sight of the green shores of our homeland, the place where we belong.

Letting Go.

Many claim that there is a way of detaching from such emotional situations, using your logic to essentially “talk yourself out of” feelings and convince yourself that though they may be valid, these emotions aren’t necessarily true.Researchers claim that the triangle of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours is reciprocal. Any change in the cycle has an influence on the others

The Natural Course

Now, I’m not trying to say that success and happiness are bad things to be chasing, it’s just that I came to a realization that day: chasing something too hard can lead to a lot of expectations and…

How to Stop Freaking Out

How To Trust People Again If You've Been Hurt

40 Words For Emotions You’ve Felt, But Couldn’t Explain

The Art of Detachment: Learning to Let Go

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!