Fewer Interventions, Please

When I was eight, I asked my father for vegetable soup. He said, “There’s minestrone in the kitchen.” But I didn’t want minestrone. I wanted vegetable soup. After failing to convince me that they were the same thing, my father gave up, heated the minestrone, and served it to me as vegetable soup. I devoured it happily … until later, I found the can marked “MINESTRONE.” I was beside myself with rage!

I tell this story because we live in a world where people constantly justify their anger as a response to injustice. And yes, sometimes people are angry because they’re being genuinely mistreated. But not all anger comes from injustice. Anger also comes from confusion. When we don’t understand our experience, we often use anger to release frustration and shake things up, like banging the side of a pinball machine to try to change the direction of the ball.

Sometimes blind anger is relatively harmless. Sometimes it destroys lives. That's why I find the whole “your rage is sacred” pop-psych trope insidious. Really? Is the rage a parent feels toward a child who doesn't understand him sacred? Is the rage of a man toward a woman who rejects his advances sacred? We romanticize anger, but behind the smoke and incense, people get hurt.

In my own journey with anger, I've noticed that anger is less a primary emotion and more an intervention: a way of trying to alter my experience rather than learn from it. Sometimes we do need interventions. But if we’re always intervening, we never learn. To understand our experience, we have to be willing to simply watch it and admit, “Actually, I’m not sure what I’m feeling right now.” That one sentence can save your relationships.

I tend to be an over-intervener, and it’s the number-one thing I try to counteract as a coach. People don’t need to be fixed or figured out. They need space to see where their actions are taking them. The same is true inside. Fewer interventions, please, and more room to see what’s really there.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.

Alfred Stevens, "The Japanese Mask" (1877)