A personal goal of mine, recently, has been to not jump to assumptions or react too quickly.
I take a few minutes to digest the situation for myself, before I verbalize something that I might later regret.
An example of this is when I was folding like 4 loads of laundry at once – I’m not exaggerating (I am really bad about putting the laundry away, but you’ll find baskets full of clean clothes at my house).
So, I am in the process of putting so many clothes away that it is covering our entire bed. Chris, my husband, is laying on the bed and having to scoot clothes over because there is so much. I am aggressively folding the clothes wondering, why the heck is he not helping me?! There are literally so many clothes that he has to physically move them to make room for himself, and yet he does not look up from his phone to offer any help at all.
Instead of yelling at him, like I really wanted to do, I kept quiet for a few minutes. I then asked him who did the laundry when he was young. He responded with “me…… that’s why I hate doing it now.” That was so enlightening for me for a number of reasons.
One, it gave me insight as to why he is behaving that way. I can relate to being forced to do something growing up and, now that he has the choice, he does not do it.
Two, if I would have yelled and him and been frustrated, he, like many other men, would not have thought to explain the reasoning behind it, to me. He would have reacted to my anger with more anger.
And three, it saves me from looking like the demanding wife who is always nagging her husband to do something. By me taking a few minutes to calm down and think about how to approach the situation, it saved us an argument and also many more future arguments about the stupid laundry.
Not reacting too soon has also helped me to realize that most people are not bad. They do not set out with the intentions of hurting someone just for the sake of it. If someone reacts negatively about a situation, it’s because it hits home with them. It may remind them of a feeling or situation that they have not fully healed from, in the past. It brings up bad feelings for them and they may project this onto someone else without even realizing it.
I know that I have done this, and now that I am aware of it, I can be better about not doing it as much.
I find the take 5 approach to be especially helpful when it comes to situations with Chris. I have heard that men are not very good at identifying why they feel a certain way. I feel like there is a lot of depth to Chris, and he does not even realize it.
Being quiet, at first, allows me to think about how I should phrase something to be able to get the information I am looking for out of him. If he feels that I am at all angry/irritated/any sort of negative feeling he automatically shifts to a defensive mode. That is why my tone and attitude towards the situation is extremely important. It is kind of like a game for me because I have to guess at what questions will be the winner – AKA provides me insight to why he is the way he is. Whenever I am able to know his thinking behind something, it feels like such a breakthrough for me, and he honestly has no idea. I smile while I write that because he seems so innocent and child-like.
This approach really does have such great benefits to our marriage: some fights are avoided, I can understand him more, and it aids us (especially me) with future disagreements. Just like James 1:19 says in the Bible “My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.”
ut it seemed to come in full swing during my college days. I spent a lot of time trying to work through it with breathing exercises and talking it out with other people. While I found this somewhat effective, it was a short term fix. As the anxiety continued into my adult life, I have found some fundamental points that I consistently revisit when the anxious feelings arise.