Managing beliefs is a way of dealing with patterns of behavior that lead to emotional aggression. When we can look at the assumptions that support our beliefs, we can better manage our behaviors and avoid the tendency to respond with emotional aggression.
Looking over your answers from the Signs of an Emotionally Aggressive Relationship questions last week, did you identify any behaviors on the list that might be the result of your beliefs? If so, are these beliefs leading to consequences you don’t want? Some consequences you don’t want might include unhappy relationships with your partner, family members or friends, or difficulties with people at work or at school, or behaviors that may have gotten you into legal troubles.
As you examine these beliefs and how they relate to consequences, how many of these beliefs are linked to your answers to the questions on the Signs of an Emotionally Aggressive Relationship? Are there any beliefs that you might be willing to change so that you might get more positive consequences in the future?
If you have beliefs that lead you to unproductive consequences, nobody can change those beliefs for you. It’s up to you to change those beliefs. It’s up to you to manage your beliefs, and the first step in doing so is taking responsibility for them yourself.
Managing Beliefs: Emotional Chaos
Emotional aggression and emotional dysregulation often manifest as emotional chaos. People who have difficulty regulating their own emotions often create emotional chaos around them as a means of distracting themselves from their own inner turmoil.
In addiction treatment, this tendency to create emotional chaos is called “drinking at” or “drugging at” someone. People with substance addictions, who are in denial about having a problem, cannot take personal responsibility for their addictive behaviors. If they admitted to being responsible for their addictive patterns of behavior, they’d have to admit to having a problem.
So instead, they blame others. This means that in their own minds, if they drink or do drugs, it’s because of someone else’s behavior. A person in such a state of denial will actually provoke arguments with family members and loved ones. When they’ve provoked such an argument, and then the loved one becomes angry, the person with the addiction has an excuse to go out and use drugs. The excuse is, “You made me angry, so the fact that I got high (drunk, etc.) is your fault!”
If we replace the substance of abuse (alcohol or other drugs) with a pattern of emotional behavior, we can see how a person in denial about their own emotional dysregulation might provoke others in order to justify their own emotional aggression.
Emotional states actually produce neurotransmitters in the brain that mimic the actions of many drugs. It is therefore possible to become addicted to emotional states. Such an addiction is called a process addiction, because the victim of such an addiction has become addicted to certain patterns of behavior (processes) or certain emotional states that generate chemicals in their brains. These chemical transmitters then mimic drugs often used to produce a ‘high.’
If you answered more than five questions on the Signs of an Emotionally Aggressive Relationship questions last week with a “yes,” look back over your answers and see if any of them involved a pattern of emotional aggression as a way of controlling others.
If so, you may be suffering from a process addiction. That is, you may have become addicted to resorting to emotional aggression as a means of coping with life, or as a means of distracting from your own emotional regulation difficulties.
Next week we’ll start talking about how to deal with process addictions as they relate to emotional aggression.