Emotional Dashboard

I want you to imagine for a moment that you are on a road trip across the country. This trip has the potential to be the greatest memory of your life. You have spent your entire life planning for it, carefully calculating stops, planning which friends to visit, and even creating the perfect soundtrack for the drive. The day of this epic road trip has arrived but despite your best efforts you get a late start getting on the road. Two hours into the journey your tire pressure light alerts you to a potential problem. Because of being off pace with your intended agenda, you hit ignore thinking that the car is probably just glitching out as you haven’t noticed any changes in the driving experience thus far. Thirty minutes later you’re cruising down the interstate only to hear the pop of your tire as it explodes. You quickly pull over to the best of your ability along the busiest stretch of road on your adventure so far. Upon exiting the vehicle you realize that not only is the tire shot, you are in a dangerous place to fix the tire. On top of it all, your phone has died from jamming out to your epic playlist. With no way to call, you have to take matters into your own hands and change the tire here in a less than ideal place. 

What a frightening scenario to find oneself in! We’ve all, in one way or another, experienced what it is like to have a light pop up on our dashboard. What can physically take place with our vehicles can also take place within ourselves. What exactly do I mean? Each of us is hardwired with an emotional system, an internal dashboard, that alerts us to things that need to be addressed much like the tire pressure monitor mentioned above. When an emotion gets triggered within us, we have a choice, do we ignore the alert or do we pull off at the nearest gas station, check things out, and get back on the road? Many of us have grown accustomed to shoving our emotions down or doing a number of things to numb (examples of this include: grabbing our phones, porn, alcohol, online shopping, etc). In doing so, we postpone the inevitable damage by pretending that we don’t have a problem. In reality, we have taken a small problem and transformed it into something much bigger. The example above could have easily turned deadly. An emotional blowup has the potential to cause significant damage to ourselves and those we have a relationship with. Hitting the ignore button on our emotions denies us the opportunity to process and get on with life. 

Come back next week to hear how we can find the emotional gas station and what can be done to address the issue, instead of suppressing it.