My therapist handed me this photocopied list of words. I stared at it blankly at first. Then slowly making connections in my brain that hadn’t been there before.
Frustrated is angry? For some reason that one stuck out.
You see, I have problems with emotional regulation. I never really learned what emotional intelligence was. We were always graded on IQ, not EQ, at my school.
I guess that’s why I talk about it so much.
It’s something that I am constantly struggling with. I stuffed my emotions down for so long that it was easy to ignore, easy to pretend that they didn’t matter. Society told us they didn’t matter. Walk it off. Suck it up. Let it go. It’s confusing, and I didn’t understand.
The guy who shared office space with my therapist upgraded us to the second list of words. I replaced the one of my fridge with this one. That’s where she suggested I keep it, something to look at everyday. Ok. That’s what we are going to do then. And there it remained until recently.
I found this new one from The Gottman Institute after I ‘graduated’ therapy. I put the word graduate in quotes because I am not so sure that we ever leave. I sit with my therapist often. (aka I ask myself what I think she would say to me in this circumstance)
As I have gone through the different iterations of these words on a page, I feel like I have evolved along with them in some ways. As the pages become, dare I say prettier, so have I in a sense. I can at least stop and ask myself what is really going on. That’s more than I used to know. And that, my friend, is progress. And progress, to me, is quite pretty.
Mad love, Jenna
