JAFARECYesterday’s women’s workshop, with a good number of men participating, was attended by three women and three men. The work was designed to help you understand your own emotions.
The theme was to make up a story by putting words in the speech balloons of this two-frame comic strip.
My work is,
Frame 1: Wife: “Did you file for divorce, you bastard?”
Frame 2: Husband: “I’m sorry, I forgot to file a marriage registration.”
We tend to believe that we think and act with our brains, but in reality, our emotions drive our actions, and our minds are used to justify our actions. Emotions make us act out things that are unreasonable in theory.Even feelings of anger or sadness, or senseless or useless actions, are justified by saying that it’s his/her fault… or that it’s something something. It’s not rational behavior, which is why it’s abnormal, special, criminal, or even frowned upon.
It’s nonsense to understand these things through logic, so we want to aim for the essential solution to our problems by understanding our emotions. In order to do so, it is critical to understand not only the emotions of the other person, but above all, your own emotions. Therefore, we practiced the above exercise as a training to always focus on our emotions.
Looking at the two-frame comic strip, we found self-insight for our own emotions in the words that sprang up, as well as our own relationships and other things. Several of the veterans noticed a difference in their reactions to themselves this time from the way they were reacting a year ago. They found themselves getting angry before, and now they found themselves directing their anger at someone else… They were able to understand their own emotions and the changes in their family relationships.
It is very difficult to notice your emotions in real time. However, by verbalizing the emotions they noticed, communication becomes smoother and less likely to result in unreasonable confrontations and misunderstandings. Since most people who are habituated to keeping a lid on their emotions are not able to do so, they tend to conflict with each other by exchanging incompatible theories, which can easily lead to verbal abuse and violence.
Violence hurts people, so you shouldn’t do it…you should be sorry…no matter how much logic is forced on you, if you can’t change your heart, you can’t change your behavior and therefore it’s pointless. And yet, the rehabilitation programs in Japan for perpetrators are all like that…they can’t even be effective.
Originally posted on October 15, 2020
English text translated with DeepL (Japanese to English) and checked by Mina.
