You can tell things as they are… accept them as they are… whatever the story is

Last night’s Men’s workshop had a slightly slow turnout, probably due to the unsettled weather, and ended up with nine people in attendance. But there were three women and six men, including some newcomers. The topic of the workshop is the creation of dialogue in the blank balloons of a two-frame comic strip. The meaning of this was to gain self-insight into the acceptance and verbalization of emotions.

People’s emotions are driven by perceiving a situation, but that understanding is based on their past experiences. Since each person’s experience is different, there is no right or wrong way for each person to express their emotions. Moreover, most people are not capable of having self-insight into their emotions in real time, so emotions will directly translate into action. Even if they don’t include violence, they can become violent words and attack others, or lie to them… Freud is right in this area.

In order to prevent this kind of emotional outbursts, we can understand our emotions in real time and communicate them calmly and verbally ( or verbalize them) to prevent both sides from having their emotions heat up and making things worse. But it takes a lot of training to be able to do that.

What I told you all last night is that speaking emotionally and talking about your emotions are two very different things.

It’s a very advanced interpersonal skill to gain daily self-insight into how your emotions relate to your past experiences, and based on that process, to verbalize and communicate your emotions about your current situation to others. This is a very high level of interpersonal skills. It would be impossible to acquire them through educational programs.

By the way, last night, words like affair, violence and dick etc. came and went, which are considered to be ridiculous in the public eye. We cannot talk about our own experiences that have forced us to come under a lid for so many years unless we feel safe to talk about these words. And if we cannot talk about it, we cannot be healed, nor can we recover.

Originally posted on October 23, 2020

English text translated with DeepL (Japanese to English) and checked by Mina.