If You Don't Make It Better, It Gets Worse
By Steven Stosny
Humans are and always have been social animals, hard-wired to react emotionally to one another. Every one of your interactions with other people changes you and them a tiny bit, for better or worse.
If you do not try to make the inevitable change for the better, it will almost always be for the worse, due to the well-documented negative bias of emotional processing.
Negative emotions get priority in our processing because they are most often associated with some kind of danger.
That same negative bias means that there is no neutral emotion - ignoring him or shutting her out feels the same to him or her as rejection and must be defended against, typically by that person ignoring or shutting out someone else.
A great many of the negative emotions we blame on stress, work, spouses, and children really come from an accumulation of our (mostly subtle) negative responses to all the people we encounter in what I call the Web of Emotion.
Here's an example of your power to achieve emotional well being, once you understand the dynamics of the Web of Emotion. Suppose you regarded everyone you saw today as a valuable person with a good heart. Everyone you live with, all your neighbors, coworkers, all the drivers on the road and people on the street - everyone you saw was a good person! If you valued and respected everyone you saw today, how would you feel right now? Most likely you'd feel pretty darn good. And if you regarded everyone you saw with value and respect, would that make it more or less likely that they would regard the people they encountered with value and respect? That's right, you would spread value and respect throughout the community.
Now suppose you viewed the people you encountered with suspicion or mistrust or just ignored them because they weren't worth your attention. If you regarded people that way today, how would you feel right now? Most likely you would feel defensive, resentful, irritable, or depressed. And if you devalued the people you encountered, no matter how unobtrusively, would that make it more or less likely that they would devalue the people they meet? That's right, you would spread negative energy in the form of resentment, defensiveness, and irritability throughout the community. Due to the vast contagion of emotions that make up the Web, even your most subtle interactions with other people help determine whether they treat their loved ones well, ignore them, or even hurt them.
Steven Stosny
CompassionPower.Com
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