Summary

The article provides strategies for managing and recovering from impulsive, emotionally driven responses that can damage relationships and reputations.

Abstract

The article "How to Recover from a Knee-Jerk Response" addresses the common issue of reacting impulsively in emotionally charged situations, which can lead to regret and negative consequences. It emphasizes the importance of controlling such responses to prevent harm to personal and professional relationships. The author shares personal experiences with anger management and offers practical techniques for regaining composure, such as focusing on breath and physical movement to interrupt the emotional cycle. The article also explores the use of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) to reframe the triggering stimuli and alter one's emotional response. Finally, it stresses the significance of apologizing and seeking reconciliation, regardless of who initiated the conflict, to maintain healthy relationships and demonstrate emotional intelligence.

Opinions

The author acknowledges the universality of knee-jerk responses and their potential to cause significant damage in various aspects of life.
Controlling one's immediate reactions is presented as a skill that can be learned, involving both physical and mental strategies.
The article suggests that changing the way we perceive and process triggering events can lead to a change in our emotional responses to them.
There is an emphasis on the importance of taking responsibility for one's actions and apologizing to repair relationships, even if one believes they are not at fault.
The author implies that emotional maturity and prioritizing relationships over the need to be right are key components of professionalism and leadership.
The article promotes the idea that reconciliation efforts should be sincere and ongoing, regardless of the immediate response from the other party.

How to Recover from a Knee-Jerk Response

What to do when your emotions do the talking.

Have you ever spoken in anger and immediately wished that you could take it back?

Have you ever inserted foot-in-mouth — just blurted out something that embarrassed you and someone else?

Everyone has known the embarrassment of saying something that they wished they could take back.

When we speak without thinking, we can hurt someone’s feelings, damage our reputation, make sometimes irreparable mistakes, or sabotage our career. Mistakes like these can cost us money, time, business, and relationships.

Reining In Heat-of-the-Moment Responses

It is easy to respond without thinking, especially when our buttons are pushed. We can snap, snarl, and hit back heedlessly when our primitive brain feels threatened. We blurt out angry or self-defensive comments, and our words, thoughts, and body language fuel our feelings in a continuous loop of negative emotions and responses.

It gets worse.

We chew on what happened, blaming ourselves for our response or finding fault with the other person for triggering it. Even though the situation is over, we relive it over and over, rekindling the same emotions as if it were happening right now, again and again.

We become trapped in our own personal Ground-Hog-Day-of-hell. This takes a toll on us and, if not remedied, can destroy any hope of salvaging the relationship.

Disarming Knee-Jerk Responses

“When you react, you let another control you. When you respond, you are in control.” Bohdi Sanders

All my life, I’ve had a problem responding to sarcasm. It would push the nuclear button, and I would lose control. Rage barely describes the emotion I instantly felt. Luckily, I was always able to control any physical response and not act in a foolhardy way. Nonetheless, my furious verbal responses often got me into trouble in business and in my life.

After a particularly unpleasant episode, I decided that I needed to take action and not allow others to pull this trigger, however inadvertently. Somewhere between my trigger — sarcasm — and my corresponding inappropriate behavior, I needed to stop my response. Since I wasn’t able to stop the anger as it flared, I could learn how to corral it.

I kept my mouth shut.
I focused on the tip of my nose and slowly inhaled and exhaled. That’s all. My entire attention was on my breath as it passed into and out of my nose.
Then I took one step back and one step to the side.

That’s it.

These small actions gave me time to batten down my anger and respond in a resourceful way — although there were times when I had to do the steps more than once.

Neutralizing the Trigger

“Stop trying to managing your emotions. Instead, choose to feel something different when an emotion arises. This is how you gain emotional freedom.” Marcia Reynolds Psy.D.

Once I could control my knee-jerk response, I set out to neutralize the trigger, using a technique from neurolinguistic programming (NLP). In NLP:

“Submodalities…are fine distinctions or the subsets of the Modalities (Visual , Auditory , Kinesthetic, Olfactory , Gustatory , and Ad) that are part of each representational system that encode and give meaning to our experiences. They are the building blocks of the representational systems by which we code, order and give meaning to the experiences we have. Submodalities are how we structure our experiences.”

Change the submodalities, and the experience changes.

I let myself imagine a situation where sarcasm pulled my trigger, and I felt that old rush of fury. This time, I paid attention to my body and thoughts. I discovered that I was flashing back to an episode from my childhood. I heard what was being said to me; I saw the speaker; I felt just as I had at that moment in my past. Then, in my imagination, I turned the words I was hearing into gibberish and immediately felt an easing of my anger. Finally, I morphed the image of the speaker into that of a cartoon chicken, running around a yard, pecking at the ground and chattering nonsense.

And I laughed aloud.

“When we access a memory and identify its submodalities in closer detail, we tend to bring back the details of that memory and amplify its associated feelings. When we change the submodalities of the memory we also change the memory and its associated feelings.”

How we present experiences to ourselves plays a huge role in how we respond to them. If we can change the representations, we can change our response.

Sarcasm no longer triggers a knee-jerk response. I just picture that chicken and shrug it off.

Recovering

The first step to take in recovering and resolving things is to stop ruminating about the event. If we want to ensure a better future relationship with the person, we need to focus on the present.

We need to apologize.

But what if they started it? It’s all their fault!

Not important.

What is important is taking the first step to fix it. This requires discipline and the willingness to view what happened objectively, without looking to cast blame.

According to Randy Conley, Vice President & Trust Practice Leader for The Ken Blanchard Companies, “It takes emotional maturity to prioritize the health of the relationship over the ego-feeding need to be right. Apologizing for the pain and difficulty of the current situation, even if you didn’t cause it, shows you place a higher value on the other person than you do on the need to be right.”

Maybe one of us over-reacted?

Maybe one of us was stressed to the breaking point?

Maybe it was just a complete misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what was said?

We don’t need to know why it happened; we just need to reconcile with the person if we want to continue to have any kind of relationship with them. This demonstrates professionalism, high emotional intelligence, and leadership.

What if they refuse to accept our overtures at reconciliation?

We can’t make them do anything. Any resolution must be sincere on both sides. In this case, all we can do is continue to improve the relationship by being polite, friendly, and open in all our interactions with them.

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