In my feelings

Sometimes my youngest son stays in his feelings like Drake after getting dunked on by Kendrick in a rap beef.

“When we swap a mechanical mindset for a magical one, we shift from reacting to obstacles to relating to them.”

-Good Vibes

My youngest son, bless his heart, is a highly emotional human being. He’s prone to meltdowns when he doesn’t get his way, and in this regard and many others, he’s a chip off the old block.

He turns nine next month, and has a wry sense of humor and a smile that could melt a gremlin’s heart. He’s fiercely competitive, too, and in his younger days he’d flip game boards when he lost. Lately, he’s dialed it down, and to his credit, he has always comported himself well in the tri-annual chess tournaments he’s played since kindergarten (usually landing in the top third out of nearly a hundred kids his age).

Still, he has meltdowns so ferocious they make me want to buy a fallout shelter. I don’t own one, so when he has a meltdown, I don’t evacuate.  Instead, I usually ask him to go to another room or outside until he’s done. He’s got serious pipes, and when he improvises songs at the piano, which is something he does all the time, the voice is lovely. But when he’s losing it, it sounds like a castrato who saw a ghost. Once revved up, he could do it all day like the crying kid version of Captain America. A truly brutal assault on the ears.

A good friend sent me a social media post about mental health professionals advising parents to let their kids yell as part of learning to self-regulate. I should have asked whether those same professionals offer free counseling and babysitting services to the parents they’re telling to let their kids wyld out. Instead, I told her I disagreed and wasn’t about to let disproportionate meltdowns slide.

A few days later, my youngest son blew up over something trivial. Normally, I would have reacted to his tantrum by telling him to stop and expressing frustration. But this time, for whatever reason—maybe the social media therapists’ algorithm penetrated my consciousness, maybe it was because we were running early, or maybe because it was Friday, I didn’t have a job, and I didn’t have jack to do—I didn’t react. I let my son have his feelings.

I watched him rage for about a minute, and then something shifted. I felt his pain. I felt his disappointment, embarrassment, and the achy feeling in his belly and solar plexus. Silently, I wished that beautiful boy love, joy, and calm from the bottom of my heart. And, like magic, the meltdown wound down. We got in the car and made it to school before the first bell. 

It hit me that when I react to my son’s pain by telling him to quiet down or shame him for being “too much,” I perpetuate the cycle of negativity. He feels misunderstood, which fuels the next eruption. When I relate instead, the fire loses oxygen.

The experience with my son took me back to an episode from the camping trip I took with my wife and best friend inside the Grand Canyon as guests of the Havasupai. That time, I asked my wife if she wanted to take a helicopter back to the rim—which was an option—on account of her injured knee. She snapped back at me, which I found confusing, and I clapped back and called her irrational. We spent the rest of the day bickering in paradise. 

Months later, she told me she had reacted that way because she thought I planned to abandon her and make her take the helicopter by herself, while my best friend and I hiked out of the canyon without her.

Had I let her have her feelings instead of arguing, I would have comforted her, cleared up the misunderstanding, and we would have savored our last day together in the Grand Canyon instead of fracturing it.

Part of me wants to avoid feelings because they’re messy and inefficient. But my twelve-year-old son, often wise beyond his years, framed it differently: If refusing to let people have their feelings holds you back, is that really efficient? 

It’s not. When we put efficiency over kindness, we always stay stuck in our feelings.

There’s a difference between indulging tantrums and holding space for a fellow human being. Letting someone have their feelings doesn’t mean you approve of unsound behavior. Rather, it means you relate before you react, and don’t add fuel to the fire.

Sometimes, the kindest thing we can do is let people have their feelings without trying to fix or explain them away.