In a really good game of telephone, the phrase you start with becomes completely unrecognizable by the time it makes it around the circle. It’s fun as a children’s game, but most of us play a more complex, internal version daily. Our internal version often tricks us into believing emotions are volatile, when it’s actually the story we tell ourselves that determines our level of volatility.
In emotional telephone we hear the words someone says, they get filtered through our way of processing the world and we tell ourselves a story. It’s only then that we actually feel an emotion (typically, fear, hurt, anger) and its based on the story we’ve just told ourselves.
This all happens in seconds, and its often hard to catch that the feeling came after our thought about ourselves. But if we can start to break down interactions into the actual moment to moment experiences, we can catch the thought that triggered the feeling of anger, hurt, fear. And when we notice the thought that came first, we have the opportunity to change the thought (and tell a new story). It’s a unique game of telephone where you control the whole story. The story doesn’t need to control you.