Emotional laws are the answer for better relationships: Diana Wais at TEDxThessaloniki

Dear friends, have you ever fallen completely and absolutely in love before this first happened to me? She was 18 years old. Our love was so sweet it was unbreakable, sure forever. 7 years later, I went through the worst breakup you can ever imagine. pieces and I was really sure that I would never be happy again how is it possible that two people who loved each other so much end up fighting to the point where there is no other alternative but to separate this question shaped my life these are a bit homemade I hope you enjoyed them No matter how much I tried to get them right, I ended up becoming a marriage researcher in Stony Brook and a relationship project on Long Island, New York, and interviewed hundreds of couples.

In all the couples I interviewed, I never met a single one whose intention was to become unhappy they all shared the same dream of infinite Hollywood fairytale love how many of them actually succeed does not look good statistically speaking in the Western world there are a 2/3 chance that you will end up getting divorced in your lifetime and how many more are now quietly unhappy or even lonely in their marriages? Why let me ask you a question? Would you jump from a third floor window onto a concrete floor? Probably not, why not? because you studied the

laws

of physics, but how many?

Many of you have studied in school the

laws

of emotions that explain your own inner world and the world of interpersonal dynamics that are so complicated. Come? How can we expect children to grow up and get along on an increasingly populated planet if we don't prepare them for that. My journey led me to become a therapist and executive coach. My job was to study the inner lives of other people and I have met people from all kinds of backgrounds. I started in California in prisons working with gangs. children I worked with parents of child abuse I worked with incest survivors I worked with torture survivors at Bellevue Hospital in New York I worked with supermodels with aristocracy with the super rich with hedge fund managers with CEOs and corporate boards of directors and each other many of unhappy couples I am here today to share with you some of the lessons I learned through them.

I would like to start with the story. It starts like this: Hi honey, I'm going to be two hours late for dinner. In the other side. a wife who thinks to herself, "My God, this is the third time this week this is happening, what am I? Does it matter?" very romantic evening now let's move on to another setting okay, it starts out similar it sounds honey, I'm two hours late for dinner this wife thinks to herself oh my god, this is already the third time this week this has happened and he's already gone. tired this morning, I'm so sorry you have to go through this, it's just not fair and you're doing all this just to provide a

better

life for me and the kids, and when you get home she gives you a big hug and says, Let's just make the best of the night we have now.

It's no wonder these two women react so differently to the same triggering event. You see the same trigger, the phone call hits a very different button in the two women, on the one hand it triggers the fear of an affair, but would you be surprised if I told you that this woman's previous marriage ended in divorce because her husband Did he cheat on her for the other woman? The same trigger triggers feelings of gratitude and compassion in the face of self-sacrifice, but what if I told you what? For that woman there was a father who worked day and night to earn extra money to attend college so she wouldn't have to be poor like him.

You see, it's no coincidence because you can't trigger an

emotional

reaction unless you have a receptive field within you that interacts with the trigger. You can think of this as a mountain and the top of a mountain is the button that can be pressed and the base of the mountain is often beneath the fog, which means it is often outside of your awareness and you may not even You don't even realize it's there until a triggering event activates it and even then most people don't realize there's a can, you can think of these, as they are called in Western psychology, as

emotional

schemas. that you can think of.

They are like colored glasses if you wear pink glasses the world looks pink if you wear blue glasses the world looks blue the problem is that there are many people walking around without realizing that they are now wearing glasses just because I study them The processes do not mean that they don't happen to me. Now I am going to share with you a personal story. Okay, it's very personal, so don't tell everyone. Well, when I was in my early 20s I had the joy of dating a therapist. One day we had an argument and I got so angry.

Well, in my anger I thought he was just being horrible and I was pretty sure he was dating the wrong guy. I was sure he was wrong and I was right. In the middle of this he looked at me and said Diana, you're really mad at me, aren't you? I had to admit this was true so I said yes and then he said you're so mad at me you can't. He even remembers that you love me a little bewildered because as soon as I realized I said yes and then he looked at me with so much love in his eyes and said Diana I'm angry with you too but despite my anger I can still remember how much I loved you wow I immediately started to cry and he put his arms around me, hugged me and said, I don't want to hurt you, I love you too much, so at that moment I felt safe and I realized that behind my anger was only my fear of getting hurt again, so let me ask you a question: how many of you in the audience thought before?

I knew it was my wife's fault; those of you who have had that thought, what if you tried this method because it works so much

better

. Now, the reason it's not that easy to do is because for most of us, when someone is angry at us and criticizes us and maybe even yells at us, it doesn't exactly trigger feelings of love and compassion, but and this It's what I had. To teach myself to be very mindful and even more practiced, you too can learn to not react out of a triggered state, but rather to stay centered and respond with kindness and it will give you much better results over time.

So what's the lesson here? Let's summarize the first consciousness. It helps because of his awareness, this psychologist may not have taken my anger so personally, but he understood that there was probably something else going on and this helped him master lesson number two, which is to avoid getting triggered. Now, to be fair, he was getting angry in response, which is natural, but thanks to his awareness he was able to get out of that state quite quickly and master lesson 3, which is to respond to the other person's need first with love. and empathy and it worked until we broke up, of course, it's okay, now too.

This happens in the business world, you know, something is coming right now, so yeah, in business they were vessels too. I'm going to share another story. I had the pleasure of working with a very successful executive from a fairly large company, let's call him Robert Robert. His company was going through uncertain times that had nothing to do with him and they were going through a bit of a recession and this uncertainty triggered the fear in the Board of Directors that they could fail, so because of that fear they began to become too critical of Robert. Note critical fear are related we just saw that before and this criticism triggered in Robert the executive and useless state so that he began to commit the three cardinal errors he became defensive he stopped listening and let's say that he did not go too far seriously, this was not own, but when you yourself go into a useless state, you are much more likely to trigger a useless state in the other and then they will trigger it again in you, so it's kind of a vicious spiral that ends. boring exactly, so the challenge was how to turn the vicious spiral into a virtual cycle, so by making a pink, of course, I worked with Robert to clear his emotional receptive field and through that he was able to not activate so easily and was able After gaining the trust of the board of directors, he successfully implemented the strategy and got the company back on track.

You see, in our world today there is an opinion that reason alone will solve all our problems. In this view, ignoring emotions somehow makes it more rational in my opinion. experience, if you are not aware of the emotional processes that happen to you and everyone around you, you are generally less prepared to deal with what I call the human factor, now that you have an emotional brain that can and will override your rational brain, whether you're aware of this or not, you see that the brain doesn't care, it's not good or bad, it's just how the brain works, so what does this mean very specifically to you, very specifically?

Specifically, what can I do with this? Okay, next time you get active, try it. Doing what the Green Monster does well, ask yourself the following four questions: first, what is being triggered in me, second, what am I afraid of, third, what is underneath that, and fourth, what do I need to heal in myself so that I don't have it again? respond like this in the future. In this line of self-inquiry you will find your own emotional receptive fields that we all have and here is the good news: you can heal your receptive fields and when you do you will not activate as easily with much less effort as you see.

People aren't aware that beneath their triggers and automatic reactions are unconscious emotions of pain, fear and shame, baggage we didn't even know was here Now imagine that every child would grow up learning about emotional laws in school Imagine that every child would grow up learning about emotional laws in school. child would master how to create harmonious

relationships

, just think of the impact this would have on families, businesses, countries, and world affairs. Going back to my personal journey, when I started working one-on-one with people, I realized that some people had beneath their angry outbursts feelings of fear and Beneath their allure of greatness were feelings of shame, so I started working with them. to heal the receptive fields.

Let me give you an example, if someone tells you that you are so stupid and there is a small part of you that thinks I am stupid. You're going to react a little like that, how dare you? Good, but if you've healed that small part of yourself and now, in every fiber of your being, you know that you're not stupid, you'll be more likely to do it. See something like this What is happening with him? Why is he feeling so aggressive today? I wonder what he's going through. You see when you sealed your own receptive fields.

There is a genuine and natural curiosity about what is happening with the other person and therefore you. We are able to respond to what they need and calm the situation. There is a natural compassion that I have discovered in every person I have worked with. It's usually buried behind gross things that most people don't even know they have. So while working with Pete I realized that everyone was like a mirror coming into my life and showing me that the dynamics I saw in them were also happening in me and then I realized that the same emotional dynamics happen within each person.

Wow and you know the funny thing that most of them walk around thinking that these things only happen to them. I can't tell you how many people cried in my office saying "Oh I can't tell you this about myself" and then when they say you know what I say now I say it welcome to the human family we are all equal thank you