“I wear my heart on my sleeve.” Those were the words that stuck with me over the past few days. It was the explanation Natalia gave for her diva behavior on the set of Back to reality. Apart from the fuss surrounding the program that has since been discontinued, it is something we are all familiar with: how some people without thinking throw out everything they feel: compliments, expressions of love, embarrassing experiences after – dare I say it – a visit to the toilet. Charming, often funny too. We find it less charming when they do the same during arguments, conflicts and in stressful situations. All brakes released. No more room for jokes. With heads turning red, reproaches bubbling up, fists landing on cupboards, strings of saliva flying around, disastrous words like “always” or “never” thrown around too often. I know such people. You might too.
We talked about it in response to The world keeps turning, but also in response to the case surrounding the rather explosive chef Willem Hiele, because it sometimes happens in a restaurant kitchen. The TV series The bear brought it all to our TV sofa. Fiction, okay, but as a viewer you almost physically felt the irritation about too much talking about things, ranting and cursing.
And then there are the people of that other caliber. Those who swallow their hearts and let them ferment on their livers, who stamp their feet in their heads, but outwardly appear calm, who sulk, no longer say a word and crawl into their shell. Who, during conflicts, close the door behind them and walk out in silence. Stonewalling, as it is called. People who build a wall around their emotions. We know that too. And that’s not ideal either. One will logically be seen in more extroverts, the other more likely in introverts.
Sorry, that’s me
It is fodder for coffee and tea discussions, because you can start a big conversation about it: about how nice it must be to just blurt everything out, about which group we fall into – both in times of love and in times of stress. You can analyze how overly explosive hearts on their sleeves sometimes seal the end of relationships, how others sometimes don’t say a word for days, because they are convinced that sulking in silence is better than clashing. We also know well enough how such a heart on the tongue can drive away the clouds, because sometimes things have to explode, the pus has to come out of the pimple.
So what is the better approach of the two? I can already hear it blurted out: “Mine! At least people know what to expect from me.” And I can already hear an introvert thinking: “Mine! I’m not hurting anyone, am I?” It’s possible. But you could just as well imagine the opposite. The blurt that makes the other party reach for a pack of Kleenex. The insider who upsets the other party by his silence. Someone who clams up is – in my opinion – certainly just as bad as the blurt-out, because those around him have no idea what is going on in his head and heart.
“Indeed,” says psychologist Caroline Bruynseels, “plus: by bottling up your frustrations and swallowing emotions all the time, you ultimately risk exploding against the wrong person in the wrong place and at the wrong time. With a flap you can get the feeling that you have no more space. You literally jump back and you may even get scared. Research shows that both the flapper and the introvert cause equally large stress peaks in the environment.” she says. And there’s more: both can also damage their own health. For people who are too carried away by their emotions, we often take this for granted (“Watch your blood pressure!”), but indoor fats are also not beneficial. The latter is, for example, the dada of the American psychiatrist Gabor Maté, who makes a link between our immune system and the bottling up of negative emotions.
Nature + nurture
“How you react is innate – it is your temperament – but it is also partly learned, for example by how stress and emotions were dealt with in your home situation. It could be a survival impulse, a fight or flight response. Or it is a matter of personality: “An introvert is often someone who is afraid to take a stand, or who has a tendency to please,” says Bruynseels. “But it’s not black and white. You have to look at it as two extremes of a continuum. On the one hand you have the dominant, aggressive type, someone who throws everything out. And on the other hand you have the so-called subassertive or submissive type, the kind of people who even say sorry when someone else bumps into them. Most of us fall somewhere between the two, with a predominance of one or the other. The situation also plays a role. If your child suddenly crosses the street, there is a greater chance that you will immediately react based on your emotions and that you will shout and swear, something you would rarely do in other situations.”
As is often the case, the ideal spot is in the middle. Bruynseels: “Assertive. That’s what we call it. Not agressive. Not submissive. Behavior that gives both yourself and others the same amount of space, and where you do not make yourself smaller or bigger, but where clarity and solution-orientedness come first.”
Finally, the good news: there is no reason to remain stuck in your annoying extreme. You can do something about it. Although it is quite a challenge to get into that ideally assertive middle ground. Diplomatic behavior is one of the most difficult things to master, Bruynseels knows. “But there are tools and training for it. The learning process lies in the way you learn to formulate frustrations: instead of acting out or ignoring yourself, you can use experiential I-sentences to let us know what is wrong with the situation. Then you say, for example: ‘I don’t feel good about this’ or ‘I propose this solution’, instead of throwing around accusations.”
Or as mediator Serge Ornelis said in this newspaper last year: “Weigh your words, control and name your emotions, listen actively, communicate, cool down, apologize, look at it positively. It’s not easy to suddenly adopt helicopter vision in the middle of a verbal duel, but you can learn to do so. It starts with being able to question yourself and having respect for others.”
In any case, the time when “That’s just the way I am, sorry, I can’t do anything about it” was a sufficient explanation for antisocial behavior, is long behind us.
