the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

Today’s prompt from Onsite is “How do you accept and respond to the emotions of others”?

As always, I feel like my response is that it depends. Emotions like joy, excitement, and awe are almost always very easy to respond to, regardless of my relationship to the person expressing it.

However, I respond differently to others’ emotions like stress, frustration, anger, and annoyance depending on my relationship to that person. If the person is someone I have known for a long time or know well, or is someone that is part of a community I am called to, it feels much easier to sit with them in it, be validating of their feelings, and work with them to find solutions if appropriate. In short, it feels easier to empathize with them. On the other hand, if someone I don’t know that well is expressing such emotions, deep down I often feel intimated and/or helpless. On the surface, though, I will simply affirm what they feel, because I often feel like I’m not in a place to be saying or doing much more. I will tend to have the urge to try to ‘fix’ their feelings in this scenario, because I am the one that feels uncomfortable by them. It’s difficult when such circumstances come up in work settings though, because my job by its nature is to problem solve and fix issues quickly anyways.