Understanding and Managing of Emotional Push Buttons

Lesson #6
In conflict situations, the role of emotions in its escalation is significant. It is therefore, important to have an understanding of the roles that emotions play in our lives. It is also difficult to listen, to open oneself, or to cooperate if we harbor negative emotions.


1. The result of the previous workshop in Lesson 5 where students identified helpful behavior in a conflict and non-helpful behavior is shown below.


2. Natural to man. Our natural reaction to our surroundings and events in our lives. Physical and visceral and include the rousing or shrinking of energy; this energy has its own circulatory path in our body. Emotions connect to our minds and produce corresponding thoughts and images. When emotions are fully felt they disappear. When suppressed or are ignored they become push-buttons or emotional baggage. Repeatedly experienced emotions create and build its own neutral path in the brain

3. Ask yourself:
If emotions are physical reactions, what happens to the body when we are angry?
Or, what are the physical manifestations of anger? Fear?

The answers are usually physical descriptions:
 Blood rushes towards the head so the face becomes red.
 There is an increased heartbeat.
 Muscles tense.
 Facial expression becomes hard or sharp.
 Voice becomes stringent and loud.


4. Answer these questions:
 How do you manage negative emotions like anger and fear?
 What are your coping mechanisms?

Try to identify whether these management or coping mechanisms contribute positively to the situation or create more problems.

5. Awareness lesson in managing emotions:
 Think of your right hand. Describe the process of thinking of your right hand.
 Become aware of your right hand. What do you feel in your right hand? (Possible answers: feeling of weight, warmth or coldness, tinkling sensations)
 What is the difference between thinking and becoming aware?
 Take a relaxed position by putting your feet flat on the floor and your hands in your lap. Take a deep breath. Become aware of your body. What are sensations in your body?
 End the lesson by stating that becoming aware of the emotions is to fully experience them in the body. The only way emotions are processed out is to acknowledge their presence and fully experience them. Suppression or putting our attention somewhere actually will create more push buttons or emotional baggage. Expression of emotions is different from experiencing them in the body. The more we are aware and present when these emotions are felt the better we are in managing them and preventing them from coloring our perceptions or taking over our actions.

6. Acknowledge emotions in oneself and in the others help us become aware of the emotions and help us better manage them.

7. React to the following paragraphs:

a) Anger and fear amplify the destructiveness of a budding bias. The flooding of these strong emotions sabotage the ability to think clearly, thereby preventing us from answering the essential question, “Does he really have all the bad traits I ascribe to THEM?”
b) Emotional involvements, like friendships between individuals from either side of a hostile divide, make people far more accepting of each other’s groups.