I’ve been reflecting a bit on how Nikki and I have been working at training our kids to think… and how to think about how they feel.
There are a few ‘emotional sins’ that seem to be quite toxic, if you don’t learn to avoid them when you grow up. Very hard to retrain yourself in adult life:
- Self-pity
- Blaming others for how you feel
- Refusing to articulate how you feel, expecting others to guess
- Passive aggressiveness
- Hanging your happiness on a particular ‘fix’
- Making others feel bad because you feel bad
- Transferring feelings rather than dealing with them: letting sadness or tiredness produce anger or hyperactive silliness
- Self-entitlement
- Feeling that other people getting good things entitles you to get something good to compensate
- Making others responsible for making you feel better
- Prayerlessness
- Lack of empathy – for both happy things and sad thing
