My wife recently introduced me to the Compassion Power workshops by Steven Stosny. The purpose of these workshops is to teach anger regulation, where you learn to regulate your internal emotions so you don’t react to others in ways that are not in your best interest or in theirs.
The basis of his approach is that anger is not a basic emotion. Anger is a reaction to feeling hurt and then blaming someone for that hurt. The key to not reacting in anger is first to recognize the emotion for what it actually is – a hurt. When you do that, you can take the initiative to heal the hurt with compassion.
The most useful information by far is his list of the Core Hurts. The basis for his technique of anger regulation is that anger is not an emotion by itself, it is a symptom of a deeper hurt. Now I had heard that before in Boundaries, but Stosny took it a step farther. He said that you can’t properly address the anger unless you address the pain at the deepest level. If you try to address the anger but don’t go deep enough in the pain, you will stay angry, so you have to go deep. He calls these, deep painful emotions Core Hurts. The Core Hurts are feeling
- Disregarded
- Unimportant
- Accused – Includes feeling guilty, untrustworthy, or distrusted.
- Devalued
- Disrespected
- Rejected
- Powerless
- Unlovable
They are actually ranked, from Disregarded at the top to Unlovable at the bottom, the deepest possible hurt.
Already this has benefited me. For starters, I don’t usually have the emotional words to describe how i am feeling. You can find lists of these, but the Core Hurts cuts the list down to a manageable number.
Most importantly, it allows me to identify the real emotion I am feeling. When my wife is back seat driving, I usually think that I am irritated because she is distracting me from my focus on the road and creating tension that I don’t need. But that’s too shallow. The real hurt is that i feel devalued and disrespected because she doesn’t think I am a competent driver and that I am incapable of getting us to where we need to go.
These Core Hurts come up constantly every day. Being able to identify them specifically is the first step in healing them and not reacting. I haven’t been going deep enough, and these will allow me to get at the deepest hurt I am feeling.
Be Free Indeed 