Hello, my name is Jeff Kay's Lee, I'd like to welcome you to the assertiveness and communication video. I hope you enjoy it. Communication is an art form, people get very little training or practice with communication in this culture. In fact, feelings are not even recognized as something good or natural. Oftentimes in Western culture, people are told that not feeling is the best thing which is really too bad. Because a complete human being has a number of different inputs in which to ascertain reality.

There's an intellectual input which consists of thinking and taking in what the world is saying and coming up with concepts about what is happening. There are also feelings which give incredible information and actually energy. So emotions are about energy. But I want to focus on is how to be assertive to communicate and deal with conflict resolution in an appropriate way. That is only possible by establishing good boundaries. assertiveness is about people standing up for themselves and communicating without putting someone else down.

The body is in homeostasis or balance and that's where people like to operate from as human beings. There is an inter flow that happens so when people breathe in, they go out of balance. When they breathe out, they reestablished balance. Emotions operate in the same way. One feels an emotion and if it's not expressed, the person will not return back to homeostasis. The energy from the feeling has got to go somewhere.

And it often gets funneled into a somatic symptom, such as a stomachache, or builds up in the system in some other way. A common example of this phenomena is called the percolator effect. For those who are under 30 and don't know what a percolator is, it's an old style coffee pot that you put on a stove or plug into an electrical socket, and the pressure builds and the water circulates, and it brews the coffee. The example I'm going to relate is a very traditional 1950s example that is unfortunately, still common today. Imagine the following scenario, a guy who goes off to work and he misses the bus, and he's angry about that. Therefore, the energy has taken him out of balance, but he doesn't really know what to do about that.

Now, if he believes that he needs to be perfect and in control, which a lot of people in this society believe his tendency will be to take that energy, push it down and try to just handle it. Essentially, that energy and feeling get associated or separated from the conscious mind. The person really thinks he has taken care of the emotion, but it is still within his body, and therefore it is still affecting him. He could blame somebody else, even though there's nobody around at that time. But even if he could displace the emotion, it would not really dissipate. He is late for work and the boss yells at him, but our fellow doesn't realize it's not a black and white situation.

In other words, he could turn around at most jobs and tell the boss said he didn't like the way he was being treated because of the boss's tone of voice But then he was sorry that he was late and there was no excuse for that. What our guy does is just stuffs the feeling one more time. Now instead of one bit of energy, he's got two bits of energy that are stuck in his body, doing damage and wanting some kind of discharge. Later on in the day, a co worker doesn't do what he wants. So underneath his breast, he curses at her, just enough for the woman to hear, but not enough for her to hear distinctly. He thinks he's gotten out some of the anger.

However, unless it's done in an assertive way, clean from mind altering chemicals, one on one and directly, no energy really dissipates. Just a small amount leaks out the side in a passive aggressive way. Now he misses lunch. Traffic is heavy, so he's late getting home and it eats Stage, he's pushing emotions down. He gets home, he says, honey, where's dinner, and she says, it'll be about 15 minutes. And he blows up yelling and screaming, taking the opportunity to get all this out on his wife and his kids.

This is a very traditional thing that tends to happen in this society. Unfortunately, it is called inappropriate expression of anger or displaced aggression. The person is really angry at one person, but he takes it out on somebody else, because he can't hold on to it anymore. Or he subconsciously thinks it's safer to show it to the family. It is not safe with the family. That's the most cherished part of anyone's life.

And the one a person should want to be most careful about if a person acts in this kind of fashion on a day to day basis, what tends to happen is they remain chronically out of homeostasis or balance. The person feels a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress on a daily basis. psychosomatic illnesses are more likely to occur, the body and the mind are connected, they're not separate. Therefore, if a person feels sad, or some other emotion, they have a physical manifestation for that particular emotion. Oftentimes, people use substances to try to handle the emotion to keep it down a little bit more. However, using alcohol or drugs blocked the expression of real feeling and the energy still remains.

Eventually, any unresolved emotions, especially anger turns against the self and becomes depression. Millions of people are walking around in a state that is out of balance emotionally Feelings are neither good nor bad, they're neutral. When something important occurs in a person's world, he or she is going to have both a thought and a feeling about what has happened. If one is angry, that's a perfectly natural emotion. That recognition of being angry allows the person to take care of themselves. It allows them to establish good boundaries.

However, the way that a person shows anger might be good or bad. If a person is angry at someone and hits them over the head with a two by four, that is bad. But if a person just tells the other person that he is angry, in an assertive, appropriate way, that actually is helpful. There are hundreds of different feeling states. If we look at anger, which is often one of the most difficult emotions, for people to express and get over once starts out feeling perturbed or irritated. In the middle of the continuum, a person might be angry.

At the end, they might be irate or homicidal or livid. Each emotion has several different radiations. Unfortunately, in our culture, the emotions that are commonly discussed are few people say they feel okay, bad, good or upset. That doesn't really communicate anything meaningful. I don't know if a person is upset because he or she is angry or upset because of feeling hurt. With the acceptance of therapy, people more readily talk about feeling anxious and depressed.

But don't do well talking about the radiations of emotions. And usually, people don't talk about much more than anger or sadness. Some of the primary feelings are hurt Frustrated, jealous, envious, shamed, betrayed, rejected, ignored and shunned. those so called negative emotions. Don't feel pleasant when people feel them, even though they're important and impart good information. They all eventually will turn to anger, which is a secondary emotion.

Anger, if it's not expressed, can then turn inward, resulting in depression. So if a person is angry at someone, he or she can't wait until they leave, once gone, he or she will think of all the things they should have said, then start damaging themselves because they didn't save them at the appropriate time. So the anger turns against the self and the other person has probably forgotten the incident and is doing absolutely fine. In our culture, although it's changing, females traditionally have had a pretty Problem talking about anger. Men, on the other hand have had a problem talking about hurt, as if the different sexes had different emotions, which is patently untrue.