Attitude = Unhinged?
Attitude is used to describe the emotional state of a person who appears unhinged or unjustly bothered. I find a problem when a woman raises her voice to express her emotions, and she meets with, “you sound like you have an attitude.”
For years I was lead to believe I had an attitude. That, I could not have had an issue that needed attention and care because the attitude automatically canceled the concern.
Now that I have practiced more self-development. I find the word attitude to be an insult to those who choose to stand up for themselves. Let me show you how to understand your emotions.
An attitude arises when you are made to feel like an unfair act has been done to take advantage of you. You are a highly capable being; you can spot these injustices immediately. The problem is not the attitude but maybe the way I chose to communicate. But even with that wonderful knowledge, it did not cancel that I still needed to fix the disrespect I was getting.
Having standards does not cancel an attitude. Let me show you how to communicate your standards by listening to your attitude.
Listening To The Attitude
Attitude is another word for emotions in action. Emotions are helpful bouts of hormones that your body produces to respond to a perceived attack, whether verbal or physical. Our bodies use emotions to let us know when something is off.
Emotional intelligence helps to figure out what your emotions are telling you and how to make sense of it all. You can improve your ability to sense when you are emotional by bringing your awareness back to you. Listen to how to understand your emotions with these signs your below.
- When you feel the Anger that brings on the attitude, stop and take a deep breath if necessary. Become aware of your body.
- Become aware of any knots in your stomach, body temperature rising, or your throat that is tightening.
- Slowly un-clinging your jaw and take slow, methodical breaths. Deep breath in, and slowly release. Repeat for 3-5 breaths if possible.
- Now listen to the feeling behind the Anger. Do you feel shame, fear, or feelings are hurt?
- Are you not being listened to, misunderstood, or ignored?
- Is the other party appear to ignore your core boundaries?
Bringing awareness back to your body will help you sort out your Anger and help you resolve issues by communicating your needs.
After bringing the focus back to you for about a week, you will see a remarkable change in your innate sense of self and how you react to your environment. This is called self-awareness and it is a must on thow to understand your emotions.
Becoming Aware of The Self
Self-awareness is a practice. Like working on your muscles and body, you can’t see results if you don’t practice. Change is the re-wiring of neural networks. Neural networks are basically habitual response paths in your brain.
The more you become aware and, in a sense, watch yourself re-act, the more those neural connections get disrupted, and that’s a good thing. Not reacting to stimuli allows you to observe and change your behavior.
Anger As An Emotion and What It Tells Us
Anger is the emotion of injustice. It can come from experiencing humiliation, neglect, betrayal. Anger can be physically expressed or verbally expressed.
You can alter Anger if you become aware of the trigger. Other names for Anger are irritation, rage, jealousy, torment, disgust,
Focusing On The Anger Emotion
Anger can be so intense that the logical brain has no chance and gets hijacked by our emotional brain. Our anger is an important emotion, and it helps us understand where we stand in our immediate group or relationship.
However, Anger can quickly get out of hand when we react based on our Traumas and what we believe to be certain injustices.
You see, you will react worse to certain behaviors or communication from others based on that old trauma. In a way, our mood or personality is simply trauma expressed to our surroundings and others.
Trauma is useful; it helps you stay safe. Throughout our lives, we build thoughts, walls, and coping mechanisms to survive in our social environment.
We build trauma responses to serious issues as well as minor issues too. Trauma is just doing its job, but it can stop us from achieving goals and bonding with important relationships.
The best method I have found to stop Anger responses or attitude is to go back and heal your trauma response. Here are a few healing methods for how to understand your emotions.
- Meditate or Use Mindfulness- Sit down and quiet the mind, go within and heal.
- Emotional Regulation– Like described above, going within yourself and becoming the observer.
- Hemi-Sync Method– Playing binomial beats through your headphones resonates and causes both halves of your brain to sync up and work together.
The Other Emotions And What They Tell You
Listening to emotions or emotional regulation is an essential aspect of being human. We tend to allow our emotions to regulate us rather than getting control and being the lead.
You can see the inability to self-regulate in movies, listen to songs, and experience it in schools. When you watch a movie, the characters are generally reacting with Anger, expressing loneliness by drinking. In songs, you listen to the songwriter singing about the pain being hurt caused, how they still “need” the love that got away.
The saddest part, in schools, you might hear teachers low-key displaying their inability to self-regulate. When the teacher yells at someone for coming in late, it might be because they felt disrespected.
When we don’t know what our emotions are telling us, we allow those emotions to control our behavior. We allow our reptilian brain to take over.
We already discussed Anger, but let’s check out the other emotions and what they tell us.
Fear:
Fear happens when our bodies perceive an impending danger. It’s a survival-based response. It can range from a mild prickling of your arm hairs to more extreme phobias of terror.
We can add nervousness and horror to the subcategories of fear.
Joy:
Joy is enjoyment, satisfaction, and pleasure. You tend to feel good. These emotions produce positive energy.
This emotion also has zen, optimism, relief, gratitude, and pride.
Love:
Love as a category encompasses those around you or even things. It’s used in friendship, bonding, altruism, and philanthropy. Affection, longing, and lust are sister emotions. Still, they are lower vibrationally than pure love, which does not seek in return.
Sadness:
Sadness relates to loss or disadvantage, it can lead to depression if it’s allowed continuously to take over as a primary emotion.
Agony hurt and anguish are subcategories. You can also include suffering, neglect, and sympathy under sadness.
Sadness is very vibrationally low and needs to be kept in check. It’s an emotion that keeps self-growth down and good things away from you.
Surprise:
Unexpected and out-of-nowhere can best describe surprise—you were not expecting something. There is a momentary loss of words or even thoughts.
Surprise can be both a good vibration or negative depending on the type of stimuli that created it—for example, a birthday surprise vs. the death of someone you love.
How to Stand Your Ground Safely When You Get An Attitude (Angry)
Here are 5 Boundaries You Need that I found helpful from Reddit and the.holistic.psychologist
One: Set Your Boundaries
How others make us feel can trigger emotions of unfairness. Understanding what boundaries another person is crossing can help us communicate to them to stop.
If a parent, partner, friend, or boss keeps pushing you by ignoring you, criticizing you, or calling you out in front of others, this can bring out Anger. Crossing a line that you are not okay with can trigger what others perceive as an “Attitude.”
But just because they label it, an attitude does not mean that you are wrong, and they are right. On the contrary, stop and listen to that Anger, figure out what injustice those around you just crossed, and then implement healthy boundaries.
Boundaries might be hard to set or explain in the beginning, but it gets easier the more you use your voice the right way.
Two: Your Emotions Are Ignoring Your Needs
Are others ignoring your emotional needs? If you find yourself getting angry when ignored, dismissed, misunderstood, or told, you don’t have a right to your emotion. Find a way to express that you require respect. Asking for consideration when it comes to your emotions can help others see that you matter.
Our emotions are critical, and they tell us exactly what is wrong. Having those emotions ignored says more about those dismissing you than it does you. Feel those emotions; ask those around you to please honor your need.
Three: Nobody Ever Taught You How to Communicate
Nobody ever taught you how to communicate needs with your voice instead of attitude or anger. The feelings of weakness, humiliation, fear, anxiety, insecurity, and vulnerability after someone calls us out are not uncommon, but learning how to translate them is a skill.
The Skill of Communicating your emotions or emotional regulation and communication should have fallen on your parents. But communication skills often lack in parents, so it doesn’t get passed on to their children.
It’s not too late. Learn to listen to your body, be self-aware, and then communicate the frustration with calm words. It’s not impossible; I would not be suggesting something impossible if I did not train myself to do this.
Four: Keep Your Core Values
Your core values are your own. You don’t have to change your belief; your ideas and position in life are valid. Insecurity is prayed on by others who have more (often made up) self-worth than you. It’s up to you to listen to your self-aware body for the cues that someone trespassed into your core values.
Set them straight in a calm voice. Take back your truth. It’s as if the person who just yelled at you was holding your coffee mug. Kindly say it’s yours and take it back. You may not be in control of others or most situations, but you control your body, your vessel. You control how you react to life and those around you, stand up for where you want to go and how you want to feel.
Please make sure you realize if you are constantly asking others to make you feel safe, loved, or keep you peaceful, life will not end well for you. Others cannot meet your needs as you can. You know what you want, you know what you need, meet your needs first. Stand up for your valid values first.
Five: Heal Old Trauma
Being self-aware of your body is one important element of getting rid of a reactive attitude. But the other more important piece is to get rid of the anger that causes attitude at the root. Do your part and heal old trauma.
Trauma happens to every single person you know. No one goes through life without lighting up their fear and then storing it as trauma. Some have way more trauma to sort through than others.
Find a way to meditate or sync up your brain through healing vibrational sounds. I explain a little more about healing trauma below.
Letting Go Of The Attitude
Let’s set something straight; you are practicing letting go of your attitude not to impress others but to improve your life. You are going through this life expansion for you and no one else. The minute you try and heal for others, you begin to build resentment towards those you heal for. This self-awareness is healing you at your core. You were not built in a day; healing will take a while.
With this healing, you will likely encounter more deep emotions that give rise to more attitude or Anger. Healed trauma tends to release extra emotions as it comes out. The more you heal, the less extra emotional stress comes out; it’s like cleaning a house. In the beginning, you have a lot of garbage coming out of that house. Then slowly, as you tackle more rooms, the junk slows down till there is nothing left to clean, and all you have is upkeep (more on that on another post).
Once you have worked on Anger you can move on to any of the other emotions we mentioned. They all give you clues to past trauma. Sorting through all the other emotions will be helpful in your healing journey.
A New You
I hope that by the end of this post, you have gotten something of value. Healing is a human right waiting to be used. When you heal, you benefit, and those around you benefit. Healing allows you to become the best version of yourself.
All the best self-help and self-care will not work if you don’t let go of your trauma first. Start with YOU FIRST!
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