Emotional playout...are we having fun yet?

What is emotional playout?  This is a not so rare condition that allows couples, partners, friends, and family members to “share” their stressors with you.  Close personal relationships create emotional bonds between and among people allowing the screen of pretension to come down and therefore allowing the furnace of emotion to open with no filters, sometimes full blast.

When we agree to have real relationships with people as compared to superficial ones, we open up a bond that brings down the walls of the protection that we normally reserve for most people in our lives. We open the gates freely and allow all of their Trojan horses to enter without compunction.  We accept the baggage, even welcome to the chance sometime to alleviate their stressors by absorbing them in the name of sharing.

Life’s most potent stressors (the ones that cause life limitation like marriage, divorce, moving, death in the family) are embraced for the sake of our human relations. This is one of the strengths of our humanity; the true sharing of responsibilities; the good, the bad, and the ugly.

What we have to learn to do though is not to adopt the stressors and make them our own.  We need to release ourselves of owning the responsibilities but act more as a sounding board that reflects the stressor and one that doesn’t adopt it instead.   Because if we own the adopted stressor, who will we give it to in return?  And, this I perceive, is the cause of many a repeated argument between and among our personals.  You gave me this stressor and now that I am stressed, I return the favor and the original stressor gets piggybacked on the new one and so on.  These stressors also have a way of popping up at regular intervals as a reminder of the previous stressor and then, folks, we have simply an argument and we have lost the ability to act as a support mechanism…

Relationships require seesawing so that when I am up, I can allow you to bring me back to even with your stressor and vice versa.  When I am down, don’t keep me there by piling more weight on top or else I cannot be there as the shock absorber you truly need.  We all want great relationships with our friends, family and significant others; this can only happen with some fair play, don’t you agree?