Why Minor Things Elicit Such Powerful Reactions Within Us

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You’re either brutally aware of this by now or just didn’t get the memo yet, but the little things in life often become the big things. What does this mean exactly? A father tucking his daughter into bed every night might seem small and even insignificant in the moment, but years later, when the little girl morphs into a woman, she will remember those nights fondly. Unconsciously, this small, reliable action might have even demonstrated to her what healthy attachments feel like and built trust around her and other men in her life.  

Just the same, a child who is told he is needy or annoying might grow up believing that too much affection was only a way to make adults turn their backs on you. That love was something that needed to be earned.

The little things in life become the big things.

Understanding this will hopefully allow you to offer yourself more grace when your emotions spontaneously combust, and you’re no longer the one sitting in the driver’s seat. Have you ever had a reaction to something that in no way matched the severity of the situation? Of course you have. We all have. But these meltdowns, this misplaced anger, or supposed “overreaction” hardly has anything to do with the situation at hand. There is usually something deeper at its root that we’d been ignoring.

Hysterically crying when the barista announces she is out of matcha tea does not indicate chemical imbalance or lunacy. It indicates a need for further investigation. Not getting matcha tea on a morning you desperately needed it could signify a loss of control – a turbulent inner world mirrored by the outside. If matcha tea is your sense of calm, the routine that regulates you, then taking it away could return you to that chaos you were trying so desperately to evade.  

The little things in life become the big things.

What if anger is not anger but merely exhausted sadness trying to be seen and heard? What if emotional avoidance is a cry for help? Emotions imitate themselves. They are rarely presented in black and white, but a spectrum of color leaking into one another.

Even when women are young, we are taught that a boy who pushes us off the monkey bars isn’t a boy who dislikes us, but rather, quite the opposite: a boy with a crush. His actions don’t match the emotions he is being accused of, and this often follows us into adulthood.

Emotions are not facts, and are often fueled by our own stubborn belief systems. If we see a world that is out to get us, then that is precisely what we will see – and then suddenly an innocent barista who’s out of matcha tea isn’t really innocent at all, but a raging bitch with ill intent. Try not to take every emotion that courses through you all the seriously, even though they might demand you do. Let them instead be your guide and show you exactly what it is you’re feeling and why. You might learn something about yourself.

Last week, I was investigating certificates of deposit in various banks and credit unions, trying to find the one with the best annual percentage yield (APY). I found one that offered 6% for one year, with no annual fees or penalty should you decide to access your funds before the account reached maturity. My boyfriend has a finance degree, and so, before electronically depositing a hefty sum of my savings into this small credit union in Michigan I’d never heard of before, I asked my boyfriend to give it a once over to make sure I wasn’t about to get scammed. The credit union was insured by the FDIC, but I still wanted to get another opinion since I’d never done this before. I’d asked my boyfriend for weeks to simply check out their website, a task that would devour no more than two minutes of his precious time. However, by the time he was able to look into them for me, we learned that the 6% APY was a special that had expired only two days before. Now its rates were only being offered at 4%. I was heartbroken. That might sound dramatic to anyone reading this, but I actually had a breakdown on the phone. I was so upset that I had missed out on this special by just two days. My torrent of tears and mucus trails might have seemed over the top, or as my boyfriend liked to put, “absolutely batshit crazy,” but there were actually several contributing factors that led to this eruption. Let me break them down for you because it even took me and my therapist a while to figure out.

1. I felt overwhelmed by the rising costs of living and stressed about money. I had been working three jobs trying to earn enough to meet my financial goals and this small effort to get ahead suddenly felt as though it had been ripped from underneath me.
2. I felt undervalued since my boyfriend didn’t help me solve a problem until it was too late.
3. I was upset with myself for feeling like I needed to rely on another human to advocate for my financial decisions, which triggered a feeling of incompetency.
4. I felt as though “other people always made the great opportunities in time, but I simply always missed them.”

Of course, my boyfriend wasn’t aware of any of this at the time, and simply wanted to exit the phone call immediately.

I write posts like this for many reasons, but my biggest is to raise awareness about the very issues that make us human. What if we all could tap into ourselves often enough to understand the root cause of our emotions? Would we still fight? And if so, would they be as extreme?  

When we learn to understand ourselves better, we understand our neighbors. Here is another example: Your friend might express annoyance when you tell her you plan on asking your boss for a raise. You sense this and your emotions start mimicking hers. Frustration builds on frustration. But if you stopped and took a closer look, you might see a woman who once fought this same battle herself and lost. Perhaps it even cost her her job. And she is now projecting her fears onto you. It’s unfair, but it’s human, and likely unconscious. But this would be a tough code to crack if you were missing pertinent information. Maybe you don’t need to know every detail about why an incident might be eliciting such a powerful reaction in another person, you just need to recognize that it’s happening and know that it may very well have nothing to do with you. You might avoid a fight if you can master this skill. Perspective is your superpower. Use it well.

The next time you’re feeling explosive in your emotions, try and put your detective cap on. Ask yourself why you’re feeling this way. Listen to your body and try to detect what is happening physically within you. Is your heart racing? Are your palms sweaty? Does your stomach feel sick? There’s a reason for it all. Don’t ignore these symptoms. Would you ignore physical symptoms if you were sick? It’s the same with our emotional symptoms. We need to be attuned to them, because if we can be attuned to them in ourselves, then we are one step closer to being attuned to them in others.

Your reactions were never irrational. You just lacked a greater understanding of what prompted their ignition.  

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Photo by Nsey Benajah on Unsplash

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