I found this video on Facebook and thought it was worth sharing. This woman, Kathy Buckley, has survived some incredible obstacles in her life, more than most of us have to deal with, beginning with being born severely hearing impaired. Later on in the video she describes her turning point and it’s at that point that I recognized her emotional response as ‘indignation’. That’s not an emotion we talk about often it seems to me but it can be a potent energy that propels us into survival and thriving. A self-defense mentor that I follow online who has studied real-world violence for 30 years says that ‘indignation’ is one of the most important emotions you can elicit in order to survive a violent confrontation. I think of it as the 'how dare you !!" emotion. Again, not an emotion that gets a lot of attention but is part of our emotional inheritance and part of our emotional intelligence tool kit that, in the right context, can be incredibly empowering and can even save our life.
Aha! A companion to Repulsion as an emotion. Indignation has the “how dare you!!” energy that challenges, asserts what we feel is right an Righteous. Feel more Yang than Repulsion…
Yes, I agree, indignation feels more assertive and active (yang) than repulsion. Repulsion has a retreating sort of energy and indignation has a ‘forward’ energy to it for me.
As I consider this I’m aware of one of my basic operating concepts that I took from NLP many years ago is that everything is useful or appropriate or understandable within a specific context. Yelling fire in a movie theatre is appropriate if there’s a fire in the movie theatre for example…if fact it’s appropriate even if you started the fire! Indignation is useful in some contexts and not so much in others…etc. I see behaviours (which includes emotions in my model) through the lens of ‘context’ as to whether they’re useful or appropriate…or helping you to thrive. You could reasonably pick the worst, most awful behaviour possible and make it seem appropriate and reasonable within some context.
I had a very strange reaction to this video. At first I laughed, then I cried. I felt the same way in school not being able to hear. I liked that she could laugh at herself and get mad at God. When the video ended I froze! I totally froze. I felt a heaviness and tightness in my chest. My breathing was erratic. I still feel somewhat off kilter. I think I’m going to tap on these feelings. It was a good video Glenn, thanks for posting it.
Thanks Jean…I found it very profound myself and I can fully understand how you would have the reaction you did. It obviously touched something very tender in you and I hope you can get that part of you to calm with some tapping…Peace.
