I was cornered in the kitchen.
His breath smelt strongly of garlic. I don’t remember what he was yelling at me about this time, but I remember the smell. I recall wondering which unlucky woman fed him last night when he didn’t come home.
His face was inches from mine, eyes wide, shouting abuse about something. I wasn’t afraid; it was a familiar scenario after seven years of marriage. It always ended with him kicking or punching something, never me, I must say, then walking out—another excuse to stay away.
When emotions get out of control
I have a clear memory of glancing over his shoulder and seeing a knife on the side. A thought went through my mind. What if?
What if I reached over and picked up that knife?
That would shut him up.
It could all be over — just like that.
Thankfully, the thought left as fast as it came. My life hadn’t quite reached rock bottom, even if it did feel like it most days. It scared me, though, to think that something that bad could happen. That I could even think that.
Luckily, I had already started building a self-awareness toolkit.
When I didn’t have control
In the darkest days of my marriage, I found it hard to control my emotions.
I would often get angry, and then I would cry.
At work, home, anywhere, say the wrong thing to me, and the waterworks would start. I would fight back tears but then sob over something quite trivial.
A good friend advised me to keep a journal. She said if nothing else it would help if I ever had to go to court.
This turned out to be the first step to building my self-awareness toolkit.
My self-awareness toolkit
Journaling and Reflection
Each day, I noticed how I was feeling at 3 points during the day and then journal how I felt:
On waking
Mid-day
In the evening
When any emotional feelings or outbursts came up, I noted who was involved, what happened, how I reacted, and how long it lasted.
At the end of each day, I reflected on the notes I had made. I looked for patterns.
At first, the only pattern was that I felt emotional whenever anyone spoke to me.
After only a few weeks, though, I started feeling calmer.
How this works
Journaling is a place to store and explore your thoughts and emotions. Because you are writing solely for your purposes, there is no risk of judgment. This means you can be honest, which is at the heart of self-awareness.
Regular reflection on your actions, thoughts, and emotions helps you recognise your trigger points as they arise. This means that if you know that a certain person, place or phrase might trigger an emotion in you, you are more able to respond rather than react in the moment.
I had been writing about my ex’s outbursts, noting when he blew up and how it made me feel. As I wrote, I could feel the anxiety building. At this point, I would stop and mentally say, ‘It’s ok, let the emotion out.’
This was unbelievably useful in calming me down.
Meditation
Since journaling was helping me to feel less emotional, I was curious to know what else might help.
I read an article about meditation and decided to give it a go.
Initially, it was hard to get my busy mind to calm down and go quiet. The important thing I discovered is that stopping thinking is not the objective. In fact, it is more beneficial to accept your busy mind. Don’t try to change anything. When you do, you beat yourself up for ‘doing it wrong,’ defeating the whole point.
The best way to meditate is to focus on your breath. Focus on the in-breath and then focus on the out-breath. Mentally saying ‘in’ and ‘out’ helps, as does counting. When you notice your mind wandering, you go back to the breath.
Why this works
Meditation works for handling emotions because it allows you to see them as they really are. Emotions are energy moving through our nervous system.
Like any form of energy, they must flow in and out of us. The problem is when we attach a meaning to how we feel, we hold the emotion in place, and it becomes stuck.
Regular meditation and focusing on breath help to allow the emotion to move through you as it should.
In other words, when you start to feel triggered — this person/event is making you feel (emotion), you notice it, accept it, breathe slowly into it and let it pass.
Create a Trigger Gap
I think this is the one.
This is the tool that I believe stopped me from picking up that knife.
To act on that thought would have been an emotional reaction. Courts often refer to these as ‘crimes of passion’. This is where a crime is committed on an intimate partner on impulse and without any logical consideration.
I didn’t reach for the knife because I had used the trigger gap. In that moment, my subconscious picked up the potential consequence of that reaction. It stopped me and kept me calm.
Why this works
The trigger gap is a pattern interrupt. This is how it works:
You recognise a potential trigger
I saw that he was angry and I was his target for abuse.
My journaling had helped me pick up his patterns of behaviour (I knew the things that triggered him)
You stay calm by focusing on your breath
Focusing on my breathing told my nervous system I was ok. Although my survival instinct was aroused, my breathing calmed me down.
This is how the meditation helped.
This tiny gap stops you from reacting and helps you think straight and respond more calmly.
What is self-awareness?
People who are self-aware make a conscious effort to understand themselves. Their personality, strengths, weaknesses and values.
During my marriage, I certainly didn’t feel self-aware, nor for a long time after. It is only recently that I have recognised the connection between the way I began to control my emotional state and the way I started to build tools for self-awareness.
One of the often-unmentioned benefits of becoming more self-aware is that you also become more aware of other people’s behaviour.
This has helped me to move past any toxic beliefs left behind by my ex-husband.
Understanding my ex
Any man who has to constantly put his wife down and make her feel stupid, ugly and unwanted, as he did, must not like himself.
Now that I am a life coach, I understand that behaviour like this is a cry for help. His cry for help was to feel better about himself. To do that, he had to make someone else feel worse than he felt, which helped him feel he was in control.
The irony is that I came out of my marriage feeling that I was not good enough. The truth is that my ex thought the same about himself. He must also have seen me as ‘better’ than him; otherwise, why did he need to control me and put me in my place?
Start Creating Your Self-Assurance Toolkit
The tools that helped me in the incident I have written about here are journaling, meditation and having a trigger gap.
There are many other tools that you could add over time.
Some ideas are: -
Reading self-help books about self-assurance, self-esteem and self-confidence.
Practising mindfulness. There are many courses and books on the subject.
Breathwork. Slow, deep breathing has the effect of calming you down.
Self-care. Caring for our bodies and minds makes us feel better, which lifts our self-esteem.
Work with a life coach or therapist to heal and improve different areas of your life.
The most important takeaway I can give you is not to stay in any toxic relationship. Remember, you deserve to be treated with respect and kindness.
Please never suffer in silence. Reach out to someone you trust. I am always here for a chat if you need it.