Emotional frigidity

My personal definition of emotional frigidity is as follows and you're welcome to file this away in "Jane's library of crap".

"The blocking of one's true emotions to the point that our entire beings become a deep freeze with a heart beat."

There I said it. Sometimes I get emotionally frigid clients. Sometimes people plug their internal deep freeze into the wall in the middle of a session. I can feel it. A big chill settles in the room and the person standing with me becomes a shell of who they really are. Or they walk in as a deep freeze and I have to create an opening for them to melt a little. This experience is pretty rare so when it happens it's a bit jolting.

The magic in a coaching relationship is in the dynamic between the two people. It's so much more than paying for a service and getting what you asked for. It's a two way street and a relationship.

Perhaps growing up in a house where I had to be hypervigilant about the climate du jour has now been tranformed into one of the major strengths I bring to what I do, one of those crap into fertilizer situations likely responsible for my ability to tune in and read people. I can tell if someone is hungry before they are hungry, are about to get dizzy before they do or need to get a good cry out of the way to be able to be truly present and keep working on the task at hand. I make it my mission to put people at ease around me. I HATE making people feel ill at ease.

Every time we interact with people we are entering into some type of dynamic whether it be the cashier at a store or a lover in a bed. We have a choice, to a certain extent, about how these interactions are going to go down.

Certainly when we are suffering or stressed, it's harder to give a flying shit how our behaviour affects people around us. How we decide to interact in our community, with our loved ones, with a service provider like me really defines who we are. Despite the shit we are going through, we can connect better with people while we still give a hoot about how we affect people around us. Having a bad day is no excuse to ignore how we are impacting other people.

I'm not saying put a big fake smile on your face and pretend all is good. I just think we can all get really good at letting our emotionally protective moats go up, build a giant barrier between us and other people and turn around one day and find ourselves alone and isolated. Or even worse, we could become so frozen and shut down that we don't even have the ability to notice the emotional disconnect anymore. I call these folks the living dead.

I can deal with almost anything from a client over emotional frigidity. I've always found it more lonely being in a room with someone you don't connect with than being alone in a room. Just remember next time you're with someone who's providing you with a service, packing your groceries or changing your oil, money is only one of the forms of payment that go along with being humans together on this planet. A little eye contact or recognition that maybe they need a little warmth might just make your life better and melt your emotional frigidity.

And by the way, I'm not saying I'm never emotionally frigid or implying by any means that I'm perfect. I'm sure someone could write a blog about something annoying I do too, maybe even a book.

I'm going to end this on a cheesy note inspired by my recent viewing of the Tolstoy film "The Last Station".

"If you want to be happy, be."
Tolstoy.