Emotional laws are the answer for better relationships: Diana Wais at TEDxThessaloniki

dear friends have you ever fallen completely and utterly in love before the first time this happened to me I was 18 years old our love was so sweet it was unshakable certain forever 7 years later I went through the worst breakup you could ever imagine I was in pieces and I was really sure I would never be happy again how could two people who loved each other so much end up fighting to the point where there's no alternative but to separate this question shaped my life these are a little homemade I hope you enjoyed them

as much as I did making them okay so I ended up becoming a marital researcher at Stony Brook and relationship project in Long Island New York and I interviewed hundreds of couples in all the couples I interviewed I never met a single one whose intention it was to become unhappy they all shared the same dream of Hollywood fairytale endless love how many of them actually succeed it doesn't look good statistically speaking in the Western world there is a 2/3 probability that you'll end up in divorce in your lifetime and how many more are quietly unhappy

or even lonely in their marriages now why is that let me ask you a question would you jump out of a third-floor window onto a concrete floor probably not why not because you studied the laws of physics but how many of you have studied in school the laws of emotion that explain to you your own inner world and the world of interpersonal dynamics that are so complicated you see how can we expect children to grow up and get along on an ever more crowded planet if we don't prepare them for that my journey took me

to become a therapist and an executive coach it was my job to study other people's inner lives and I've met with people from all kinds of backgrounds I got started in California in prisons working with gang children I worked with parents of child abuse I worked with incest survivors I worked with survivors of torture at Bellevue Hospital in New York I worked with supermodels with aristocracy with the uber rich with hedge fund managers with CEOs and boards of companies and amongst them a lot of unhappy couples I am here today to share with you some

of the lessons I learned through them I would like to start with the story it starts like this being being hello honey I'm gonna be two hours late for dinner on the other side is a wife who thinks to herself oh my god this is already the third time this week this is happening what am i air do I matter does he even care he's probably having an affair at the office when a husband comes home let's just say it's not a very romantic evening now let's go to another scenario okay it starts similar it

goes ring honey I'm about two hours late for dinner this wife thinks to herself oh my god this is already the third time this week this is happening and he already left so tired this morning I'm so sorry he has to go through this it's just not fair and he's doing all this just to provide a better living for me and the children and when he comes home she gives him a big hug and says let's just make the best out of evening we have now it's no surprise that these two women react so differently

to the same triggering event you see the same trigger the phone call interacts with a very different button in the two women for one it triggers fear of an affair but would it surprise you if I told you that this woman's past marriage ended in divorce because her husband did cheat on her for the other woman the same trigger triggers feelings of gratitude and compassion in the face of self-sacrifice but what if I told you that for that woman there was a father who worked day and night to earn the extra money to put her

through university so she would not have to be poor as he was you see it's no coincidence because you cannot get triggered into an emotional reaction unless you have a receptor field inside of you that is interacting with the trigger you can think of this like a mountain and the top of a mountain is the button that can get pressed and the bottom of the mountain is often underneath the fog which means it's often outside of your conscious awareness and you may not even realize it's there until a triggering event activates it and even then

most people don't realize that there's a can you can think of these as they're called in western psychology as emotional schemas you can think of them like colored glasses if you're wearing pink glasses the world looks pink if you're wearing blue glasses the world looks blue the trouble is there's a lot of people walking around without realizing that they're wearing glasses now just because I study these processes doesn't mean they don't happen to me I'm now going to share with you a personal story okay it's very personal so don't tell everyone okay when I was

in my early 20s I had the joy of dating a therapist one day we got into an argument and I got so angry kind of like this okay in my anger I thought he was just being horrible and I was very sure that I was dating the wrong guy I was sure that he was wrong and I was right in the middle of this he looked at me and said Diana you're very angry at me aren't you I had to admit this was true so I said yes and then he said you're so angry at

me that you can't even remember that you love me a bit puzzled because I just noticed myself I said yes and then he looked at me with so much love in his eyes and said Diana I am angry at you too but despite my anger I can still remember how much I loved you Wow immediately I started to cry and he put his arms around me hugs me and said I don't want to hurt you I love you too much for that at that moment I felt safe and I realized that behind my anger was

just my fear of getting hurt again so let me ask you a question how many of you in the audience thought earlier I knew it was my wife's fault - those of you who may have had that thought what if you tried this method instead because it works much better now the reason it's not so easy to do that it's because for most of us when someone is angry at us and criticizes us and maybe even yells at us it doesn't exactly trigger feelings love and compassion does it but and this is what I had

to learn myself with a lot of awareness and even more practice you too can learn not react back out of a triggered state but instead remain centered and responding kindness and it will give you much better results over time so what's the lesson here let's summarize first awareness helps because of his awareness this psychologist was able to not take my anger so personally but understand that there was probably something more going on and this helped him master lesson number two which is avoid getting triggered yourself now in all fairness he was getting angry back which

is only natural but because of his awareness he was able to switch out of that state quite quickly and master lesson 3 which is respond to the other person's need first with love and empathy and it did work until we broke up of course okay so now does this happen in the world of business you know something's coming now right so yes in business they were glasses too I'm going to share another story I had the pleasure of working with a very successful executive of a rather large company let's call him Robert Robert his company

was facing some uncertain times that had nothing to do with him and they were going for a little bit of a downturn and this uncertainty triggered in the Board of Directors a fear that they could fail so because of their fear they started to become overly critical of Robert notice fear critical they're related we just saw that before and this criticism triggered in Robert the executive and unhelpful state so that he started to do the three cardinal mistakes he became defensive he stopped listening and let's just say he did not exceed a lot of gravitas

this was unlike him but when you yourself get into an unhelpful state you're much more likely to trigger an unhelpful state in the other and then they trigger that back in you and so it's kind of like a vicious spiral that ends in boring exactly so the challenge was how do we turn around the vicious spiral into a virtual cycle so by making a pink of course so I worked with Robert to clear his emotional receptor field and through that he was able to not get triggered so easily and he was able to win the

trust of the board implemented strategy successfully and stir the company back on track you see in our world today there's a view that reason alone will solve all of our problems in this view ignoring emotions somehow makes you more rational in my experience if you are unaware of the emotional processes that happen to you and to everyone around you you're usually just less prepared to deal with what I call the human factor now you have an emotional brain and it can and will override your rational brain whether you are aware of this or not you

see the brain doesn't care it's not good or bad it's just how the brain works so what does this mean very specifically for you very concretely what can I do with this okay next time you get triggered try doing what the Green Monster does okay ask yourself the following four questions first what's getting triggered in me second what am I afraid of third what's underneath of that and fourth what do I need to heal in me to not respond like this again in the future through this line of self-inquiry you will find your own emotional

receptor fields which we all have and here's the good news you can heal your receptor fields and when you do you won't get triggered that easily with much less of an effort you see most people are not aware that underneath their triggers and automatic reactions are unconscious emotions of pain fear and shame the baggage we didn't even know was here now imagine every child would grow up learning about emotional laws in school imagine every child would master how to create harmonious relationships just think of the impact this would have on families businesses countries and world

affairs so back to my own personal journey when I started to work one-on-one with people I realized that some people had underneath their angry outbursts feelings of fear and underneath their allures of greatness were feelings of shame so I started working with them on healing the receptor fields let me give you an example if someone says to you you're so stupid and there's a little tiny part of you that thinks I am stupid you're gonna react a little bit like this what how dare you okay but if you've healed that little tiny part of you

and now in every fiber of your being you just know you're not stupid you're gonna be more likely to go something like this what's going on with him why is he feeling so aggressive today I wonder what he's going through you see when you sealed your own receptor fields there's a natural genuine curiosity for what's going on with the other person and because of that you're able to just respond to what they need and defuse the situation there's a natural compassion that I have found to be in every single person I've ever worked in it's

just normally buried behind the yucky stuff that most people don't even know they have so as I was working with Pete I realized that everyone was like a mirror coming into my life and showing me that the dynamics I observed in them were also happening in me and then I got it the same emotional dynamics happen inside every single person Wow and you know what's funny about that most of them walk around thinking this stuff is only happening to them I cannot tell you how many people cried in my office saying oh I can't tell

you this about myself and then when they say that you know what I say now I say welcome to the human family we're all the same thank you