When someone gets all worked up about something, the temptation is often to share their emotions with the first person around. Many times this plays out like someone vomiting in a cartoon — the words just blather out and spew all over the listener. The original party may feel better, but those who were the recipients of the sharing now have the burden of dealing with the emotions as well.
Like a stain on their shirt, they may choose to ignore it, but it is there nonetheless. More often than not, they don’t/can’t/won’t forget it is there, so the time and emotional energy invested in the issue multiplies.
In most instances, everyone would be better off if the original speaker allowed for an element of time to pass before sharing. Time has the ability to decompress emotion and put things into a much more reasoned perspective. Think of emotion as water being soaked up by a towel. Time is equivalent to ringing out the water, so that the towel may be easily passed on to another without fanfare or incident. If you hand someone a soaking wet towel, all the attention turns to dealing with the water rather than the towel. If you have let the emotion pass through, the actual issue may be addressed.
Next time you’re tempted to vent or insert drama into a situation, ask yourself if you really need to hand off the towel while it is soaking wet or whether everyone would be better off if you waited a bit before doing so. I’ll bet you know the right answer.
