Reframed Perspectives

Emotions can be difficult to understand and process at times.  In fact, one of the questions I fear the most is: How are you feeling/doing?  To be fair there are actually two reasons why I dread this question.  On the one hand I am always questioning whether they actually want to know how I’m feeling/doing in that particular moment or if they are simply asking out of societal expectations of being polite.  On the other hand, what if they are genuinely interested or concerned about my welfare at that given moment?  My response is usually the same regardless of the other persons motive for asking, I don’t know because emotions tend to confuse me and in general I really don’t know what I’m feeling at given time.

We have been taught to read other people’s body language and other non-verbal cues to help determine a person’s mood.  People tend to make assumptions about what others are thinking or feeling based off of their own perceptions but how often are they actually right?  Granted we can make some generalizations about other people’s behaviors and body language to give a starting point but I think it is important that we also learn to take that crucial next step and actually talk to the person to find if what we think to be true actually is.

Last week I had the opportunity to present the, “Reframing Your Perspective” workshop I developed at the System of Care Academy Conference at Stone Mountain, GA.  One of the exercises in this interactive workshop has participants act out different scenarios focusing on their assigned emotion. The emotions are drawn at random and the audience has three attempts to correctly identify what the participants were portraying.  The first time we do this exercise the participants are allowed to speak and communicate verbally but then we do it again and they have to rely entirely on non-verbal communication skills.  

The interesting thing was that people more often than not were unable to guess the correct emotion based on the behaviors whether the participants in the scene were able to speak or had to rely solely on non-verbal communication skills.  But one of the scenarios that provided an excellent example of how often people mistakenly read another person’s emotions based on their own perceptions.  The emotion being portrayed was enthusiasticbut the overwhelming response from the audience was that she was either nervousor anxious. The other common misconception was that she was manic based on her behaviors.

During the discussion of the scenario we discovered that people main reason people misread the emotion was because the scenario was set in the emergency room with no other established parameters other than the location. A majority of the people in the audience work in the mental health field and therefore made the natural assumption that her excited/enthusiastic behavior was a result of feeling nervous or anxious about being in the ER in spite of the fact that it was never established the exact reason why she was there.  

It provided an excellent example of how often we misjudge a situation based solely on our own perceptions, especially when we don’t take the time to speak with the person to find out what is actually going on.  All too often people make the assumption they know what a person is thinking or feeling and often make judgements based off those assumptions.  But what if we started to take the time to actually talk with people and listen to what’s going on instead? Maybe we could learn to communicate more effectively and see past our own biases and slowly start to reframe our perspectives to see others for who they really are as opposed to who we think they are.