W.E. Krill, Jr. M.S.P.C.

Emotional reactivity is like lightening: quicker than the blink of your eye, white hot, and….zapping!

There are several sources of emotional reactivity, we learn it first from our family when we were children, then friends, then the wider world. There is a very wide gap between ‘reactivity’ and ‘responsively’. People often use these interchangeably, but in counselor speak, they are not.

Reactivity happens when our negative thoughts about something or someone begin to create a heightened (negative) emotion in us. Negative thought + negative emotion + even more negative thought= crazy reaction. And, to loosely paraphrase Newton, for every reaction there is another equal or greater

 reaction.  Or to loosely paraphrase physics: a nuclear reaction takes place.

A response, on the other hand, is when you can stay engaged with a situation or another person and not become negatively reactive. Think this is you? Think again: most of our interactions with loved ones are far more reactive than responsive. Most of us are far more responsive to strangers than our loved ones. If you’d like to find out why this is so, go read a wonderful author named Dr. David Schnarch.

Even after working very hard at understanding and practicing Dr. Schnarch’s  ‘Four Points of Balance’, and even though I have made great progress, I am still deeply reactive to those I am close with. And that is what really hurts: knowing how your reactivity is toxic to your love relationships, but still compulsively reacting anyway. 

In the spiritual sense, reactivity is sinful, because it hurts others. Yes, we do have culpability for it (once we understand the mechanics of it), but we also need to accept that reactivity is very much learned at a very early age, and as such, is a strong sinful force that we are only partially personally responsible for.  Reactivity and sin swirl around us like autumn leaves on a windy day, like the colds and viruses that do as well. The trick, of course, is in staying healthy.