Optimism is also a powerful antidote to anger. Many participants in our anger management classes report their anger lessening as they learn to replace negative thinking with positive thinking.

GOOD NEWS FOR NEGATIVE THINKERS You can learn how to replace pessimism with optimism.

The starting point is to access your vulnerability to pessimistic thinking by taking self evaluation test you can find at http://www.authentichappiness.org.

Your responses will be compared to thousands of other people in various categories, down to your Zip Code.

If you scored lower than you’d like, you can become more optimistic. As Dr. Seligman writes in Authentic Happiness his latest book: “the trait of optimism is changeable and learnable.”

LEARNING TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC THINKER There is now a well-documented method for building optimism. It’s based on first, recognizing, and then disputing, pessimistic thoughts.

People often do not pay attention to their thoughts and thus do not recognize how destructive they can be in leading to negative emotions.

The key is to recognize your pessimistic thoughts and then treat them as if they were uttered by someone else—an external person, a rival, whose mission in life is to make you miserable!

Basically, you can become an optimist by learning to disagree with yourself— challenging your pessimistic thinking patterns and replacing them with more positive patterns.

Note: this view of optimistic thinking is not process of “positive thinking” in sense of repeating silly affirmations that you really don’t believe.

Rather, it is process of correcting distorted or faulty thinking patterns that create health, career, and relationship problems for you.

By teaching yourself to think about things differently, (but just as realistically), you can morph yourself from a pessimist to an optimist—and tame Anger Bee in process.

But main problem with all these analogies is they’re fixed, and relationships are not. There are times we want and must have a boundary. There are times when we want to be permeable and vulnerable, as in intimate relationships.

The Flood Gate

Now here’s a great analogy for letting things “in” and “out” – floodgate. In emotional intelligence, we use it in terms of emotions. If we are “flooded” by an emotion, it overtakes us. It keeps us from thinking and responding. We are either paralyzed, or act immediately, as a reaction, whereas, except in truly life-threatening situations, a reasoned response is nearly always best course of action.

It would be nice, as with a floodgate, to let emotions in, but with care, and to let them out, but with care. To regulate it, yes?

For most of us, it will be unwanted emotional and mental assault from others we need protection from. (If you are under threat of physical harm, please get help.)

Let’s say we’re tying to work on a project at work. It’s fairly unlikely someone at work will assault us physically. Instead, they might interrupt us and cause of to lose focus, or a boss might demean us, or a colleague might cry or have a temper tantrum in order to try and manipulate.

Unless you are truly an abused person, in which case please get therapy, it’s likely that this idea of “boundaries,” floodgate, is more in line with getting some management into your life. Letting your partner know that right now you can’t have that deep conversation, but that you will when you can, and managing emotions on both sides. Using floodgate to release anger slowly before it builds up and/or causes problems in valley below. It is difficult to function well when flooded with emotion (including being in love!) and it is difficult to function well when our emotions are dammed up.

Our relationships with people are our emotions. When you develop your Emotional Intelligence, you are learning to have a functioning floodgate for those emotions.

We don’t want to eliminate emotions (as if we could), or even tamp them down permanently (because then we’d be robots), but we do need to be able to identify them, understand them, use them, and regulate them. Learning how to put a floodgate in place, slows thing down enough for you to identify, understand, manage, and eventually regulate.

HEALTHY INTERDEPENDENCE

Co-dependence is an unhealthy blurring of lines, and having no floodgate for emotions. Something happens to your loved one, and you react as if it had happened to you. You take responsibility for someone else in ways that aren’t appropriate.

But “dependence” is healthy for human beings. We weren’t designed to live alone. In fact isolation – and by this I mean lack of connection – has been shown to be more injurious to our health than smoking, obesity and other high-risk factors. Being in healthy connection with others is vital to our health.

Healthy interdependence means being able to let others in and out as you wish, when you wish, letting emotions flow, neither flooding, nor dammed up. Your emotions and effect of other person’s emotions upon you. The floodgate regulates flow. It’s sense that you can have your emotions and experience them and your relationships and manage it at same time. This is Emotional Intelligence.