Communicating/Getting Emotions:

As a teacher your job is to acknowledge (to get, to recreate) a student's communication; unacknowledged, it leaves a student incomplete with no choice other than to take it to the next level. For some this means not doing homework or misbehaving. For others it's sometimes expressed as graffiti, for others it's guns. I.e. Prior to the shootings the Columbine students non-verbally communicated their incompletes daily. Read, Open letter to Sue Klebold, mother of a shooter.

Your students will mirror your integrity, your unresolved anger issues, those conversations in which you or another left in upset. If there is deceit between you and your spouse your students will learn to deceive, to withhold significant thoughts from someone significant.  These are called incompletes. They must be completed.

The way to find out if you are dragging around unresolved resentments and anger into each present-day interaction, each communication, is to ask a close friend.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, says, genuine anger communicated lasts about ten seconds, whereas dramatized anger, anger that's not addressing the truth of what the anger is about, lasts longer, sometimes years. Most people have forgotten the conversation that set in their original anger so they don't know how to get to the truth of it to disappear it. These energy-sapping, quiet, grumpy, sullen, moody, unhappy-looking people cannot experience happiness because their unacknowledged anger serves as a barrier to the experience of communication.

Getting a person's anger or reacting to it produces two different results. When you get another's anger, they no longer have it. They are gotten. You have disappeared it for them.

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