ETHICAL

THE ETH ICAL SLUT
talking about how you communicate about what's important to you,
like how you feel.
So: if feelings like to be heard, and anger is a feeling that can be very
hard to hear, how can we vent anger without creating more trouble
than we relieve?
EXERCISE Glbberl." "g'"
This will be both silly and very satisfying. Set the timer for two minutes.
Sta nd facing each other, a little dista nce apart. Express your anger
simultaneously with stance and gesture: stamp your feet, wave your
arms, and speak to your partner in entirely inarticulate soundsmoans,
groans, sighs, growls. (If you're not sure what we mean here,
imagine Donald Duck having a ta ntrum.) It's hard to describe this in
words, but when you go for the drama, freed from the need to make
sentences, or to figure out who's right and who's wrong, or even to
make any sense at all, you'll communicate your feelings very weiland
then have a good laugh. This is a great way to vent and break
up the te nsion before a more serious conversation.
Triggering
How is it that we sometimes get triggered into very strong emotions,
particularly at times of intimate conflict? We all do it; it's not just you.
Dossie recalls at nineteen having panic attacks that seemed to come out
of nowhere, until one day she noticed that something had moved fast
near her face. Her father was prone to sudden bursts of temper accompanied
by a hard slap across the face, and Dossie realized that whenever
something moved suddenly near her face-even her lover-some part
of her believed that she was about to get hit. Once she understood this,
she became able to look around and see that nothing was threatening
her in the present, and these panic attacks disappeared.
New research into brain functioning has given us a lot of very useful
information about how triggering works on the physiological level. We
have an organ called the "amygdala" in the middle of our brains, right
under the hypothalamus, that does the job of remembering situations
associated with strong emotions, both pleasurable and terrifying, and
setting us into action. The most familiar form of this phenomenon is
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