Feel the Range of Human Emotion

Dr. Tim Thayne Discusses the importance of feeling the range of human emotions. We need to understand the seriousness of any hardship so we can have empathy, but we need to look to the future with hope and optimism. This episode will help you see if you are leaning too far one way or the other and what you can do to gain perspective.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

[inaudible]

Talmage: 0:04

welcome to not by chance, the podcast. This is Talmage, Tim Thayne's son and podcast manager. Today, dr Tim Thayne is talking about the range of human emotion and how we should be able to feel all those things, especially in times like this so we can have empathy as well as have hope.

Dr. Tim Thayne: 0:27

Hey everyone. I was talking to my brother the other day and he shared the story with me. There was a man who had a very busy job. He was working all over the country, did a lot of traveling for his work and a work late as well. Uh, at the same time, his home life was, was difficult. Um, he had a young son, uh, in junior high school that was struggling in school and had been for many months and he kept trying to get him. He knew he was capable. He kept trying to get him to do a schoolwork and there was a lot of conflict around this for a long time, but he was, he had D's and F's in the semester. Well, we all know what happened next when coven 19 came along and everything started to be shut down, including all the schools. And so this boy was sent home to do then online school. And at the same time the father was sent home to actually work from home virtually for the first time. And uh, so that first day that they were starting the online school for the son, the dad was there and he just sort of wanted to make sure that it was all set up right. And he got him involved in the online and, and um, he sat there next to him and actually spent that time with him while he did the same thing the next day. And, and he was telling my brother, he said, the thing that spends so amazing to him is that his son, in a fairly short amount of time, brought up all those D's and F's to B's and C's. And he says, and he's doing his schoolwork. He's doing it. And then he said, you know, all it took was for me to sit there next to him and show that interest and support. And now he's doing a schoolwork. And, and the fringe benefit also on the side is that his relationship with his son has been restored in a lot of ways back to what it was before all the conflict started around schoolwork. The thing that he said next I think is what I want to focus on. And that is that the solution to the problem that they had around academics and him getting, getting a schoolwork done and even their relationship in the conflict they had was sitting right in front of him the whole time it was there. It did not require a, an epidemic. It did not require, um, his whole life to turned around upside down for this to happen. But because of the paradigm that he had about his life, how work should be done, how schoolwork should be done, how he's supposed to parent, that paradigm kept him stuck in a certain way. This is one of the bright shining, uh, linings to this, this epidemic. While there may be a lot of horrible things in there are happening around this epidemic. There's also some potential blessings and this father happened to stumble into one and it's been a huge difference maker in his relationship with his son and in his, in his son's schoolwork. So that's one thing. But let's talk for just a second longer about this paradigm and the fact that we over time develop assumptions. We develop ways of thinking that become just givens. We don't even question those anymore. It's a framework we live by and we just operate under those conditions as if there's really no choice. We don't really examine our lives very carefully. The blessing of having something like this happen to us all together is that all together now there's, there's lots of opportunities for us to look at life differently now in the course of this, I've seen people who are really focused on the blessing side of this situation and other people really focused and, and being personally impacted by the tragedy of the situation. I tend to think that as human beings, one of the greatest gifts we have is the ability to actually experience the full range of emotions. To be able to look at the, the impact this is having through a lens of empathy, even sadness, looking at, even if it may not be happening to us directly, we don't have to look very far to see the suffering that's happening. The loss of income, the loss of life, the loss of security, all of these things. The loss of structure for kids who, who don't know what to do when there's not structure. And that's something to mourn, to feel sorry about, to, to worry about to some extent. And, and that can change our paradigm. It might go from, uh, you know, not thinking of others, to actually having empathy for our other, you know, members of the human family out there. And, and we're in this together and I think that's a special kind of feeling to go through a trial with a society, with a country, with the community. We feel bonded to each other. But in the process, there's an opportunity for us to do some paradigm shifting that will come out of this. On the other hand, if we're in myered mostly in the trials and the tribulation we're going through, we may be missing some of the opportunity that lies in this as well. Some of the blessings. And I think that what's what's available to us there, uh, is the ability to look at our past life and kind of what the routines were and the paradigms were and really call them into question and say what would be better going forward. The blessing here is that we, when this whole thing is, is, uh, run its course and we're mostly back to normal. My hope is that it will not be back to normal. That there will be some fundamental shifts that have taken place in families in our individual lives. Maybe it's around developing our own, um, preparation, emotional preparation for the next hardship. Maybe it's in our faith that we have as a whole come to realize that we really are not much without a Supreme being without God and having that influence back in our lives. So it's almost like with every great tragedy that comes there, there are the pains and the losses and then the aftermath is what have we learned from it and what are we going to keep instead of going right back to the old pattern. So my hope is that me and my family will, will identify those key principles and let our paradigm change and have that shift take place so that at the end of this we're in in a better place with each other in our faith, in our preparation and all of those things that really matter. And I hope the same for you too. To sum this up, I think that let's use the full range of our capabilities of as human beings to identify the suffering, the difficulty even feel, the sadness, the empathy for those who are struggling the most and see what we feel inspired to do as a result of that. What could we do to make a difference? And then on the other hand, the other side of our human ability here is to see the possibility inside this trial. What is it that's going to cause us to, to innovate? What new thing is gonna come out of this? What new habit, what new relationship, what new way of relating with other people are we going to keep after this is all said and done? That would be my challenge to use to look on both sides and identify something that's specific, specifically calling you to change.

Talmage: 8:48

Thanks for listening to this episode. We'd really appreciate it if you went on social media and told us what you thought of this episode in any action items that you want to take away and you want to implement into your own family.

Speaker 1: 9:03

[inaudible].