describe what’s going on, so they use their behavior to evoke the same feel-
ings in you. If you can let them know that you understand what they’re
feeling, you can sometimes prevent them from having to demonstrate.
When you’re at the blast zone, you may feel you’re being manipu-
lated—that is, forced into doing something you don’t want to do. But
thinking in terms of manipulation is not helpful in understanding or deal-
ing effectively with emotional explosions. It’s a judgment, and manipula-
tion is generally considered a bad thing to do to someone (despite the fact
that people pay therapists to manipulate them). In fact, judging anything
renders you less able to understand it.
If you think of an emotional outburst as a devious attempt to take
advantage of you, you’re looking at the situation from the wrong direc-
tion. To handle explosions effectively, you must always look at events from
the other person’s point of view. Explosive people are thinking of them-
selves, not you. They’re displaying their distress in the hope that some-
one will do something to make them feel better, though they often don’t
know what that something is, nor do they care that the someone who does
it is you.
I’m not suggesting that explosive behavior doesn’t make you feel
things you don’t want to feel or do things you don’t want to do, only that
such behavior is almost never the result of conscious intent. There is no
first person form of the verb to manipulate. People may do it, but they’re
not aware of what they’re doing. Nothing enrages explosive people more
than attempts to make them take responsibility for what someone else
believes are their unconscious intentions.
One of the most effective tactics for dealing with emotional out-
bursts is to ask explosive people what they want you to do. And it’s unlikely
that you’d even consider asking if you believe they already know what they
want but are unwilling to admit it.
EXPLOSIONS ARE REPETITIOUS. They are not single events, but a series
of outbursts that typically expand in both intensity and duration as they
repeat. As we will see throughout this book, repetition is a key element of
most emotional explosions. Most strategies involve subtly disrupting a repeat-
ing pattern. You may not be able to stop an ongoing explosion; you may just
have to brace yourself and concentrate on preventing the next one.
The Blast Zone ❧ 7