is our first job to be calm?

I’ll always remember my friend Vanessa, a special education teacher I worked with in Saskatoon years ago. She was the model of structure, planning, and predictability, while I was working on other strengths (because there is a place for randomness, improvisation, and surprise). When faced with a child in some existential crisis (a broken pencil, a bully, long division), she’d never start by addressing the crisis itself. She’d say, “Our first job is to be calm.” Then she’d slow her own breathing and wait for the child to follow her example. Sometimes there’d be a few more tears or stamping of feet, and the child would come back to their window of tolerance. Then the second job could begin: dealing with the problem.

I even watched Vanessa use this technique with a crying, irate parent—and the same exact words worked with this thirtysomething adult. “Our first job is to be calm.” Like magic.

It worked, but at the time I disagreed with Vanessa. Our first job is to feel our feelings, isn’t it? Don’t we first need to be aware and accepting of what our finely-tuned selves are telling us? Isn’t that the important thing? Isn’t being calm just a euphemism for repressing our emotions? And has nobody noticed what happens when we push those feelings down and down and down? Toxic masculinity, misplaced anger, autoimmune disease, cancer? Seriously, people: read Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk.

But now I’m calmer myself, and I see that Vanessa was right all along. Our feelings demand attention, of course, but our first job? Our first job is to self-regulate, to get out of fight/flight/freeze/follow so we can access the front of our brains and think like human beings. Our first job is to keep ourselves and people around us safe.

And at some point we do need to process those emotions—at the end of the day, bawling our eyes out or talking to someone we trust or hitting a punching bag or staring into a candle flame while spending way too long in the bath. Dealing with our emotions really is the most important job. Feel them, name them, accept them, express them, and grow.

But our first job? Vanessa was right, folks. Our first job is to be calm.