Emotional Control through Toilet Repair

“Not again,” I said as I stood there plunging out yet another clogged toilet. My 2-year-old toddler son had successfully shoved another toy down the toilet for the umpteenth time in the last few months. This time, his destruction would be complete. The toy was stuck. And on top of that the toilet had cracked. A new toilet would need to be installed.

So, I walked away. Sweat dripping off my head and body from my futile toilet wrestling match. I was frustrated. I didn’t have any time right now to install a new toilet. It would be a week before I could do the work leaving us with no functional bathroom downstairs. But then the most important thing I realized was…I was in control. I told myself, “Its fine. It’s only a toilet. And it’s just a week until I can get to it. It will be fine.”

Rewind the clock two years prior to this moment. I was in the middle of my darkest moment in life. I was failing at every aspect of my life possible. Everything around me was falling apart. Then, in an instant I cracked.

I was preparing to head out the door when I happened to stand in my dining room and looked up. I noticed a small hole in my ceiling. My curiosity got the best of me. I grabbed a step stool. As I reached up with my hand to investigate, the ceiling began to crumble at my slightest touch. I noticed how damp that section was and then noticed the dripping. My worst fear was then realized. We had a leak coming from the upstairs master bathroom.

You would think I would have simply shrugged it off and said, “OK time to make a repair.” Or maybe even showed some basic frustration over the situation. But I didn’t. So much had happened to me over the previous months in my life. To top it off, a number of other things had broken in the weeks prior. This time, I lost it. I panicked. I started arguing with my wife over how this was the equivalent of the end of the world.

I had lost all sense of objectivity of the situation. My emotional state was in complete collapse. I was no longer in control. I immediately figured this was a $5,000 fix. I didn’t have $5,000 let alone even $500. My wife would try to give me suggestions and other perspectives to try and calm me down. But all it did was agitate my emotional state. In the end, it took me several days to recover to finally calm down enough to start coming up with rational ideas on how to solve the problem.

I called a friend and he was able to come out and assess the situation. My toilet had cracked and was leaking. I had no idea how to replace a toilet! And I definitely didn’t know how to repair the damaged ceiling below. My friend offered to help me replace the toilet and repair the ceiling damage. Once everything was repaired, I was relieved and finally felt like things would be ok, ending my nearly weeklong self-torture.

It is Not Logical

Throughout my life I have been in a struggle with my emotions. Whenever things got difficult my emotions would overwhelm me. Sometimes they would take over my cognitive reasoning ability so much that once the incident had passed, I would have very little recollection of what happened.

In my adolescence I lacked the examples of controlled emotional behavior. As a result, I never developed the tools to handle the rush of emotions I would feel in any given situation. I would simply allow the chemical reaction in my brain to hijack and transform me into something I was not. An irrational, unreasonable person. No, I never turned to violence physically on other people. Fortunately, that barrier was instilled in me by my parents. But those poor walls and pieces of furniture didn’t stand a chance.

I remember back to when I was in high school. My best friend and I wanted to make a movie spoof of Star Trek. He had already decided that I was the best Spock because I was tall and dark haired. The reality is I would have played a better Captain Kirk. While I may have looked like Spock on the outside, I had the emotional feelings of Captain Kirk on the inside. The biggest difference between me and Kirk was I had no control of them.

Emotions are a Gift from God

As human beings, our emotions play a very heavy part in our lives. They help us to feel love, care for other people, have compassion, feel joy, and feel pain. Emotions can even be a tool of self-defense in the form of fear. The simple emotion of gratitude is the most important gift of all. Our feelings are a critical part of who we are. They define us as physical and spiritual beings. These emotions are gifts from God. He has them and wants us to feel the same things he does. God has given us our free agency to learn how to use these gifts.

In my case, it took me 47 years to learn how to master many of these emotional gifts. Is this a bad thing? No. Every person must learn in their own way. We must each have experiences that give us the necessary perspectives that help us to learn and grow. Emotions are some of the most difficult feelings to interpret. There is no true written language that can properly explain a specific feeling. Words can only give a close approximation. Hence why we learn other ways of expressing emotion. A pat on the back from our friends. A hug with our kids. A kiss from our spouse. These are not words, but expressions of emotion that are only best communicated in the physical form.

I know exactly what my emotions feel like. Only I can interpret them for myself. I can only make best guesses as to how those emotions match up with others. I have learned that everyone manages them differently. Some are open and willing to share them without hesitation or second thought…having less control (this is how I have mostly operated). Others only share what they want you to see, controlling what we see and managing their responses. And yet still others are Vulcan, hiding and containing them all.

There is no quick fix nor easy answer to learning how to control one’s emotions. Each person must have their own experiences to accomplish this. For me, it took a number of failures and embarrassments. A key tool that helped me to realize how to manage my emotions better was journaling.

I have spent the last year of my life focused on many improvements. I recorded all of my important events, my emotional states, and my thoughts throughout this time. But I also wrote down “What If’s?”. What if I had responded in this way instead? What if I looked at this situation in a different light? By taking a moment and thinking about how I could have done things differently, I learned ways to tap into my emotional control mechanisms and do better the next time.

When I looked back over my previous entries from over the past year, I have been able to view them as if I was reading about another person. I had been so focused on making small improvements along the way, then suddenly I was able to look back and realize that I was no longer the person I was. I had learned from my failures and I was growing. I was in more control of my emotions and there was more hope for my future whenever I would hit those moments of emotional adversity. I was better prepared for the world around me.

Back to The Toilet Repair

After a week of waiting I was finally able to install a new toilet, replacing the one my toddler had broken. I decided to make this a father-son moment with my teenage son. Not only did I realize that my father had never taught me how to install a toilet, but he had never taught me how to control my emotions while working on a frustrating project. I felt it was a great idea to give my son those lessons. Learning a new handyman skill, and also learning the skill of a loving husband, father and provider showing emotional control. I wanted to lead by example showing that my emotional behavior can be tempered even in the most difficult of circumstances.

Not only were my son and I able to successfully install the toilet, the project went off without any major hitches. Even when we hit a few struggles, we both maintained our cool and persevered. It was perhaps one of the most amazing moments I have had between me and my teenage son. We were able to top it off by taking the old toilet to the dump and enjoying a truly emotional and manly moment words can’t best describe. Watching the destruction of the broken toilet as we tossed it into the trash pit. There is nothing like some creative destruction to bond father and son together.